College Students! discussion

Oh, Anna, I so feel you on #4...who was the casting director? Seriously. Could they have at least picked one who actually read the book? The whole book. I know they weren't good, but shouldn't that be a job requirement? ...to really know the characters so you can pick the best actors for the parts??

ok I guess I understand the LaPush scene...it does rain most of the time.
speaking of attractive vampires...I just put Interview with a Vampire on my netflix...hopefully I can erase the Twilight damage.

hahaa...good luck

My Gothic lit professor loves that movie. He says you've never really lived until you see Tom Cruise bite Brad Pitt on the neck. I loved the book and really liked the movie--I hope you do too!

ha. funny memory about interview with a vampire-- when i was a young girl (10-11 years old) my dad convinced me we were actually watching a true-life documentary on pbs.
i really should have known better...
scared me half to death, though...

I do love the movie, I think it will be good for me. Funny story Frances, sounds like something my older brother would have done to me.

Ahaha Frances that is awesome. If only my brothers were young enough to pull that trick on them.

Fair play to ya for writing 9 books! 9! Thats fantastic! :-) I'd love to be able to write a book instead of just reading them the whole time.

And I completely agree with you- it's really annoying that so many teens/tweens think it's the greatest piece of literature ever written. There are millions of books that are far, far superior to Twilight.

goodreads is great exposure, Saved by Grace! It's still an amazing feat regardless! I'd love to read one of your stories :) If you friend me can I see them on your profile? (I'm friending you now...)

I am so glad I am not the only one who thinks the actors in the movie were ugly. I liked Alice cause she's cute, but I also like her in the book. The same is true about Jacob and Jasper. Edward though is particularly ugly. Bella is actually kinda pretty, but her retardness detracts horrible from her beauty.

I agree too that Bella could not act. Did you notice how she kept leaning away from him when she'd say I love you! I almost fell over laughing everytime she did. Her body posture said ew the whole movie. Both of their body languages sucked. I don't pay attention to directors or actors but who ever was the director on this one will probably make more movies and have it big even though he sucks as a director. (It could be the actors but a director should quit then)

Tahleen I'm gonna go rewatch that because I haven't seen it since I was little and couldn't understand half of it. I want to see this. Its like a fabled act. It should be at least.

OH! And does any one else think its odd her name is Bella Swan. I think it might have been mentioned before on the basis of what it means, but this is coming out after POTC and Elizabeth Swan one of the most glorified girls in a while by many ages, especially after the second movie. I agreed with Kira Knightly and that the first POTC needed Elizabeth Swan to do more ass kicking. I couldn't respect her fully every because of the first one. I am more and more now though. Kira Knightly is amazing...

Oh and I hate it because Alice in the movie I hope can live beyond Alice, but I bet you she won't. Hopefully she doesn't get caught in the same trap Spock did.

Something I just thought of. Sorry for writing so much at one time. Meyers passed off the half breed child as something new. Its called a Dhampir. She also had a wolf hiss. Almost called them were wolves, but that didn't shock me either when she said they were shape shifters. That really not a new idea. I actually was thinking shape shifter before they called themselves were wolves. I think she changed them to shape shifters at the end because someone yelled at her.

I haven't seen the Twilight movie, hopefully when I do watch it there will be a rifftrax for it... Rifftrax is by one of the guys who worked on MST3k, basically hilarious commentary during horrid movies. If you have a quirky sense of humor I highly recommend watching some MST3k!!

April that sounds great! Would you post a link to it if you see that it comes out for the Twilight movie? Or just where you can find the others?

http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/twil...

Watch the sample, it is hilarious!

Here's the website for other riffs:
http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax

Thanks! But its not working? Do I have to buy the sample?

The sample should be free... hmmm

I found a sample on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPi4Fe...

This one is hilarious too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs73q2...

Not quite my style. But thanks anyway! Still love finding out about that type of stuff.

Oh god I need to see this. My favorite was "No I can read it there's just nothing there!" hahaha so good.

