/lit/ - Literature

Horrible, atrociously bad writing. Couldn't make it past page 2.

Fantastic... This thread again.

>>888862
Somewhat new to /lit/ sorry
I read a lot, but it really never occurs to me to come here.

All 4 books should have been condensed into one 450ish page novel. Once you cut out most the fluff the story isn't THAT bad.

you want to know how bad it is?...

the whole phenomenon has caused me to dislike vampires... can't take any story involving vampires seriously anymore... I imagine its going to be some fanfiction shit or something

>>888874
Yeah, this is the main argument I hear in response to the atrocious writing.

Like it's a good story but Meyer is just....bad.

Like a retard writing a book.

>>888888
oh the waste

>>888888
Worst.

Get.

Ever.

You know what? I think the time has come.

I think I need to read Twilight.

>>888893
>>888895
What, you guys care about gets?
What is this, /b/ ?

>>888902
why do you guys care about having stupid fun? what is this 4chan?

>>888902
No. It's summer.

>>888908
Touche

Okay so in loo of this thread I have began to read my mothers copy of Twilight. I have gotten to page 37 and I honestly must stop here. It's just bad.....just straight up bad. I feel as though this is all written by some teenaged girl on a dark emotional pseudo-poetic myspace blog post. Also something that is really pissing me off is that she doesn't use the word 'of' ever. Where one would say "She looked out of the window, then preceded to walk out of the door" she writes " She looked out the window, and preceded to walk out the door"

>>888908
This is /lit/ No fun allowed, just srs business discuss of books and book writerz

>>888914
>teenaged girl on a dark emotional pseudo-poetic myspace blog post

DO.
NOT.
WANT.

Fuck the books, this right there convinced me to not even try it.

>>888919
what. have you ever even posted here. like all the archived threads are just 'dumb jokes about books' and it's fucking awesome and everyone loves it.

NO FUN ALLOWED

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38LMVNzqKtI

This about sums it up.

>>888932
Also, this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4uuGvmAxTI

>>888914

"Walk out of the door" would imply they were in the door.

Does twilight take place in a door?

>>888932
Comparing Twilight to A _____ Movie
This is like comparing HIV to AIDS
You're a faggot for even knowing this preview exists.

I dunno guys, I heard the Edward does an emergency C-section with his teeth, if this were any other novel I would think that was awesome unless Meyer managed to make it terrible or something.

>>888947
She did.
After the C-section, Jacob decided he wanted to fuck the baby right there on the spot. Placenta and all.

I haven't read the books, just Cracked.com's synopsis of it. I assume it's true.

>>888944

Please don't try to defend the book. Please.

>>888944
>Hipster faggot gets butthurt over proper use of English in the Twilight series.
>Gets called out.
>Rampant butthurt ensues.

>>888965
>>888954

Twilight bashing does not excuse a poor use of English.

The books are shit. So is your grammar.

>>888952
>Cracked.com's synopsis of it.

I love me some Cracked.com, and the Twilight articles are hilarious, but don't ever try to use anything you learned from them in a debate about how shitty Twilight is. They take some considerable liberties where they aren't even necessary for the sake of funny.

There's plenty of shit to make fun of in Twilight, but a lot of the points raised in those articles take stuff out of context that (while still stupid) does actually make sense in the books.

Like how they make fun of Edward for trying to commit suicide by standing on the hill in the sunlight even though sun doesn't hurt vampires in Twilight, when he's actually just making himself known as a vampire so the vampire mafia will kill him.

>>888989

>Everyone is suck compared to me and my opinions

will this become a regular event now.

>>889001

Alright, whatever. Enjoy your shitty vampire fantasy door-world books.

>>889015
DOOR WORLDS!!!

FUND IT

can edward come in uninvited?

>>889027

What?

>>889034
Bitches don't know shit bout vampire mythology these days.

Traditionally, vampires cannot enter a dwelling unless officially invited. This was popularized by Dracula, though it stems from true superstitions.

Considering I've heard Meyer through all existing vampire mythology out the window, I'd guess he can go where the fuck he pleases.

>>888997
>stuff out of context that (while still stupid) does actually make sense in the books.
>vampire mafia

Alright, let's hear it because the concept of a vampire mafia in a world like Twilight sounds pretty retarded to me.

