Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Twi-LAME
When I travel, I have a ritual that I almost always perform. I stop at the airport gift/book/junk food/drugstore, and purchase a trashy piece of reading material. This is the only time I allow myself to read crappy paperback bestselling works of fiction. I prefer books with murders, sex, and an utterly predictable mystery to solve, particularly the Mother Goose-inspired titles of James Patterson. I’ve also been known to indulge in some Stephen King and John Grisham from time to time. Sometimes this ritual works out well, and by “well” I mean I enjoy this guilty pleasure, I finish the book right around the time my flight is landing, leave it in the pocket of the seat in front of me with the SkyMall for the next passenger to enjoy, and immediately forget about whatever the cookie cutter plot was. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, such as the times that I’ve made the foolish mistake of reading anything by Dan Brown. When I read Angels and Demons, I was literally reminding myself that audibly cursing out a book on a plane surrounded by strangers is probably not a good idea, even if said book is as offensively retarded as Angels and Demons.
When I decided that, in spite of the A&D debacle, I was going to read The Da Vinci Code, it was even worse. I had some hippie computer programmer with a fucking ponytail hitting on me via incomprehensible jokes about coding in Perl and inviting me on sailing trips through the San Juans on one side, and The Da Vinci Code pissing me off with every poorly composed page in front of me. I was only reading The Da Vinci Code because so many people, including ones who normally don’t read these types of books, were talking about this shit like it was the best thing since the Bible, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As I read, I grew angrier and angrier that The Da Vinci Code, which I rated as the literary equivalent of a frost-bitten Lean Cuisine chicken cordon bleu , was something that a significant number of people had recommended to me as both mindblowingly awesome and educational. I was insulted that Dan Brown conned a lot of otherwise intelligent people into believing that a bland, patronizing, Grail Quest-flavored retelling of a Learning Annex art appreciation course is some sort of phenomenal contribution to the canon of great literature. I thought that after enduring The Da Vinci Code without either falling into some state of catatonia or murdering anyone, I had suffered enough. And then last month, I wandered into the Hudson News at JFK and purchased a book that made The Da Vinci Code look like War and Peace
That book, which may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, is called Twilight.
In case you aren’t a fat, ugly, bespectacled adolescent preteen girl and you didn’t notice hordes of the same swarming your local theater a few months back, you might not know about Twilight. It’s a Mormon vampire fantasy with legions of extremely dedicated tween girl fans. I normally don’t read books for children because I hate kids, and I normally avoid vampire stories, because I don’t care about what annoying goth fruitcakes get up to when they’re not exsanguinating random bitches. I assume shopping for crushed velvet frocks or appropriately spooky wine goblets for their decrepit old mansions and castles, listening to "Toccata and Fugue," and practicing their Transylvanian accents. However, several of my friends liked this trash, so I decided to give it a try. After all, I’d spoken derisively at length about Harry Potter, but after reading it became a serious HP nerd so dedicated that I cut in front of children at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble TWICE trying to get my copy of book 7 . Maybe I’d likewise be pleasantly surprised by Twilight. At least I expected that it would at worst be solid trashy plane reading.
WRONG. Twilight sucks. Actually, “sucks” isn’t strong enough. Twilight is so bad that the very word should be stricken from the English language. I’d be happy to exclusively say “dusk” just to ensure that nothing could remind me of the mind-numbingly horrific experience of reading this shitty fucking abomination of a novel. I think I would probably rather read The Notebook fifty times without stopping than Twilight once. I hate Twilight so much that I’m tempted to bring my copy into lab and destroy it with whatever kind of hardcore acid we have in our "Corrosives" cabinet. Actually, I’d like to piss on Twilight before burning it and destroying the ashes with acid. In fact, I think the actual paper the book is printed on is begging me to do so. The book is that fucking appallingly terrible.
For starters, the story’s narrator, the protagonist Bella, is the dumbest bitch I’ve ever encountered in the world of fiction, and that includes legendary dumb bitches like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Daisy looks like a damn rocket scientist next to this hooker. Bella spends the entire book pining away after Edward, her obnoxious vampire boyfriend. In fact, Bella seems to have no interest in anything whatsoever besides obsessing over Edward. Occasionally she takes a break from figuring out how to better craft her entire reason for living around her statuesque undead paramour to do some domestic chores around the house, but that's about it. What kind of a personality devoid loser does fucking dishes and laundry for fun when she's not devoting herself slavishly to some dumbass guy? Not any slag I would be rolling with. The minute Edward and all the other devastatingly sexy vampires roll onto the scene, I was hoping one of them would bite the fuck out of Bella and call it a day, because I was so sick of reading Bella's utterly idiotic musings like "there's no way this godlike creature could be meant for me", "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him," and (my favorite) "you're exactly my brand of heroin." Oh, bitch, please. Save it for some bad poetry in your diary and get a life, and that's real talk.
