Twilight Paper

I don’t want to read Stephanie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ quadrilogy. She would not be surprised to hear me say this: I am not a teenage girl; I am not a woman wishing to relive the high emotion and angst of my younger years.

I haven’t read any of the Twilight books, but I hear that they have sold very well. Some readers will have neglected their homework or skipped school in order to read these books. Some readers may even have neglected a screaming child just so they could find out what happened next.

There were people, respectable adults, who bought these books in electronic form so they could read them in public. These people sat in the park, reading Twilight, safe in the knowledge that there was no book cover to give them away. Their secret was buried deep within the circuits of their eReaders. Their secret was buried deep within the circuits of their own minds.

Lost in the pages of a Twilight novel, these devoted readers had escaped the mediocrity of their lives. They had become a part of something truly worthwhile: a universe-rending tragedy.

This is something most readers of fiction can understand.

My attitude towards the Twilight series hasn’t always been so relaxed. I was a scoffer, I admit it. But then I thought: who am I to sit in judgement of 116 million readers? It was then that I reached a sense of peace with the whole Twilight phenomena. This peace was sorely tested when, one evening, I was sitting in a movie theatre, waiting for my movie to start, when a trailer for the latest Twilight movie begin to play.

Forever is Just the Beginning, it declared without offering any further explanation as to how this might be.

No, it isn’t, I grumbled.