'Scuse my Dissertation (or Lack Thereof)

Have I really not blogged in two weeks?!!!! Hmmm... maybe if I got more comments from people, I'd be more motivated. (You darn Lurkers, with your lack of comments!) Not even the fart joke brought out much interaction. What's a girl to do?!!! Ha, ha, ha, yes, I'm enjoying my little guilt trip for the day. Now, moving on.

After reading Sue's blog post, Consumed, I was inspired to finish the Twilight series, by Stephenie Meyer. I finished the first book a long time ago, but didn't really feel like reading the others. I very rarely like soap operas. I need resolution. But, going through a little bit of a book dry spell, I was willing to satisfy my curiosity for the Edward/Bella saga, and I read the next two books.

WARNING - Spoiler Alert! If you haven't read the series yet, and plan on relishing the surprises, don't read this post!

Now, in order to evaluate my opinions, you have to understand I was an English major in college, so if this is a little wordy, formal, or more serious than you wanted to be about escapist fiction, take it all with a grain of salt. Another thing you should know about me, is that I hated Wuthering Heights when I read it in college. I thought Heathcliff and Catherine were psycho and needed years of intense electro-shock therapy to get over themselves. They seriously found nothing better to do than make each other miserable. Also, I have a ten-year-old-girl whose specialty is unnecessary emotional outbursts (it turns out that not just two-year-olds have temper tantrums), and I have a lot less sympathy for excessive emotion than I used to. But today, I have no English professors to please (thank heavens! I think I've finally quit having nightmares about papers being due, though it's been fourteen years), and no professional people to impress, so I can be kind of lax in my writing. Since it's Friday, maybe I'll just take a "Casual Friday" stance, and write lists!

Things I love about the series:
1. Okay, it's romantic. It takes serious skill to draw out an attraction, step by step and make it interesting. It's not very often a writer can write about holding hands, and make something so simple seem very, very sexy.
2. Great setting. I guess if you live in a place with the constant rain, it would be less appealing to have to read about it, but I'm fascinated by a place with so much green!
3. If you're going to write a vampire story, it could be useful to write your own take on it, as opposed to the standard garlic-crosses-coffins angle. Kudos to Stephenie for avoiding this common trap.
4. It's a good Romeo & Juliet story, well done. Problems abound, which keeps the series going. Could be annoying, but it's good to have a lot of issues to resolve in a paranormal romance, and I think there are just enough in this series.
5. It's just well-written, period. Completely readable. What's the point of reading fiction you have to slog through? I've never understood that. Just one of the many reasons I have no aspirations to be an English professor. I'm done with that, I read for pleasure, not for headaches.
6. Jacob - love or hate him, but I love him. He's a bit of a pushy jerk in the third book with all of his first-love-jealous-teenager issues (don't forget that he has werewolf hormones to deal with, too), but I find him believable as a character, and I hope he gets a satisfying resolution in the end. I could easily see him getting his own book, with a love interest that takes off after Bella and Edward.

Things that annoy me about the series:
1. Why would a 100-year-old man (vampire, whatever) be interested in a seventeen-year-old girl, for a reason that's not creepy? I get why this is necessary in the story, because Edward needs to have many years of self-control under his belt in order to be with a human. A lot of their relationship makes sense to me. But it's a question that stays in the back of my mind, just bugging me.
2. Bella is too emotional and immature at times. Way too much drama in the final scenes of the third book. But then, I'm 36, so naturally, I find this annoying.
3. Could we get some resolution, here? Granted, I don't think very much of the books are just useless filler, they are entertaining, but enough is enough, already.

My favorite list - speculating about the end:
1. Resolving the to-be-or-not-to-be (a vampire) dilemma for Bella. Will she try to live with Edward as a human, or will she take the final step, and become a vampire? Now that I think about it, I appreciate the fact that neither option seems feasible or easy. I think that means the ending should be pretty good. Something unpredictable will probably happen.
2. My current theory is not really fleshed out, but I think that something extra, something outside the current rule-set for the series is going to make Bella and Edward living together as humans possible. Perhaps a Quileute ritual to make Edward human. But that leaves some serious loose ends with the Volturi, the Cullen family, and the vampire race in general.
3. It's been established that each human who becomes vampire can develop extra skills, such as Edward's mind-reading, and Alice's pre-cognition. Bella seems plainly human on the surface, but there are hints that she is more unusual than most humans: resistant to Edward's mind-reading and the Volturi's mind skills, she is fascinated by Edward instead of instinctually fearful of him, and while there are a lot of jokes about her clumsiness and her too-frequent tendency to be the center of trouble, there could be something in that as well, perhaps some extrasensory ability to detect trouble coming or maybe it's just there to give a general sense of Bella being at the center of a bigger change to come, for the whole vampire world. It could be that turning her a vampire will make her more of a hybrid than a true vampire - more control over thirst, or the ability to keep a human diet, but perhaps even more intriguing would be the ability to change other vampires, maybe not into humans, but to give them back their humanity, to give them greater control over things that were previously uncontrollable, to offer redemption for the damned, so to speak. The Cullen clan all want their humanity back, in some form, so Bella is there to give it to them. The next step in evolution for all vampires. And to take it further, maybe Bella's change will also change Edward, so that they take their changes to the rest of the vampire race, a literal and symbolic partnership, Adam and Eve stuff. Now that sounds interesting to me.