>>889046
and "officially invited" can be as little as opening a window because that goddamn bat is annoying you

>>889046

Yeah man. Some friend of mine and I were talking about this rule, and I told him I would actually read Twilight if they kept this one. So I'm just sticking to my promise; it'd be kind of cool if Meyer did. Although Bella would only have to go "come in i love you" before the "magic" would be lost.

>>889085

Dracula, for all its awesomeness, contradicts itself a lot.

>>889078

Briefly: Vampires have a culture that values secrecy above all. Shithead vampires who go public are routed out and killed by one of the older/more powerful clans. Ed is an emo faggot who can't figure out how to kill himself so he figures he'll go public and this gang of bad dudes will off him.

There's like 400 pages of text setting that up.

>>889119
so its the masquerade from vtm, but watered down?

>>889121
I haven't read Dracula in ages, so I don't remember enough to call out contradictions, but...

I would say that someone opening a window would -technically- count as an invitation, as the person was responding to a stimuli created by the vampire.

I'mnot asking for an analysis, but what other contradictions were there?

>can edward come in uninvited?
Yes, he comes in uninvited to leer at Bella while she sleeps.

The first book was decent until Bella found out about Edward's vampire status. Then the book never stopped with the long passages about his beauty.

>>889177

Sucks. Guess I'm not reading it then.

>>889175

Ugh, I can't remember off the top of my head, sorry dude. But the version I have...edited by Auerbach and Skal, Norton Critical Edition, 1997...tended to point them out a couple of times in the footnotes. I think I might have been extremist in my "a lot" but they are there.

>>889211
no problem, i was just curious.

Okay, so, I haven't read this in a while, but I thought it was stated that Dracula didn't have that restriction because he was a top tier Vamp?

>>889242

Just looked it up. Nope! I was wrong. It does say he can come and go as he pleases afterwards, though. Maybe she invited him in on that first night somehow? Or maybe a servant girl did it or something. Don't feel like searching through the book, but there're some options.

The books are terrible. However, from a Freudian perspective, fascinating.

They represent what Freud would call "the return of the repressed". Chunky Mormon girl goes to Brigham Young University and majors in English. She can't help herself from referencing Shakespeare all the time.

But do you really think she consciously named the main characters Edward and Isabella after the main characters in Marlowe's Edward II?

The real secret to the novel---it's exhaustive length, Edward's unwillingness to have sex with Bella, the sense that Edward is somehow not quite human---is that it demonstrates, at exhaustive length, the kind of anxiety that Mormons have about homosexuals.

>>889812
this is why I enjoyed reading it. I wish more people looked at it from this perspective.

>>889858
my girlfriend is trying to get me to read them based on this criteria (also for the lulz). is it really worth it? Mind you, I do enjoy Ed Wood's films..

>>889865
yes. it is fun to analyze it, especially if you read some other recent vampire fiction... say, anne rice's novels. i read The Vampire Lestat one day and Twilight the next, and the allusions to and treatment of homosexuality (among other topics) in both novels is very different and interesting.

>>889885
Ha she suggested Anne Rice as well. Maybe I do need a break from the serious business stuff...

To use a criterion first offered by Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp"....

Ed Wood's films are bad enough to be enjoyable.
Twilight is only bad enough to be excruciating.

Seriously, if you want a book that's badly-written enough to be amusing, try Marie Corelli or Jean Genet or "Chippendales: The Naked Truth" by Troy Kline and Joe Bice. Try "The Sign of the Speculum" by Jessica Russel Gaver, a romance novel about a woman who falls in love with her gynecologist, with a preface by First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

There are no lulz to be had in reading something that's longer than Proust and reads like a 14 year old girl's inept diary.

>>889885
are very* sorry, it's late here.

>>888876
Same, here. I won't play a fucking black deck in Magic because of it.

No. My mom was reading them when I got back for Christmas, and she was saying that they weren't too bad.

I flipped to a random page and read.

It was horrible, and she admitted it...

Yes, but the thing is that Anne Rice seems perfectly aware of the homoerotic content in what she's doing. Stephenie Meyer has no fucking clue.

But basically, Vampire Fiction in general is about the writer's perception of otherness. Bram Stoker is an Irish Protestant. For him it's clear that blood drinking is anxiety about Catholicism (transubstantiation anyone?). Anne Rice---whose real name is Howard O'Brien, I'm not kidding---wrote her novel after her baby died, in the 70s era of gay liberation. For her, dangerous seductive otherness is sexuality without motherhood even if it implies damnation. Meanwhile, Stephenie Meyer doesn't seem to have the faintest fucking clue that Edward Cullen is basically a fat girl's fantasy of what a gay boyfriend would be like (sparkly, yet dangerous....hot, yet strangely uninterested in having sex with you....)

