Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

19:26Jeff O'Neal:The later books are real spicy for age 12. Well, they may have aged them up. I don't have a copy in front of me. But, you know, one of the things that has always been true in when it comes to YA books is that people, young people tend to read up. So if it's sold for 14 and up, you're going to see the 12 year olds, the 13 year olds excited to read it. And Bella is a junior in high school. So she's 17. But Jacob is like 15. 15. Which is like, I'm going to dig into that later because that was the thing that took me out.

19:57Rebecca Schinsky:Was that the most problematic age gap for you, Kelly? 15 to 17?

20:01Jeff O'Neal:Not 100 to 17? No, it wasn't that. That's a different story. But the movie, right? Like you look at the casting of that movie, you're like, what 15-year-old looks like that?

20:13Rebecca Schinsky:He looks like a, I mean, there are some people that look 30. Like he's got the Jon Hamm gene. He's looked like he's 35 since he was about 14. But the point I was making there is like 20 years ago, those people who are 14 to 17 are now 34 to 37 now. They're becoming the prime book buyer in America. Women, 34 to 37, who read books as kids. I would imagine, and I don't want to tell anybody ages here except my own, I'm 47, that if you're a book reader now as an adult, like books are a part of your life, especially if you're a woman, you had to reckon with Twilight when you were a tween, whether you liked it or not.

20:49Rebecca Schinsky:Vanessa, talk to us. I think you're as close to a fan. What was your first reading experience? What is your sense of it? Did we get any of this right in our long prologue for you? I mean, I was absolutely not 14. I was a smooth 24, clearly going through something because these were extremely my shit. We don't know any 34 year olds. We're all too old. I mean, we don't know any of those. I was 24 years old. I was going through a major reading slump. I was in that part of my career where I was just like, you know, I used to be in a very different career. I was in sales and I was working like something stupid, you know, close like 90 hours a week, not whatever issues with boys.

21:23And a friend of mine literally did that thing where she slid this book to the side and was like, there's this movie coming out with a book. And like, you might like this because you like stuff like that. Actually, I liked fantasy. So I read it and then just I again, I'd be lying if I said I didn't suck. Were they all out already?

21:37Rebecca Schinsky:So it was like after the series was done. So I think I don't know if they were all out, but I know they're at least new moon, possibly eclipse. I know Breaking Dawn had not been, because I remember going to like buy Breaking Dawn on my own. But like I, even then I think I knew what I was reading was cheesy, but I didn't. It was like, it was targeted to somebody who wanted to read a story about a girl and love and a guy that like wanted to protect her. And, you know, in ways that, again, we will get into that, like, girl, what you needed was therapy. But at the time, a sparkly vampire book filled whatever that little void was.

22:08And I understood what the fascination was. And it made a lot of sense to me in a way that, again, we can interrogate the health of later. But I was primed to devour that story. And unapologetically, it's fine.

22:18Rebecca Schinsky:And when something becomes a phenomenon of the side, it has to be bigger than 14-year-old girls. Like, it just has to. There's just not enough of those people to make it where it sells 160 million copies worldwide. The five films together have made$3.5 billion. Stephanie Myers can't seem to stop writing versions of this book from that perspective. And we're going to gender flip and whatever. she remains committed to it. I don't think, Kelly, we got your first reading experience. Did you first read it when you were in school? Yes. I think most of the books had been out at that point. Here's really the memory I have.

22:51I was sitting in a database class. Again, I was in library school, so I was taking a database class over the summer. I was one of those people who they say, in grad school, you should only take one class over the summer. That's enough. I took three because I wanted to graduate early. So I was taking three. This totally scans for you. My shocked face. I know. Well, I was loving this database class and I was in it with one of my good friends in grad school. And she's like, I've been reading this series. It's so good. I can't put it down. And she's telling me about it. I'm like, this is so not my jam.