I don't know. The books were okay, but it seemed like they dragged on and on, you know? By the end I was asking myself if the book was ever going to finish.

I like vampire romance books so I picked up Twilight because it was such a popular read with other people. I don't usually do the Young Adult thing- can't stand Phillip Pullman and only read one and a half Harry Potters- the first one was okay. But everyone was buzzing about Twilight and I had to see what the fuss was about. I had some real problems with it in the beginning- I really wanted to slap some sense into that chick Bella. (I still want to slap her sometimes.) But, about a hundred pages into the second one, the series grew on me and I kind of like it now. I'm most of the way through the third one now.

A friend of mine compared reading Twilight to eating a full bag of potato chips...at times you know you should stop and start feeling a little bit sick but yet you keep going

that is exactly what it was like for me!!

I love the full bag of potato chips analogy! I can't wait to visit http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax
I loved MST3k.
I have no intention of watching any of the Twilight movies. The books were enough for me.
I never really saw the attraction of LOTR. I tried reading one of the books and it just didn't work for me. One the older movies, an animated one was pretty good. But I went to the LOTR movie and I liked the graphics- the scenery was really pretty. But the dang thing was three hours long! I nearly died. There's only so long you can sit in a movie theater and say "oooh that's pretty."
Harry Potter, I read two and think I saw more- They were good.

The first Twilight book was sickly romantic- I didn't get into that part much. But as I said earlier, the series grew on me. I came to appreciate some of the phraseology. Even Shakespear can be sickly romantic at times but his saving grace is he puts it in great words.
I think the book is appropriate for high school level girls. When I was in High School, I ate up Harlequin Romances. The Twilight series is like the Harlequin romances with a paranormal flavor.
As for whether or not they are damaging for the way the portray women to impressionable young girls is the subject for many interesting conversations.
I say this:
1. Yes, they are. I know Harlequins contributed to my unreasonable expections of romance and men.
2. This thing is very unlikely to go away any time soon. Because it's all about the bottom line- money- fact is- these story lines sell. People don't write what doesn't sell.
While, I blame Harlequin for some of my unreasonable expectations, the fact is also this: I had a lot of reading choices growing up. Beyond porn, my parents did not censor anything we chose to read. I didn't HAVE to read Harlequins. I chose to read them. That was the kind of story that attracted me.
These days Harlequin seems to have gone the way of the VHS tape. But now we have Twilight.

oooh! I just checked out the riff tracks sample- It was awesome! I'm still not sure the movie is worth a buck ninety-nine. But if anyone could save it, they could.

Annashu wrote: "A friend of mine compared reading Twilight to eating a full bag of potato chips...at times you know you should stop and start feeling a little bit sick but yet you keep going"

Haha, Thats it exactly!

I hated the books...I'm not really into the whole vampire-in-love-with-a-human...thing, anyway--I didn't like it on Buffy, either--but I, like everyone else, thought 'oh, everyone likes this so there has to be something to it, right?' And, as I work with quite a few high school girls on a regular basis, had been hearing quite a lot about it.

So, I borrowed the four books and read up until the middle of the fourth one when it got so rediculous I couldn't stand it anymore. I kept thinking 'it has to get better, it has to get better...' but it didn't. it got much, much worse.

I have so many issues with these books that I can't even get into them all or we'll all be here for a long, long time and I have exams to study for, so I'll just glaze over some of them briefly. :D

Basically, I feel that the characterization is terrible--Edward is too perfect/creepy, Bella is just a Mary Sue/extremely annoying/waay too weak to appeal to me as a main character. Also, I really liked Jacob...until he decided to be in love with Bella for God knows what reason. I thought the plot was incredibly weak. Most romance stories--good ones, anyway--have some amount of action to balance out the romance. But not Twilight. The book reads like a jr. high school girl's journal. "Edward wasn't at school today. I think it's because of me. Edward is so beautiful. Edward is so perfect. Edward kissed me tonight..." BORING! Another thing I have a problem with is the vampire lore. Now, I'm all for reinventing and modernizing vampires. However, they should still be a) cool and b) able to be killed. Sparkly vampires are not cool. Vampires that can only be killed by being chopped up into tiny pieces and then burnt do NOT have a weakness. If Edward doesn't even get a scratch on him by getting hit with a freakin' SUV or van or whatever, how is anyone, aside from another superhuman being, going to be able to kill him? They're not. He's too perfect. He's like the undead Superman. And I'm not the biggest Superman fan, either.