>>889046
She admitted to not looking up any vampire lore because she wanted vampires to be the magic sparklefucks she imagined without any common sense or centuries of myths contradicting her.

>>889924
while I see what you're saying, I think Bram Stoker's perception of vampires was more-so a xenophobic illustration of Eastern European foreigners, what with Dracula's gypsy servants and odd customs. I mean, vampires always drank blood, right? I don't think Stoker added blood drinking because of Catholicism; don't other sects of Christianity drink wine at communion?

I could sort of see Stephenie Meyer's "Volturi" as a fear of Catholicism, or the Vatican. Both start with the letter V, have the same amount of syllables, same number of letters (possibly coincidentally), live in Italy, like wearing robes, and whereas one is the highest order of vampires "like royalty," the Vatican is the highest order of Christianity/Catholicism.

>>889976
oh yeah, and both the Vatican and the Volturi are regularly portrayed as being evil.

>>Bram Stoker's perception of vampires was more-so a xenophobic illustration of Eastern European foreigners,

It's both, actually. It's just people tend to forget that there's a strong anti-Irish component as well. Bram Stoker was a Protestant Civil Servant working in Dublin Castle. His first book was a manual for civil servants. His next book was called "The Snake's Pass" which is set in the West of Ireland even though--as any good Irish Catholic would tell you--there are no snakes in Ireland, Saint Patrick drove them out. Incidentally the heroine of "The Snake's Pass" is named--I shit you not--Norah Joyce.

In other words, the Irishman / Jew confusion that seems to be going on in "Dracula" is something that James Joyce probably noticed. Which is why he came up with Leopold Bloom. (There's only one reference to Stoker and Dracula in Finnegans Wake, despite the fact that both books are about "un-dead" characters, in some sense.)

>>what with Dracula's gypsy servants and odd customs.

The historical Dracula was famous only for holding back the Muslim influx into Europe in the Dark Ages. In other words, a hero of medieval Catholicism. However, "Dracu-la" in Romanian basically means "the serpent". (From Latin "draco", the "la" is a postpositive definite article, which is a linguistic feature of Romanian.)

>>I mean, vampires always drank blood, right? I don't think Stoker added blood drinking because of Catholicism; don't other sects of Christianity drink wine at communion?

Yes they do, but the whole point of the Reformation was to point out that ONLY Catholics believe they are actually literally drinking blood and eating flesh. From the standpoint of the historian of religion, this makes Catholicism more like a Dionysian or Orphic sparagmos---it makes clear the pagan roots of Christianity. From the standpoint of Luther, Calvin, or any other non-Catholic Christian, it's cannibalism and blood drinking.

Also, doesn't the scene where Dracula feeds a baby to his brides remind you of Swift's "Modest Proposal"? We're just not accustomed to thinking of Stoker as an *Irish* author with typically Irish anxieties.

Holy shit. I'm being intellectual in a Twilight thread. Somebody pinch me.

The first book in the series was acceptable for the 12-15 age range. It was the sort of book I mildly enjoyed reading the first time, then promptly forgot about it. The rest of the series is unadulterated shit. Especially the last one. My Immortle was better.

>>890146
No it wasn't. At least whoever edited Twilight made sure the spelling and grammar were readable.

>>890195
I didn't find it so

>>890012
Greekfag here (aka 99% cr. orthodox)
The orthodox faith also believes that the communion is literally drinking blood and eating flesh...also I'll at least speak from my stand point living in Greece we do tend to have quite a lot dionysian "mysteries" all around the year :)
My belief is that the catholic church is what it is when it comes to vampire novels due to its dark and violent history (inquisitions crusades burning the all of those who dared to worship any other version of christianity) in mho always :)
ps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgnFyPyLCw&feature=player_embedded#!
worsiping of the phalus carnival in tyrnavos happening almost every year for at least 1 milenia

>>889041
Isn't it sad?
>>889034
Vampires are not supposed to be able to come in someone else's house unless they are invited.

>>888914
>preceded

>>888952
Pic is relevant to this post.

>>890011
>>890012


Thanks for posting. I just finished Dracula and you enhanced my experience. The etymology of the name was really interesting.

>>890334
...Oh God.
Was that writing an actual excerpt from the book?

reading Twilight is like reading shit

yes the books are better, no they are not quality literature.