So a friend recommended 'Twilight' to me last year and at first I wasn't keen on the idea and at the time had no idea about all the hype going on. Anyway I got reading and in 4 weeks had all 4 books done and dusted. WOW.

Loved, loved, loved them. I stareted a re-read a couple of weeks ago and have am now up to Breaking Dawn, but I'm struggling to go on. Second time around the first three were still great, but Bella and Edward are really becoming irritating.

Does anyone else find them a little too much to stomach towards the end?

If you didn't like it the first time, and are struggling now, then stop. There's no reason to spend your valuable book-reading time on something you aren't enjoying.

that is just what I was going to say. Go to the library or something ~

Breaking Dawn was my least favorite, and I also found them both irritating in the last one.

I agree, after the fascinating with Jacob wore off I lost interest.

I'm not going to continue reading this one for the moment, I was just curious if anyone felt the same way about these characters. I wonder if the off-putting thing was that I saw the film between reads. It was horrible.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Jun 27, 2009, 3:52pm.

I didn't like the movie either.

Breaking Dawn is, hmmm, different. Ordinarily a love story ends with the wedding, but Bella and Edward's wedding starts yet another phase of their relationship, and kicks all the emotions and danger up another few knotches.

i don't find them irritating in Breaking Dawn any more than in the previous books, which is to say the only irritating thing is that they don't talk to each other, don't clarify what they're feeling and thus what's going on. This has been true from the start. Breaking Dawn is pretty fraught, the emotional atmosphere getting charged almost to the point of snapping. And yet, this is all in keeping with the storyline and the characters.
Once Nessy is born and Bella becomes a vampire, both she and Edward settle down, their emotions become more stable.

I agree that Breaking Dawn is my least favorite of the four books, but I still like it a lot.

There are tons of other books that you might like. There was a thread somewhere where people were listing books you might like if you like Twilight, but I can't find it. Offhand...

Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith
Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause
Peeps and The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld
Morganville Vampires series by Rachel Caine

I never liked Twilight to begin with, and I don't bother reading books that I don't enjoy. Life's too short :)

Sorry. That wasn't very intelligent or coherent, was it? *sigh*

Certainly, if you don't like Twilight or any other book, there's no reason to persist in reading it. I understood that the person who started this thread likes the Twilight saga, but is just having a bit of difficulty with Breaking dawn, the fourth book in the series. There's no call to put down Twilight just because *you* happen not to like it. Perhaps another discussion thread might be more to your liking.

Thanks for the book suggestions :-)

I was just a little stumped that I got so into this series the first time and second time around I'm just stuck at the end.

Catreona - very excited to find someone else that didn't like the film. I know it's not really fair to compare film adaptions to their literary sorce cause there is so much that is missed on the big screen, but this one was just... something else. I went to see it with some mates when it first opened and the entire theatre was in histerics! To be fair I saw it again, but still nothing, it's hard to erase the characters on screen from my mind though. I prefered the ones in my head pre-film.

bee9383, I intensely disliked the movie, even without being able to see it with 20/20 vision. The boy wasn't anything near carismatic enough and the girl was not someone I could imagine Edward falling totally and irreversibly in love with at first sight, or scent. I didn't like the music either.

It wasn't as bad as Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring, but only because I don't love Twilight as deeply as I love The Lord of the Rings. And, I suppose I understand why at least some of the aggregious changes had to be made to the Twilight screenplay... So much of the book is internal, Bella's thoughts and feelings, and they did only have about ninety minutes to work with... But, I'm not looking forward to the movie of New Moon. Managed to get out of going with Sis and her friend by saying I'd watch it with her later at home on DVD. But, really. That will be even harder to film I should think.

Catreona, the characters in the film were all wrong for me, I don't know if I have just read them completly different in the book, but the film was just too different. Dissapointing. I gave Jacob much, much more credit, as for Bella and Edward... we'll I'm just not going to go there. Nothing against the actors themselves, they can only work with what they are given. But it was all bad.

I quite enjoyed the LOTR films, I must admit though that I have not read the books, as films (and with no background information from the novels) it was very enjoyable. I saw The Hobbit as a theatre production in 1998 and it wasn't until 2000 that I first heard of The Lord of the Rings. We were force-fed Shakespeare in school and nothing else, for this reason I took no interest in reading until I left college, by then the films had hit the cinemas.

I couldn't make it through Breaking Dawn the first time I tried to read it. I really liked the first books, but by the fourth one I just couldn't stomach it anymore. It felt like all the good things about Twilight were gone by then... Like bee9383 said, it just got irritating. Bella and Edward didn't develop over the course of the series, they just seemed to get dumber (they took so long to figure out the plot in Eclipse it was just painful) and Bella doesn't seem to have a personality at all anymore.