When I decided that, in spite of the A&D debacle, I was going to read The Da Vinci Code, it was even worse. I had some hippie computer programmer with a fucking ponytail hitting on me via incomprehensible jokes about coding in Perl and inviting me on sailing trips through the San Juans on one side, and The Da Vinci Code pissing me off with every poorly composed page in front of me. I was only reading The Da Vinci Code because so many people, including ones who normally don’t read these types of books, were talking about this shit like it was the best thing since the Bible, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As I read, I grew angrier and angrier that The Da Vinci Code, which I rated as the literary equivalent of a frost-bitten Lean Cuisine chicken cordon bleu , was something that a significant number of people had recommended to me as both mindblowingly awesome and educational. I was insulted that Dan Brown conned a lot of otherwise intelligent people into believing that a bland, patronizing, Grail Quest-flavored retelling of a Learning Annex art appreciation course is some sort of phenomenal contribution to the canon of great literature. I thought that after enduring The Da Vinci Code without either falling into some state of catatonia or murdering anyone, I had suffered enough. And then last month, I wandered into the Hudson News at JFK and purchased a book that made The Da Vinci Code look like War and Peace
That book, which may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, is called Twilight.
WRONG. Twilight sucks. Actually, “sucks” isn’t strong enough. Twilight is so bad that the very word should be stricken from the English language. I’d be happy to exclusively say “dusk” just to ensure that nothing could remind me of the mind-numbingly horrific experience of reading this shitty fucking abomination of a novel. I think I would probably rather read The Notebook fifty times without stopping than Twilight once. I hate Twilight so much that I’m tempted to bring my copy into lab and destroy it with whatever kind of hardcore acid we have in our "Corrosives" cabinet. Actually, I’d like to piss on Twilight before burning it and destroying the ashes with acid. In fact, I think the actual paper the book is printed on is begging me to do so. The book is that fucking appallingly terrible.
For starters, the story’s narrator, the protagonist Bella, is the dumbest bitch I’ve ever encountered in the world of fiction, and that includes legendary dumb bitches like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Daisy looks like a damn rocket scientist next to this hooker. Bella spends the entire book pining away after Edward, her obnoxious vampire boyfriend. In fact, Bella seems to have no interest in anything whatsoever besides obsessing over Edward. Occasionally she takes a break from figuring out how to better craft her entire reason for living around her statuesque undead paramour to do some domestic chores around the house, but that's about it. What kind of a personality devoid loser does fucking dishes and laundry for fun when she's not devoting herself slavishly to some dumbass guy? Not any slag I would be rolling with. The minute Edward and all the other devastatingly sexy vampires roll onto the scene, I was hoping one of them would bite the fuck out of Bella and call it a day, because I was so sick of reading Bella's utterly idiotic musings like "there's no way this godlike creature could be meant for me", "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him," and (my favorite) "you're exactly my brand of heroin." Oh, bitch, please. Save it for some bad poetry in your diary and get a life, and that's real talk.
The only sensible thing Bella does in the entire book is show disdain for Forks, Washington, where most of the action takes place. I have been to Forks on several occasions, and if given a choice between eternity there or in Hell, I'd strongly consider Hell. It's a tiny, piece of trash town with absolutely no redeeming qualities, which is apparently why domesticated (ie: non-people-eating) vampires like living there. There's not a lot of sun (which just causes the vampires to glitter like a bunch of really attractive disco balls, but it's apparently really obvious and distracting) and the place is populated exclusively with ignorant hicks, so it's clearly a great place for a clan of statuesque Volvo-driving (seriously) Mormon vampires to blend in. Just as a further indication of the type of people living in Forks, the teenagers in the book all take time out from their parents by cruising over to La Push. My family spent a couple summer vacations salmon fishing at this fetid shitshow of a Quileute reservation town, and those were the crappiest summer vacations ever. La Push was always cold, I invariably got seasick from being on the north Pacific in my uncle's 20-foot Bayliner, and the beach was covered with broken glass, because the kids in La Push do what every other bored-ass teenager from a crappy economically depressed town: drink cooking wine stolen from the coolers outside tourist fishermen's RVs and smash the bottles on the beach. This happened like four times before it occured to my aunt to keep her salmon poaching-grade chardonnay inside the trailer...and yes, note that we were the "rich," faincy out-of-towners and we were worried about losing four jugs of Gallo from outside the RV, which should give you an idea of how classy the denizens of La Push actually are. However, that's not the way the kids roll in Twilight. They go to the beach and there isn't a drop of liquor anywhere in sight. They build beach fires and look at tide pools. Those aren't the drunken Forksian/La Push hicks I remember. UNREALISTIC. FAIL, STEPHENIE MEYER, FAIL!
