Personally speaking, I am heartily sick of sparkling vampires and well-groomed werewolves. I’m not one to enjoy gory movies for the sake of being scared, mind you. But I firmly believe that vampires and werewolves should fall in the “gorefest” category, and not in the “sparkly” one. But the teens seemed to enjoy the Twilight saga, and it helped to encourage legions to read, so I can’t bash it too much.
A more realistic version of Twilight....
Anyway, Eldest was chatting (texting, whatever teens do nowadays) with a friend, when she turned to me and brought up the subject.
Eldest: Mom, did you know that Breaking Dawn opens on a school night?
Me: What they do is premier a movie on Thursday at midnight, so they can technically say it opened on Friday.
Eldest: Well, (her friend) wants us all to go at midnight to see it.
Me: Uh, no. It’s a school night, plus you have drill practice on Friday morning.
Eldest: I can get plenty of sleep. I’ll be home by 2 AM and get up by 6 AM.
Me: If you think you are going to a midnight showing on a school night, you are seriously deluded.
Eldest: Mom, you are using the wrong word. That’s not the one derived from delusional.
Me: Of course it is!
Eldest: Then what is the word you use when adding water?
Me: That’s DILUTED!!
Eldest: (laughing her derriere off).
I’m still not sure if that was a cleverly laid trap for me. I am sure, however, that she isn’t attending the midnight premiere 😉
Oh, and this is possibly the longest post title I’ve ever done!
Sithy Things 
October 24th, 2011 at 8:27 AM
It encouraged legions to read crap – that is hardly something to give it credit for 😛
October 24th, 2011 at 10:00 AM
When it comes to witches, werewolves and gore, I just can’t go there and if I still had kids at home they wouldn’t either, at least not on my dime. 🙂
October 24th, 2011 at 10:07 AM
I, personally, prefer my vampires of the Anne Rice’s Lestat variety. True Blood hits some visceral scary/sexy button I didn’t know I had until I read and watched Bill and Erik.
I know the Twilight books aren’t the best literature but I am a firm believer that if you get them hooked on reading anything… it will carry on into real books later. Buttercup is currently mainlining A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and just finished War of the Worlds…..
BTW- NO midnight movies on school nights is the rule here too!
October 24th, 2011 at 10:15 AM
Whatever gets kids reading!!
I had to give up on True Blood. It’s not a bad show, but the thing is, my nephew is a dead ringer for Bill, and that ruined it for me 😉
October 24th, 2011 at 3:13 PM
Ummm… yeah… that would be a bit of a buzz kill
October 24th, 2011 at 3:35 PM
Girl, big time!!
October 24th, 2011 at 11:08 AM
Your photo reminded me of an old joke: It’s much better to bite into an apple and find a worm, than to bite into an apple and find half a worm.
October 24th, 2011 at 11:29 AM
“I’ll be home by 2 AM and get up by 6 AM.”
Home by 2 from a midnight show? Is the theater next door to your house? Will there be no previews? As a former avid movie-goer, I’d say home by 3 is more like it.
October 24th, 2011 at 11:35 AM
I’m with the get it started folks. Youngest was very slow to begin reading (maybe due to the anal way her school approached the subject). Harry Potter started her off and she entered college as a creative writing major.
Love that boy wizard.
Openers on school nights? I’ve allowed the occasional midnight foray, picking up the girls, taking them to the theater, hanging around nearby and then taking them all home. Among other lessons for them, It’s useful for them to learn how a short night ‘colors’ the next day. There has to be room to screw up early in life.
Parenting is sorta like federalism – we all do it differently and compare results.
October 24th, 2011 at 12:09 PM
I think it depends a good deal on the student. I’ve heard lots of stories of kids getting turned on to reading by Harry Potter and moving on to the classics.
Unfortunately, closer to home, my niece got excited by Harry Potter, graduated to the Twilight series, and then gave up reading, cause most everything else was ‘boring’.