23:22But she kept going on and on and on. And I was like, all right, well, I'm going to read it because this will probably be relevant to the work I want to do. So I remember vividly reading whatever one, I don't know if it was twilight or the second one new moon on the bus to campus and i had it with me and she said something to me along the lines of guess what i've got and i was like i don't know what do you got and she said i have midnight sun in my email and i'm going to send it to you now for those who are like what's midnight sun it is the leaked copy from edward's perspective it was a huge to do that this thing had gotten leaked at some point and to this day it's still in my inbox because i haven't been able get rid of it like I think about this moment all the time I never finished the series so I'll start with that so I never read it and I never had interest in reading it and yet like that moment of I'm getting something that excites somebody else that like also what the heck is going on like how did this get leaked and it was it was a big scandal at the time but I haven't been able to get rid of it so I've got it in my inbox and I remember when Stephanie Meyer announced it must been five years ago at this point that she was including the Edwards perspective in the anniversary edition I was like I wonder how different it is from the one that's sitting in my inbox

24:38Rebecca Schinsky:that's well I mean when something becomes a phenomenon you start to get those weird tertiary stories like a leaked email or someone put the lay down date two weeks early or something you know that there's so much sort of cultural pressure that cracks start to happen in the

24:52Jeff O'Neal:You're going to get accused of plagiarism, which she did at least one time. Someone was like, but I, too, thought of a teenage vampire romance, even though I've never met Stephanie Meyer or communicated with her at all. She stole it from my brain.

25:04Rebecca Schinsky:There's so many of those. Okay, before we get much further, for those who really don't know much about Twilight, I mean, if anyone, the minimum cultural sort of awareness you might have Twilight is probably from seeing a clip of a movie or something, right? Sparkly vampires, Stewart and Pattinson, and maybe big trees. um Rebecca would you like to do our very quick oh I'd be so delighted let's do Shinsky's notes here

25:26Jeff O'Neal:so our main character here is Bella Swan she is a terribly clumsy which we hear about is she she's clumsy it's Chekhov's twisted ankle Jeff just it's like she didn't get this clumsiness until she met Edward let's be real there was no clumsiness until that point she's 17 as we said she moves from Phoenix Arizona to Forks Washington which is one of the wettest cloudiest places in the United States to live with her dad because her mom's new boyfriend sucks. On the first day at her new school, the only open seat in her biology class is next to the hottest guy she's ever seen. His name is Edward Cullen.

26:04Jeff O'Neal:He is tall. His skin is like beautiful stone. His sweater perfectly hugs his sculpted pecs. And he wants nothing to do with her. Like she doesn't know what the deal is. It reads like one of those deodorant commercials where someone is like, oh my God, is it me? and she's like he's sitting as far away from her as he can get at their little table and she's so offended especially because this guy is so hot he gets up and bolts out of the room at the end of class they have not spoken she has no idea but she gets the idea that he hates her it turns out that edward is a vampire and that he was so tempted by her delectable scent that he i'm so sorry that i just said that guys i'm like i'm so sorry it's not a metaphor for anything though definitely not no he's so tempted by her scent that he couldn't bear to be near her in fact he tried to get himself transferred out of class we also come to find out that the thing about vampires not being able to go outside during the day is a myth they can but they can't be out in the sun because they sparkle so they have chosen forks this wet cloudy place because the climate is great there's not much sun you're not going to be at risk of being caught sparkling very often.

27:17Jeff O'Neal:Don't ever let anyone dull your circle. Caught sparkling, the Bella Swan story. And danger, now at least, calamity is maybe a better word, has a way of finding our girl Bella. Like she is not like other girls, as we find out so many times throughout the book. And Edward saves her from a couple perilous situations. They have maybe one halfway substantial conversation in the process, And then they conclude that they're in love with each other, which is a problem because he's immortal and he has superhuman strength. And she is very fragile, which he repeatedly reminds her. So fragile. And this is a really dangerous combination.

27:56Jeff O'Neal:Dare I call it the danger bone. They cannot have sex. It would be too dangerous because he's so strong and she is so fragile. And that's not really even on the table in this first book. No. And kissing is barely on the table here. So that's an important point. The book is short on spice, but it's really, really long on yearning. It's just really, really long. It's not there. The yearning. It has a lot of nods to classic romance tropes. There's forbidden love. You have this like brooding, dangerous hero, an unremarkable, but also like manic pixie dream girl kind of heroine. This push-pull tension between them.