Apart from the lame setting and lead characters, Twilight may actually be one of the most poorly written, relentlessly cheesy novels I've ever read. Half the fucking book is this bitch Bella gushing about how incomparably gorgeous her vampire boyfriend is, and how she literally faints when he pecks her on the cheek. The rest is them exchanging lame dialogue while they smell each other because that's about as hot and heavy as they can get. Apparently, though he is a boring Volvo-driving vampire who only eats random wild animals, making out too passionately with Bella will cause him to lose control and eat her. Clumsy teenage boning is thus definitely out of the question. So instead they just snuggle and sniff each other and have lame exchanges like this:
I could feel his cool breath on my neck, feel his nose sliding along my jaw, inhaling."I thought you were desensitized.""Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet," he whispered. "You have a very floral smell, like lavender...or freesia," he noted. "It's mouthwatering."
Seriously, dumb vampire, that is not the smell of your fucking destiny. It's the smell of a $7.99 bottle of Bath and Body Works lotion. Get with the century, loser. And as long as Edward is learning about modern customs, he might read up on how the women of the present regard STALKING. This moron vampire actually tells stupid-ass Bella that he fucking hangs out in a tree and watches her sleep every night. Instead of being creeped out and ordering him the hell out of her life, Bella, again demonstrating her total and utter lack of any sense or intelligence whatsoever, thinks it's fucking cute and endearing after he assures her that she repeats an endless litany of "Edward" in her sleep. Then again, I would expect no less from a bitch so completely clueless she refers to NyQuil as "gratuitous drug use" and thinks exchanging body odor with her man is hot. Granted, I like a man to be on top of his hygiene and smell nice, but at the end of the day I want a dude who I can blow without him either whining about how dangerous he is or trying to exsanguinate me. That's something Edward can fucking work on, and it shouldn't be THAT hard if he's so "godlike."
I could probably rage on about this abortion of a novel for hours, but I have to get back to work on my thesis, and frankly, I'm not sure the internets are big enough to contain all my anti-Twilight hatred. I'll just try to work on getting my breathing and heart rate under control, and leave you with a reminder that all the bitches who love this trash look like this:
Before you start criticizing me for knocking on these children, let me remind you all that I am a huge nerd. I can tell you that Gandalf's sword is named Glamdring. I know Hermione Granger's middle name. I can tell you who Cthulhu is and that in his house of R'lyeh he waits dreaming. And I've been remiss with the posts lately because I'm on the home stretch doctorate in science. My nerdiness is well-established, and is in fact my profession. However, I am like the fucking captain of the cheerleading squad in comparison to these fugly, custom-shirt-crafting losers. Even when I was a poetry-writing, morbidly depressed, Sylvia Plath-reading baby dyke wearing hideous Eddie Bauer fleece pullovers and ill-fitting Salvation Army khakis I was like a prom queen compared to these bitches in terms of our respective spots on the social hierarchy. These are the bottom of the high school barrel. These are the kids who lettered in band and got jackets made anyway. They were the kids who you thought you would rather be stretched on the rack than kiss. The ones who had bad skin and smelled weird and still wore stirrup stretch pants long after the early 90s were over. They are the ones who read Twilight. Don't be one of them! Leave sexless Mormon vampire romance novels on the shelf (or better yet, the garbage can) where they belong!
Labels: destroy all children, epic geekery, librophilia, nerd alert, pro-apocalyptic zeitgeist, ranting, retard rage, scathing indictments
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Oh dear sweet Jesus, I remember the day I got to his "dazzling" and I literally lit the book on fire. If I was a smidgen of the whiny bitch Bella is I would beg for someone to drag me to a back yard with a shovel because I doubt anyone would miss me.
The best part? There's a guy I work with who is in his thirties when I start railing about Twilight he gets all affronted. I think he's Mormon because that's could be my only connection to why he's defending this piece of drivel.
The best part? There's a guy I work with who is in his thirties when I start railing about Twilight he gets all affronted. I think he's Mormon because that's could be my only connection to why he's defending this piece of drivel.
1) I would never read this book because I have a set of nuts and it's obviously a tween girly book
2) They're no different than the stupid girls that obsessed over the "brat pack", New Kids on the Block, or Back Street Boys. In a few years this phase will fad out and there will be some other stupid trend for forever virgin girls to obsess over.
3) I am from Port Angeles, WA - a town of about 20,000 people an hour away from Forks and the largest town on the the Olympic Peninsula. The kids in Forks and LaPush used to come to PA with wide eyes and money to go shopping in PA and eat at McDonalds or Burger King (before BK went out of business there). We went to Seattle for fun, they came to PA
4) If the book ever wants to give reality to LaPush then it must mention that LaPush is built on an Indian Resevation, has about 4 people living there that aren't Native Americans, and has a larger population of stray dogs than people by about 2-1.