October 24th, 2011 at 12:54 PM
Gotcha. I’ve always enjoyed any work of fiction that creates a well developed, self consistent fantasy world – Lord of the Rings, Foundation, Dune (before it gets weird). And, there are historical works like ‘Undaunted Courage’ (Lewis and Clark and ‘Son of the Morning Star’ (Custer, not to be confused with ‘Son of the Beach’) that tell riveting tales fully based in what we know of history. I bet she gets started again.
October 24th, 2011 at 1:10 PM
I hope so. All I know is, after she read Harry Potter, I tried to get her to read Lord Of The Rings, and she quit about ten pages in and told me it was boring and wasn’t interested.
October 24th, 2011 at 3:40 PM
Another way to encourage reading, especially early on, is read to your children at night. Mom used to do that, especially if it was a book we found interesting. And though it “wasn’t cool”, we would occasionally sneak to the door of my younger sister’s room, to hear Mom reading to her, long after we were “to old” for such things.
Did it for my kids. It’s fun to make up different voices for the various characters. More often than not, the same phrase was heard in our house, as it was in my parents house years ago … “Awwww please, juat one more chapter?!!”
I won’t claim that in and of itself was the reason I grew to love reading, but it did play a part.
As far as the Twilight series goes, is it really any different than the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Tom Swift? Granted, it is for a slightly older audience, but the overall quality is about the same. And I have to agree, anything which might promote reading, is better than nothing at all.
Btw, if we are talking older teen/early twenties, you might have them check out a book called “A DIscovery of Witches”. Not a bad read at all. The vampires do not sparkle, though it is not constant Hammer films horror either. I give it 3.5 outta 4 stars, check it out!
October 24th, 2011 at 7:03 PM
I read A Discovery of Witches and enjoyed it a lot. It was a fun read and an interesting twist on “the specials”
October 24th, 2011 at 4:16 PM
I struggle with the Twilight and Harry Potter phenomenoms. Like you, I occasionally find myself saying, “Well, anything that gets kids to read is a good thing.” But other times, like when I’m forced to see a commercial for one of these new horrific movies, I think parents just aren’t beating their children enough. I mean, I started reading Tom Clancy in middle school. Not like I’m some kind of kid genius, but Hunt for Red October was a helluva lot better reading than this Twilight crap.
October 24th, 2011 at 5:44 PM
*phenomenons. See, Clancy made me a master speller!
October 24th, 2011 at 6:01 PM
HAHAHA!!! Glad you stopped by 😉
October 24th, 2011 at 6:02 PM
Please tell me that this Twilight series ends up with Buffy kicking everyone’s butt and staking the sparkly dude.
October 25th, 2011 at 6:01 AM
I agree…whatever gets kids reading, I don’t care what they read. Today, kids read about 1% of what I did growing up. For the younger ones, if they don’t read the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mysteries, they’re missing out.
I had every Hardy Boy book until they were destroyed in a fire. I wish I had that collection today, to pass on to someone.
You were DILUTEDLEY set up!
HAHAHA!
October 25th, 2011 at 7:28 PM
“…. seriously deluded…”
that’s funny… 🙂
i don’t get the whole vampire / werewolf / living dead / pay someone to scare you gig…. it’s probably a personality flaw …. or something.
November 19th, 2011 at 3:06 PM
FINALLY FOUND IT!!!
After like…almost a month.
Well, I used to read the Nancy Drew series. For three years, I would get a new Nancy book every two weeks and read it. I don’t know how I would put up with doing that, because I really don’t enjoy reading (I’m way more of a writer, so a dictionary strikes closer to reading for me than anything; it doesn’t influence my writing style!) at all anymore. But I read the Twilight series and enjoyed it until they came up with that crappy movie adaption. Don’t get me wrong, sparkly vampires is just odd…but I’m not going to criticize Meyer’s version because it is her artistic license to shape things in her own image. And the rest of the movies got better as they went along (although I’ve YET to see Breaking Dawn, which premiered yesterday). However, they are not, by far, the best reading I’ve ever done. My list of favorite books ever:
Anthem by Ayn Rand
Unwind by Neal Shusterman
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness
The Forest of Hands and Teeth Trilogy by Carrie Ryan
See? I read old stuff too…