What makes me sick is that every time I complain about this book to someone who's not a high school-aged girl, the response I get is "Remember, it's aimed for pre-teen and teenage girls."

I'm 19 and female. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that makes me a teenage girl. Just because a book is YA or written for younger girls, does NOT mean it has to be dumbed down or narrowly focused. There is so much well-written, exciting young adult literature out there, that it's a shame to me that these books are STILL on the best-selling lists.

I think it's a shame that "pre-teen and teenage girls" are expected to remain confined in YA. There is such a thing as good YA, but why not encourage girls to read Verne or Twain or Spyri instead? I'm not sure I believe in this unspoken agreement the book industry's got going to feed younger people mass-produced drivel. I'm lucky to have a father who believes I'm cleverer than I am and encouraged me to read "beyond my age-group." I don't think there's really a distinction between literature for old or young people -- just good or bad literature.

Leanna I agree completely that this whole teenage girls comment is pretty old and not true at all. These books really shouldn't have ever been on the best selling lists...

Nools its true my Dad didn't push me to read above my age group, just read. Which is a lot bigger then most people think. I was encouraged to read anything! Whether the book be a children's book or an advanced adult book. It was a book and I was reading it.

Another comment I'm tired of is when you say the book is just not written well enough to be on a best seller list and they spout back, "Its her first books!" Yes its nice that it was her first books but most first books do not get recognized by mass media for a reason because a beginner writer may have lots of potential but its potential not actual good writing.

I am actually upset it's aimed at pre-teen girls... I've already mentioned why haha.

As a feminist, Bella REALLY annoyed me.

Roisu, agreed. :)

I third that.

"Twilight can help your marriage
Twilight can help your marriage
Read the book that women are saying opened their eyes to the powerful keys to committed love contained in t he Twilight saga.
www.amazon.com"

I think I just threw up a little... Ok seriously this was just a sponsored link on my GR home page. That's just so disgusting and wrong.

I have that link on my homepage too. Ha ha. If my marriage was in trouble, I think I'd go to a marriage counselor, as opposed to a YA romance novel.

Roisu, I fourth.

Erin, incomprehensible.

The powerful keys to committed love contained in the twilight saga:

- If your boyfriend leaves you stop living, waste away, and try to kill yourself through your own stupidity.

- If you really, really like someone break into their bedroom and watch them sleep.

HAHA Mandee that is awesome. I am horrified that that's a real ad by the way.

Hi. I'm new to this discussion! I'm Rachel (okay thats obvious...my name is at the top of this comment). Anyway, I read the series (well, Twilight through Eclipse. I never TOUCHED Breaking Dawn) after the nagging of my camp best friend who adores Edward. I read the first book and while I was not impressed by the message or the writing style or any of the characters, I could visualize myself in the scene. I could clearly see the meadow, etc. I thought New Moon and Eclipse were not much better, but I do admit I *heart* Jacob Black. He seems to bring Bella to life, which is an excellent thing! I really felt as though she was a person with him.

I do agree that the message it sends young readers (well, ALL readers actually) is a terrible message. It clearly says: Feel free to allow your boyfriend to control you and be abusive. Don't speak up for yourself (there is a quote in Eclipse that has Bella "wanted to say something, but didn't) and its okay-- he is sparkly!

Yuck!

These girls could get a much better female role model in Alanna of Trebold in the Song of the Lioness quartet by Tamora Pierce.