Glad to see you posting again Razz,
jj
2) They're no different than the stupid girls that obsessed over the "brat pack", New Kids on the Block, or Back Street Boys. In a few years this phase will fad out and there will be some other stupid trend for forever virgin girls to obsess over.
3) I am from Port Angeles, WA - a town of about 20,000 people an hour away from Forks and the largest town on the the Olympic Peninsula. The kids in Forks and LaPush used to come to PA with wide eyes and money to go shopping in PA and eat at McDonalds or Burger King (before BK went out of business there). We went to Seattle for fun, they came to PA
4) If the book ever wants to give reality to LaPush then it must mention that LaPush is built on an Indian Resevation, has about 4 people living there that aren't Native Americans, and has a larger population of stray dogs than people by about 2-1.
Glad to see you posting again Razz,
jj
# posted by 
: 2/26/2009 10:03 AM
: 2/26/2009 10:03 AM
Oh I forgot to ask, is there even a Mormon church in Forks? Only 13% of all the people on the Peninsula even go to any type of church, and they're mostly non-denominational. The Mormon population there must have a total of about 2
jj
jj
# posted by : 2/26/2009 10:06 AM
: 2/26/2009 10:06 AM
I get the impression that the success of this excrement has its roots planted firmly alongside all the other successful crap aimed at socially awkward teenage girls:
From Leif Garrett to Boyzone to Take That to etc etc etc ...
Take a pretty, non-threatening, pussified, male object of affection and sell it the timid, young schmucks.
Congratulations ... they can then feel completely safe, exploring their first sexual fantasies, grinding the clam to a mental image of some neutered dork who would never dare try to push them past their comfort zone.
It puts them in complete control - "ka-ching", you've sold another copy ...
If I had a spare million dollars I'd hire the author and ensure that the sequel to this crap includes a really hard-core vampiric fisting scene.
Instant consciousness-expansion for the introverted.
Bet you'd never see a fan-base disappear again as quickly in your life.
Suit Dude
From Leif Garrett to Boyzone to Take That to etc etc etc ...
Take a pretty, non-threatening, pussified, male object of affection and sell it the timid, young schmucks.
Congratulations ... they can then feel completely safe, exploring their first sexual fantasies, grinding the clam to a mental image of some neutered dork who would never dare try to push them past their comfort zone.
It puts them in complete control - "ka-ching", you've sold another copy ...
If I had a spare million dollars I'd hire the author and ensure that the sequel to this crap includes a really hard-core vampiric fisting scene.
Instant consciousness-expansion for the introverted.
Bet you'd never see a fan-base disappear again as quickly in your life.
Suit Dude
I've been reading this blog for quite a while...and I am always amused when you spew acid at stuff. I love it. I just wanted to post a thank you.
CJ
CJ
# posted by : 2/28/2009 1:48 AM
: 2/28/2009 1:48 AM
Razzy's rants are cool and entertaining, 'specially this one because I disagree with almost everything (tho the 'dazzling' sucks). It is a romance novel, that's all, about a teenager :) (Hey SuitDude, there are already 3 sequels published)
# posted by : 2/28/2009 3:44 AM
: 2/28/2009 3:44 AM
I'm not a fan of Twilight, and your opening line about a twilight fan being fat with glasses, was sadly spot on with my ex girlfriend (I had low selfesteem at the time...quiet.) I found it quite humerous.
But I have one question, how does the fact that the author is Mormon make it a mormon fantasy? Does the fact that Tolkien was a Catholic make the Lord of the Rings a Catholic fantasy?
Nope.
And I'm not trying to imply that who ever the twilight author is, should be even placed on the same level as Tolkein or C.S. Lewis, but I don't see how an authors' religion is relevent. Considering that to my limited knowledge of the story, the only remote Mormon teaching the book contains is that it's pro abstinence.
So it's a crappy book, what's the big deal? Personally I've felt the same way about Harry Potter. The most I've ever read was the last few pages of the last book just to see how it ended.
No one died. I was a little dissapointed.
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But I have one question, how does the fact that the author is Mormon make it a mormon fantasy? Does the fact that Tolkien was a Catholic make the Lord of the Rings a Catholic fantasy?
Nope.
And I'm not trying to imply that who ever the twilight author is, should be even placed on the same level as Tolkein or C.S. Lewis, but I don't see how an authors' religion is relevent. Considering that to my limited knowledge of the story, the only remote Mormon teaching the book contains is that it's pro abstinence.
So it's a crappy book, what's the big deal? Personally I've felt the same way about Harry Potter. The most I've ever read was the last few pages of the last book just to see how it ended.
No one died. I was a little dissapointed.
# posted by : 3/20/2009 4:53 AM
: 3/20/2009 4:53 AM Links to this post:
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