Last week I bought and read both Twilight and New Moon. Eddie had jokingly pointed out Twilight to me when we were shopping, and I picked it up because I’ve found that there’s two camps of people who’ve read the book: those that loved it, and those that would rather use its pages as kindling to set fire to their heads. I enjoyed the first book in the first book more than I expected, but the second one wasn’t as good in my opinion. I found it incredibly depressing for the first three quarters of it, but still read through it because I’m one of those people who just can’t stop reading a book I’ve started. Thankfully the last quarter of the book picked up and made things better, so Tuesday I went out and picked up the third book in the series, Eclipse.

I’m so happy that I decided to keep going, simply because the third book is better than the first two combined. It was faster paced, and it was as though the author suddenly realized that she didn’t need to use an adjective as every third word. It reads less like a teen movie and a bit more emotionally grown up. Eddie tells me the same thing happens in the Harry Potter series, where midway through the 4th book Rowling figures out the secret to being a real writer and suddenly everything is fantastic. Since Eddie’s Walmart doesn’t seem to have any copies of Breaking Dawn in stock, he’s promised to hit up a real bookstore and pick it up for me, which I assume will be similar to sending him to buy me tampons in that he’ll find something else he just has to buy for himself so that he doesn’t look like the guy whose wife sends him to buy embarrassing things at the store.

Judging by the reviews for the movie, I’m slightly on the fence about wanting to see Twilight in the theater. I mean, if I go any time this week, I’m bound to be swamped with teenage girls squealing every time Edward is on screen. Needless to say, this does not appeal to me.

I wouldn’t be seeing it this weekend anyway, since tomorrow I’m working and need to get up early in the morning to go in, so no dates for me tonight. Saturday is Case McBride movie night, and this week we’re watching Tropic Thunder. And Sunday is the season finale of True Blood on HBO, which means that we’re definitely not going to miss that.

Maybe it’s because I’m one of those people who loves watching teen movies. It seems that the worse the acting, the more predictable and sappy and silly the story is, the more I enjoy it. Sit me on the couch while there’s a movie where some popular high school girl harbors a secret crush on the president of the chess club or the awkward-but-artistic girl ends up with the team captain of the football game and I’m guaranteed to be occupied for 2 hours.

So that’s my reasoning why I enjoyed reading Twilight so much. It was a fast read, and being a book written towards a teen audience it read even faster. Like Robin, I got annoyed that the writing was terrible for the most part. To me, it was like a 16 year old had taken all of the vampire hotness of HBO’s True Blood, converted it to the PG-13 level of something like 10 Things I Hate About You, and then put it in a novel form. I literally sat there reading it with this huge grin on my face because it was a torrential stream of Edward being described as beautiful, god-like, and made of marble. It was laughable, it was awful, and I sat there wondering exactly why I was reading this tripe.

And yet… I devoured it. I couldn’t put it down last week. At one point I was considering bringing it to the release party so I’d have something to do for 2 hours while I was there, but then decided to finish it before we left. I liked the characters, as stereotypical as they were. Handsome male main? Check. Socially awkward outsider heroine? Check. Get me a comfy spot on the couch, I’m in this for the long haul.

Yesterday, I picked of the second book in the series, New Moon, which was written in the same style and with equal predictability, and I was trying to read it by candle light last night when our power went out. I would have stayed up and finished it had Eddie not dragged me off to bed. I ended up taking it to bed with me and finishing it this morning. I finished it and told Eddie he had to pick up the third book for me while he was at work today, but sadly, they didn’t have it.

So he bought another one by the same author.

Eddie’s birthday went ok. I wasn’t able to buy him anything before the party becuse the last thing that I want to do on the way home from work is stop and try to figure out just what the hell to get him, so he’s gotten nothing from me except a claddagh ring at the 2nd flea market we visited.

We did manage to score some great books at both flea markets. I’m kicking myself for not grabbing a copy of some old hardcover called The Modern Sex Handbook (or Modern Handbook of Sex, I can’t remember which it was), but I did score a 1936 copy of Gone with the Wind, a 1960’s illustrated sexual encyclopedia that describes lesbians as having a psychological imbalance and female arrousal as “voluptuousness”, and a 1934 almanac put out by Dr. Miles Medical Company that consisted of calendars, planting suggestions for every part of the year, and an equal part of advertisements for Nervine. Eddie found a tiny little memoir of Elizabeth Fry that looked interesting, and snagged a collection of Ian Flemming’s James Bond series for $5. Someday I’ll get around to posting pictures and a list of all these fun antique books we’ve been buying up.

I got thoroughly sunburnt during the ferry trip to scatter Nanny’s ashes. You’d think that under the circumstances I’d be more careful considering that she did die of cancer and all, but I had other things on my mind, such as, “this box of Nanny is much heavier than I expected,” and “I shouldn’t have stood downwind,” and “oh my god I think I just inhaled her!”

My family has started going through Nanny’s things. It’s sad and fantastic all at once, like opening a big, tragic treasure chest. I found a cookie tin filled with letters that my great-grandfather got from his family while he was in France and Germany during World War I, and my mother found a box of letters that my Uncle Rick wrote home during his boot camp on Parris Island. We found my grandmother’s baby book, first communion and confirmation certificates, pictures of relatives and people we don’t know, unsent greeting cards, and boxes upon boxes of general household records such as what bills were paid and who was getting Christmas cards that year. One of the books we found was The Farm and Household Cyclopaedia (ca. 1888) - with 249 illustrations - which is pretty fun to read and see what fun household hints they used back then. I’ll try to find some good passages to post later.

Harry Potter fandom-wank. This is just so very, very wrong.