:-)

Rachel wrote: "Hi. I'm new to this discussion! I'm Rachel (okay thats obvious...my name is at the top of this comment). Anyway, I read the series (well, Twilight through Eclipse. I never TOUCHED Breaking Dawn) af..."

i LOVED jacob too. it's good you never read breaking dawn because she RUINS him in that book. it was horrible. i really wish that the boy who plays jacob in the movies would hurry up and stop being underage so i won't feel like a creeper when i drool over him. le sigh

Speaking of Edward being sparkly, there was a really funny FML yesterday which made me think of this:

Today, I was taking a shower and I saw a new body wash that said "radiance ribbons." That sounded a little effeminate, but it smelled manly enough and the only alternative was normal soap, so I used it. Just now, I stepped out into the sun and found out what "radiance ribbons" means. I sparkle. FML

April that is just too funny!

Hello all! Just finished Twilight last night and thought I would somewhat join the thread. I really, really enjoyed it. I have read some of the past threads here. I agree that it was just something simple and fun to read. It really got my hooked. Not the best writing but it was fun and interesting!

I also agree that a lot of people are reading way too much into this book. It's just something fun and simple. I don't think it was meant to offend anyone with it's anti-feminism...or whatever people are saying. I really don't mean to push anyone's buttons, sorry.

As far as young girls are concerened...atleast they're reading. I agree that these books are a little far fetched but how often do these young girls read? I am glad they have found something they enjoyed.

Never-the-less I am only on the first book. Maybe that do get a little more adult-ish later. But I did enjoy them. I enjoy reading because it gets me away from my life and the real world and Twilight did a great job at doing that.

I know my arguments aren't strong but just wanted to say something about it. Now I am going to buy New Moon! Hopefully it's as good as the first!

P.S. April that makes me laugh! I LOVE FML!

Janet, the first one wasn't so bad, I liked it too. But it's the ones after that I have problem with. Let us know what you think of New Moon!

Just for shits and giggles, I opened up my copy of Twilight just now. I do plan on reading it, I've decided.

I'm putting this here because I don't know if there are any editing nerds here. I took Creative Writing so I was never schooled in editing mistakes, but I still have a strong head for them.

"It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue."

Shouldn't the comma after "Phoenix" be a semi-colon? Granted, the second half is not a complete sentence so that might be why it is a comma, but it still feels off to me.

"I was wearing my favorite shirt--sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture."

I have *never* seen this before. It's an m dash and at the end of the phrase, a semi-colon. Has anyone else seen this kind of punctuation?

This does not bode well for my reading of the novel. If I am already as uninterested to be focusing on this and letting this bother me, the book might be hell to read. :(

i NEVER notice mistakes in books by i caught some in the twilight books. in one bella makes her dad pancakes and then a few lines down he scowls into his cereal bowl. WTF!

Whereas I tend to let the writer choose their own punctuation most of the time (i.e. not going to mess with Beckett or Gaddis), I'm not sure Meyer falls in that league.

I think the comma thing might work in the first one, though, as a zeugma. Maybe what throws you off is the second comma to separate the adjectives. Also, it's not a particularly elegant use of the device.

I'm with Nools on the letting the writer choose. Its why I don't notice things as much like Franzz. I think of the punctuation as a form of expression and so while I don't hold it to a 'standard' at the same time her writing sucks because her expression is really wrong. I have learning disabilities that basically make my first language more like a second or on bad days a third language. This causes me to do things by a feel and not be rules. I study how things interrelate and cause people to feel and her usage just doesn't flow correctly.

I read a Twilight review on amazon.com and something the reviewer said struck me as totally true and hilarious:

"saying 'at least they're reading' when a person reads Twilight is like saying 'at least they're eating' when an anorexic eats a marshmallow."

Not trying to offend, Janet. I'm just frustrated that there's SO much good YA literature out there and they still come back to this tripe. :S

Leanna that might be the best analogy I've read in a really long time. Thank goodness someone else said something about it.