The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer

Ya, I read them. Or rather, I listened to them in an experiment where I wanted to see if I liked audiobooks. Turns out I do. And you should try an audiobook or two, they're pretty awesome.

Well, MANY of them are awesome, unless the books are the Twilight series.

But first let me talk about audiobooks in general. They're obviously a very efficient way of gorging yourself with books, as you can be "reading" while riding your bike, in the dark, playing video games, doing jumping jacks, hang gliding, basically whatever you're doing right now you COULD be reading a book. How cool is that? The iPhone interface for audiobooks is pretty sweet too. Saves your place, keeps track of your info and all that so you can always pick up where you left off just fine. The coolest part though is a lot of them actually go to great lengths to make the audiobook BETTER than the book, with really high production value and excellent voice overs from multiple actors and sound effects and music and such. I just finished a book by Orson Scott Card where he actually SAYS that listening to his book is the way he would prefer the reader to experience his story. And I don't care how nerdy this sounds, but actually HEARING the snap-hiss of a lightsaber when you're imagining the story is waaaaaaaay better than NOT hearing the snap-hiss of a lightsaber. Although there's pretty much no situation in my life that wouldn't be made better with a snap-hiss sound effect. Or a real lightsaber.

Back to the task at hand: venting about how bad Twilight is. But first a warning:

Just because maybe some of you might care, there may be a light spoiler of the ending at the end of this paragraph. But really though, don't waste your time with this crap like I did. Don't doom yourself to the same mistakes I made.

I'll start with the good. I can't knock on the audio. Iliana Kadushin does a great job of reading all the parts and makes each character very distinct and gives them their own voice. The problem is the books themselves, which are miserable. Maybe it was because they were overhyped and I went into them with the idea they were children's books that transcended that genre like the Harry Potter series. Maybe it was because I really like vampire mythology (but not in the retarded goth way) and these books travel so far away from that canon it makes me mad they call themselves "vampires". Regardless, these books are nothing more than trash novels for 13 year old girls with thinly veiled BLATANT attempts to cast pre-marital sex as evil, no surprising plot twists, and and the ending was so proposterously "and the all lived happily ever after" it didn't even make sense.

I wouldn't have even written about this except they were so bad it forced me into action. You may be wondering "Why the hell did you even read them all if they were this bad?". Answer: I realized I LOVE audiobooks and I didn't have any others at the time and its so easy to tear through books when you're just listening to them and doing other stuff it didn't really bother me. Until I got to the end. And realized how miserable the story was. Now I have better books. Maybe I'll get inot them in the future...

So, anyone else read these attrocities? Anyone else disagree? Is there anyone out there that can explain the popularity of these wretched things? I'd love to hear it.

e.