28:37Jeff O'Neal:Their communities disapprove of it. and later in the series we do indeed get a multi-species love triangle yeah i was wikipedia-ing what happens in the rest of the series last night and i was like okay i did i did finish them when the books as the books were coming out and i remember being like what kind of drugs did stephanie meyer get access to as she wrote the third and fourth ones yeah well i mean this goes into the money the money yeah well i mean part of the mythology is stephanie meyer's mythology of

29:07Rebecca Schinsky:this, right? Of like, it came to her in a dream. She was a stay-at-home mom. She's a Mormon. And she had an English degree from BYU. And like, we get nods to classic literature here. Like in, you know, apparently she named Edward after, you know, Wuthering Heights and some other things. Classic literature. Bella's already read Faulkner. I don't know if anyone, did anyone catch that, that she's already read all the books?

29:29Jeff O'Neal:Bella's already done all the homework for all of the classes in her new school.

29:32Rebecca Schinsky:All the homework, none of the pushups has Bella Swan done. Also,

29:35Jeff O'Neal:So she's just not like other girls, Jeff.

29:37Rebecca Schinsky:Not like other girls. And then Meyer writes this quickly, and there gets normal rejection stuff, but gets a huge advance for all three books, $750 ,000, which is inflation being what is more than a million, a seven-figure advance at the time. And there's a mythology of this spontaneous origin of this series, sort of came from her brain. And I think that's one of the things, and people can do all sorts of stuff they want with it. Is it a metaphor for the Church of Latter-day Saints? Is it a critique of the—you know, it can do all that kind of stuff that you want. I guess what I want to talk about first, before we get into our own reactions, is do the thing of— one thing that reading these phenomenons that I don't particularly vibe with teaches me over and over again, is usually there's a thing.

30:26Rebecca Schinsky:The rest of the book can be a mess. It can be bad. It can be boring. It can be long. but if it has a special something that can pull everything through, whether it's the Da Vinci code or Harry Potter, what else? And the special thing here, Kelly, I think is the yearning. Is that what it is? Is that, is that the central thing? Like what made, why, why Kelly? Why?

30:48Jeff O'Neal:The faces that are happening. If this was a visual medium. Yeah. Kelly just like looked like that cat clock. The people who were enthralled to this,

30:57Rebecca Schinsky:what was it that they were reacting to? I mean, it had to be the forbidden love aspect, honestly. It has to be 100%, right? Yeah. I mean, not for me. Right. But I'm also saying that as somebody who is much older than the target demographic, rereading it now, you know, this many years on. But, yeah, my guess would be the forbidden romance is really what the hook was. It was something different. It was something at the time that was edgy in terms of, like, romance in YA. You know, you had a lot of romance in YA, but not so much this like paranormal romance element. And the copycats came hot and heavy, too.

31:33Rebecca Schinsky:Oh, yeah. In the paranormal romance. It's paranormal romance.

31:36Jeff O'Neal:I also think this is really inseparable from the cultural moment that it's coming out in the late 90s and the early 2000s are rife with purity culture in the mainstream. that like talks about the expectation that teens would save themselves for marriage had extended outside of churches and were just kind of all over the place. Like, you know, you can read Britney Spears' memoir and get some of this. And Stephanie Meyer is writing in that moment and writing from a particular religious tradition that really emphasizes that and continues to emphasize it. So you've also got all these teenage girls who are filled with all the hormones and curiosities and desires that teenage girls are filled with.

32:15Jeff O'Neal:pumped full of messages about temptation. The book opens with a quote from Genesis about not eating from the tree of knowledge. I spend more time than I would like to admit this reading being like, but who is the snake?

32:31Rebecca Schinsky:Well, there's an apple on the cover. There ain't an apple in the book, but there's an apple on the cover.

32:35Jeff O'Neal:The danger of temptation, that temptation makes you willing to put yourself in harm's way and take major risks and the real like glamorizing of waiting and of purity and of not giving into temptation becomes a thread throughout the rest of the series like Edward refuses to sleep with Bella until they are married and later on they do get married and they do have sex and somehow she survives but that that they're talking about it and that there eventually is an overt conversation about waiting until marriage was one of the selling points. When I was a bookseller, moms would tell me, and it was always moms because dads are not shopping with their teenage girls looking for books like this in 2005.

33:18Jeff O'Neal:Maybe they are today, but it was always moms saying that they really liked that they could give their kids a romance, but that it was clean, that they knew it wasn't going to have sex in it.

