Twilight (The Twilight Saga, 1)

Rereading it 14 years later made me realize I’ll never grow up, I still love this book like I did back then!

I have read this book twice, once before all the movies came out and I was in love. Then once after the movies, and for the life of me couldn't remember why I loved it so much. It is an incredibly sappy teenage love story, so if your having one of those days where simple feel good romance is your medicine, this is the book for you!

Re-read 15 years later! This is still a good time. Characters have personalities and back stories. The timeline was months and not just a week. I forgot how much I enjoyed the series without the movies distorting my memory. There were also large parts of the story I forgot, like Alice and her backstory. Its not a masterpiece its a good time. This was so fun for a vibe reader like me.

I was too young to read the books when they first came out but love the movies & have been a twilight fan ever since (let's hear it for team Jacob). I finally caved and to my surprise I enjoyed the books as a separate entity and even though I found myself comparing them to the movies, I still liked the books themselves and would be interested in a remake that is closer to the books! I also liked Bella's personality a lot more in this first book, she makes more jokes and puns than I expected!

This is a re-read for book club, and it was really... illuminating (horrifying? funny? dare I say... enjoyable?) to revisit after I first read it in the eighth-grade. Lots of truly heinous plot points and writing, most of which were made more heinous with my additional 13 years' worth of maturity this time around, but also some really impressive reminders of why the book drew me into the series in the first place.

I remember being really resistant to read it the first time, because I was in the midst of an intense "I'm-not-like-other-girls" phase just like Bella (it wasn't until I saw a rerun of Stephenie Meyer on Oprah that I decided to give it a shot because Oprah was the true arbiter of taste in my young mind), and I think the book's strongest element is its sense of allure. I know what happens, yet even now I couldn't put it down because I just had to see what was next. It's like gawking at a car accident, except some times the car accident is genuinely pretty good (this is a bad analogy... not quite as bad as "my own brand of heroin" but hey, I'm not the professional writer here). This series has been analyzed to hell and back so there's nothing I can really add to the conversation, but it's truly a guilty pleasure. So bad it's good. A book I love to hate and hate to love. I have a new rating for it every time I think about it because it is simultaneously terrible and a masterpiece. I'm going to stick with a solid 4 for now because, flaws and all, I'm still scrambling for the next book. See you for New Moon next.