It's really a shame because the first two books were excellent. Romantic and tense at the same time.

I'll add some more recommendations:
Evernight by Claudia Gray
Sucks to Be Me by Kimberly Pauley
Demon in My View by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Need by Carrie Jones

Meyer could have ended with New Moon, it's true. The last lines could easily have been the end of the whole shibang. Still, I do enjoy Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. Bella and Edward do develop in these books, I think, though not as obviously as, say, Jacob does.

For one thing, Bella has to come to terms with the truth that she does love Jacob too and that he is a part of her. This part of the storyline doesn't get fully resolved till Breaking Dawn with the appearence of Nessy, but it's something very real that Bella has to try to integrate. Perhaps Edward doesn't really develop during the course of Eclipse, but we get a better sense of his thought process and what loving Bella costs him.

I enjoy watching Bella grow into her powers in Breaking Dawn, fulfilling and more than fulfilling Aro's prediction in New Moon that she would prove tremendously tallented.

And, what can I say. I'm a pushover, but I love the love scenes throughout the saga, and how they grow more intense from book to book. Once Bella's immortal, wow! *giggle* Like Emmot, I'm surprised the cottage is still standing.

Personally I didn't like the direction Jacob went in, although it's true he does develop. In Eclipse all he developed into was a jerk.

I also didn't think the love scenes got more intense. They were VERY intense in Twilight even without much touching, but by the wedding it's basically "He's gorgeous and I love him" repeated ad nauseum. It didn't make me FEEL anything.

I was more interested in the plot of Breaking Dawn than some of the other books, but I couldn't make it past all the "he's gorgeous and I love him" to find any of the plot people tell me was there.

The antifeminist aspects of the book have been discussed at great length in other threads so I won't go into that unless there's a demand.

Again, this is really a shame to me because of how awesome Twilight and New Moon were. I feel like if Stephenie Meyer had put in the work, done research into her genre, done more editing, and not paid so much attention to her fans, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn could've been awesome too.

To leave it at, "Jacob developed into a jerk" seems shallow to me. It's also shallow to reduce Bella's response to Edward to, "He's gorgeous and I love him." Yes, both these statements *are* true, but if you look below the surface, if you follow the characters and the implications of their actions and interactions rather than merely the writing, you'll see something much richer. Jake has a great deal going on in Eclipse, much of it only dimly guessed by Bella but fairly easy for a moderately intuitive reader to divine. It's vastly easier in Breaking Dawn, with the extended middle section of Jake's narrative. But even in Eclipse, if you read attentively, you can see that he's becoming a more -- hmmm, maybe not exactly a more complex character, but a deeper character.

As to your complaint about Bella: the he's gorgeous and I love him response is a normal part of being deeply in love. Grownups eventually learn to balance this aspect of their emotional reality with the outside world. But, remember the epigraph to Breaking Dawn. I don't have the print copy in front of me to consult but it says something along the lines of, Childhood is the world where noone dies. By becoming a vampire, a pointg emphasized by her almost pathological fear of growing older, growing up, Bella by definition excludes herself from the possibility of achieving such balance, at any rate, as quickly and relatively easily as someone who *has* grown up.

I guess I'll have to leave it at "I don't like this." :) One of the things that makes any book a sour read for me is when the characters don't grow up and get a grip. I get sick of wibbling.

Incidentally, "almost pathological" is a good description for any aspect of Bella. It's like she's a caricature of herself sometimes.

Yes, sometimes. But, aren't we all...sometimes?

I think Bella's insecurities are what drew me to her in the first place. She does eventually grow up enough to accept the reality of Edward's love. She also accepts that being a Cullen involves responsibilities, largely responsibilities to others. Though in one way she doesn't grow up, instead becoming the superhero she always wanted to be, in another way she does grow up. She internalizes the need to protect Edward and Nessy and the rest of her (extended) family. And her gift, her talent, proves to be exactly that, shielding. In Vultara, her instinct was to protect Edward from Jane, but she wasn't physically or mentally strong enough. During the confrontation with the massed Vulturi, she first shields Edward, then all those she knows to need protection.

I donno. I think she grows, if perhaps she doesn't grow up.

Catreona... I'm finishing it :-) haha! I do think annoying thing sometimes where if something is really bugging me I have to see it through, Breaking Dawn turning out to be one of them :-) Just finished reading Jacob, I really enjoy his dialogue. I have a 5 hour train ride on Friday so I think I'll be done by the weekend. Then I can move on. Lol.

Five hours ought to be long enough. *grin* Safe travels.