on why i hate twilight, harry potter, and related books.

My younger sister is not a "reader." I mean, she can read, and she has read, but it's not something she usually does for pleasure or fun. If a class requires her to read a book, she will, albeit at a snail's pace (whether thats intentional or not, I don't know), and sometimes she enjoys these books or are just simply indifferent to them. She doesn't care, really.

When I was still living at home and my sister was getting a bit older, heading into the 7th and 8th grade, I decided to try to shove some books on her. My little sister looks up to me a lot, and whether it be music, film, or books, she usually takes my recommendations very seriously. So I decided to give her a book that was one of the catalysts in my interest of literature: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. She didn't question it and read it.

And she loved it. She read it in under a week and asked about other books by Christie, which I was more than absolutely happy to lend to her. Sure, Christie's novels are not high art by any means, but they are well written, clever, and addictive. Her novels are the definition of "page turners," whether it be in Murder on the Orient Express where Poirot finds the single same discrepancy in everyone's story, or in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the reader finds out before Poirot that the narrator was the murderer. These clever, fun stories are miles above the mystery pulp found in grocery store aisles across the nation.

So my sister continued to read Christie's novels, which excited me to no end. Later, in her Freshman year of high school, she told me that she had to find a book to read for her Humanities class, but she preferred for the book to not be too long. My sister is certainly intelligent so I wasn't going to waste her time with something below her, so I went into my room and fetched her The Stranger by Albert Camus. A short novel length-wise, sure, but this book is filled to the brim with existentialist rhetoric and philosophical questioning that could really leave you talking for days. Again, she enjoyed it, and her teacher was even impressed with her ability to comprehend it and analyze it to the level that she did.

After that, she read more books for school but never really ventured outside of that. And so that bring me to two days ago.

I was talking to my mom on the phone when I brought up how I hated all this Twilight bullshit that was being shoved down my throat by literally everyone. My mom used some excuse that because of the movie, kids are reading the book, which is a good thing (I'll get to that in a bit, though). I brushed it off and said that's useless and as long as my little sister doesn't read them I'm fine. My mom stopped me there.

"She's actually read the first two of the series and is going to see it tonight."

How did this happen? How did my little sister, who I was putting on the track to read real literature, become engulfed in this marketing monster? I'm sure every other kid at her school has been talking it up and maybe that's why, but I've always told her not to go with the crowd, to make her own path. How could someone as smart as my sister become prey to such a lame and useless piece of shit?

I can only assume the reason that she started to read them was because of all her friends at school - who didn't know about the book before there were commercials on TV for the movie every thirty seconds - told her to read it as well. So she read them. And enjoyed them, apparently. Enough to want to see the movie opening day, at least. But my sister is hardly the problem. And you know what? Her friends aren't the problem either. And this might throw you for a loop, but it's not even the millions of dollars that went into promoting and making this shit movie, either.

It's Stephanie fucking Meyer.

Who is Stephanie Meyer? you ask. Well, Ms. Meyer is the author of the Twilight books. She has that same fucking stupid story as another author who I will get to a bit later who goes by the name JK Rowling... You see, Meyer was an unsuspecting nobody when she had a "great" idea and wanted to become an Anne Rice for 13 year olds. And so she "innocently" wrote her first godforsaken novel, Twilight. You see, before the movie was ever announced or anything, I recall seeing this book in bookstores and just not caring. I didn't know about it. I didn't care about it. It didn't concern me. It was for 13 year old girls and I am certainly not that. So who the fuck was I to care? I didn't think or even want to know it had legions of fans who wanted nothing more than to stay up and just talk with the story's male protagonist. I didn't know it was a vampire book. I just did not care.

But now this book has shoved itself into the public eye, and I can't fucking avoid it. Girls (and guys) of all ages, not just the 13 year old crowd, are reading these books like it's crack and it's confusing and saddening me. This is not real literature, don't these people understand? Don't they understand these books have no more merit than a day time soap opera?

And this is where that age old argument of, "Well, at least they're reading!" comes into play. I hate that argument. I hate it so much. Do you not realize thats like saying, "Sure, she could be listening to Mozart, but at least she's listening to Britney Spears!" That's what that sounds like to me when you say it. So stop saying it. For years I've been hating on Harry Potter and JK Rowling, making the same argument I'm making now, and people, without fail, will give some variation to the "at least they're reading" argument.

Why do people flock to such mindless drivel such as Twilight and Harry Potter? Books intended for 13 years olds or younger are being read by people older than me, and they're enjoying them, reading them multiple times, the whole thing. It makes such little sense to me. Because, here's the thing: Do I care if you watch the Hills? No. I don't. I think it's a dumb show, but it's reality television, what the fuck do I care? Do I care if you watch Epic Movie, Date Movie, Whatever Movie? No. I don't. Those movies are even below the Twilight movie, but they're mindless shit intended for the absolute sewer-level common denominator. But here's the thing: music and literature are two mediums that haven't been overrun by shit. These are the last two respectable mediums of art, excluding painting and the like. Every time I hear the Jonas Brothers I cringe. And every time I hear the words Twilight or Harry Potter mentioned I cringe. What would Milton, Faulkner, Bukowski, Kafka, Hemingway, Melville, or any of the greats of literature think if they saw what their beloved format had turned into? Mindless crap that resembles day time TV for kids who think just because they're "reading" means they're learning.

These are not real books whether you want them to be or not. These are not respectable pieces of literature. There are such things as actually credible young adult literature (The Giver and Catcher in the Rye being two books I read around the age of 13 that are actually respectable). JK Rowling has fucked the literary world over and Stephanie Meyer is helping to fuck it's rotting corpse. Mindless stories filled with vapid and hollow characters that lead nowhere but to big movie deals and mindless people thinking they're doing something "right" by finally reading... I'm fed up with it.

Seriously. Fuck these books.