Don’t Knock Twilight

For what seems like forever, I’ve been avoiding the stacks of books with those distinctive covers at the front of every Borders and Barnes and Noble. I rolled my eyes at the hordes of giggling (mostly girls) waiting in line for the movie. And with the recent release of the DVD, I shared a moment with the guy behind the counter at my Blockbuster. “Can you believe this?” I asked, shaking my head and pointing at the glossy advance poster stuck to the wall. 

“I know,” he replied, in the tone of one who has had to stare at it all day, every day for far too long.

“Are you guys ripping on Twilight?” another employee asked.

“Yes,” we both said together with a shared smirk.

And with that, I realized something: I think I might be a bit of a book snob. Despite its world-wide popularity and the fact that Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel has sold 17 million copies, I just can’t help my tendency to, well, smirk. Literature is Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy, I would think to myself, smug in the knowledge that my bookshelves at home hold the complete works of the former not to mention most of the novels of the latter two. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are writers, this train of thought continued. And everyone knows that new and compelling voices get reviews in some literary magazine somewhere, not Entertainment Weekly. That’s what defines real writing and good books. Isn’t it?

The funny thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder. In his time, Dickens himself was extremely popular in periodical publications. In fact, the chapters of his novels often have such a cliff-hanger feel precisely because that’s how they were written: chapter by chapter for release to the serial magazines of the time. If there were grocery store checkout lines in Victorian England, would Dickens paperbacks have been stacked up nearby? When Stephen Crane released his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, it was universally panned by critics as being sentimental rubbish. Yet when The Red Badge of Courage was published a few years later, all of a sudden the first novel started to get a second look (and wound up on my high school English teacher’s reading list). And speaking of books that go on and on and on, is anything taken away from the complex brilliance of Les Miserables just because a re-working of Hugo’s novel is also the longest running musical in the history of the West End?

It is true that the brilliance of literary genius, the stories and poetry that stand the test of time from generation to generation, well, this kind of language does not come along every day. The writer who can pen the best of times and worst of times or to be or not to be is truly a master. Yet can’t the definition of a good book also mean more than great literature in the classic, Norton’s Anthology sense of the word?

After all, vampires and the swooning drama of high school love affairs might not be my thing, but I must admit: I am an unabashed Harry Potter fan. I don’t go for the movies or the stickers or the midnight press releases, but I absolutely love the novels. I own them all, I’ve read them more times than I care to disclose publicly, and I was one of those people who read the conclusion to the series (all 784 pages of it) in one sitting. On the day it was released. I just couldn’t help it. When you love to read and you find that most elusive of entities—a good book—sometimes you have to give in to the little voice that pleads, “Just one more page.”

And that’s the thing: any writer who can create a world so vivid and compelling that it pulls us away from reality and into a place created solely through words and imagination, well, then I think that’s what makes a good book.