33:29Rebecca Schinsky:I think too, and I'm picking up like sort of echoes of what I could imagine the reading experience is like, there's kind of an element of the desire, the withheld desire, maybe kind of is too much of an equivocation. Almost like when you feel the fever blister in your mouth, like, why do you do that? It's sort of that pleasurable pain. And there's some of that here. It's like the exquisite pain of being so flippin' horny and not being able to do anything about it. Like living right on that edge, like putting, I don't know what part of a body Edward didn't put his cheek on a bellus. Like almost every single part he put his cheek on.

34:04Rebecca Schinsky:And that being right in that moment for 300 pages, essentially, in this book, I don't think that's a bug. I think that's a feature. I think that you get -

34:15Jeff O'Neal:Exquisitely horny would be such a great alternate title.

34:17Rebecca Schinsky:That's just what it is. And it's almost painful how horny they are. And they won't, they can't, it's not allowed. Stephanie Meyer won't let them allowed. Vampire Code, I'm still lost on the morals of vampire codes here a little bit. But that is where you spend most of the book. And after a while, I find it to be quite tedious. But I think that elongation of the withholding is the, that's the juice. That's the juice to a lot of this book. Let's talk about vampires.

34:44Jeff O'Neal:What a pivot. Because vampires have long been symbols of all kinds of stuff, sex, desire,

34:51Rebecca Schinsky:you know, the occult, whatever else is going on here. These are versions of vampires, but they're sparkly vampires. And that was much derided. I think one of the first blog posts on Book Riot was why he's more than sparkly vampires. So even 10 years later, that was a trope that was invented that people were feeling like they needed to go against. The paranormal was new too, but this is pretty light. And it's more mysterious. I actually kind of like, if I had a favorite part of this book, I guess by definition you have to have a favorite part. I like these early chapters where I can imagine reading it for the first time.

35:26Rebecca Schinsky:you really didn't know what was going on like it's hard to remember like did people really like what the hell is going on with these people that are like amazingly beautiful like by the time you're reading it vanessa did you know the deal were you like you you kind of knew they were vampires or what did you have like i don't know what's going on here moment it was hard not to know because again i had watched it basically because the film was about to come out and someone was like hey you like stuff like this like vampires occult whatever and i was like okay cool so like i did but i i'm yeah i don't know maybe kelly do you remember whether like the vampire thing was super clear when the books were first coming out?

35:57I don't really remember, but I do know, you know, one of the things that often comes up when adults talk about YA more broadly is, you know, they find themselves bored with YA or frustrated because they know how the story is going to go. They see how this is going to happen. They've seen this play out and it's like, okay, but a 12 year old doesn't. And the book's written for the 12 year old who hasn't read 5 ,000 other books like this. And so I can absolutely see even now young people who pick this up being kind of like knowing that it's a vampire book, but not knowing how that part is into it because they haven't seen it play out over and over again.

36:35They haven't read the vampire classics. They haven't read the books that have come, you know, in the wake of this one. And like that is one of those things that is hard when I read to remember like, okay, you know, I'm reading this as an adult who's well read and knows literature. But if I'm a 12 year old picking this up for the first time, my experience is totally different because maybe I don't. Maybe it is all new and surprising and fresh to me. I have a question.

37:02Jeff O'Neal:Do we think Stephanie Meyer has read the vampire classics? because to me this reads like someone who is writing an ode to what she says she's writing an ode to like there's some shakespeare there's some jane austen there's some wuthering heights the vampire parts read to me like she did a 2005 google i think she did what bella did where she chose her favorite search engine and then landed at vampires a to z and that is more or less how she could yeah like it doesn't feel like the history of vampire literature is smutty as hell yeah super yeah yeah and i don't this doesn't read like somebody who's into those components

37:35Rebecca Schinsky:And yeah, I think that part is interesting. I mean, she's aware enough and maybe you don't. I mean, I don't know how much you really need to know Dracula, the original stuff that even Dracula was based on and Balkan mythology. But I did find myself, not knowing the general shape, but not knowing the plot, I wasn't sure who, if any, in Cullen's little mini vampire cult, would any of them turn on him? Like there was some questions to me about how that piece was going to go because it's a little farther outside of the norm. I've done Interview with a Vampire and some of those kinds of things. But those questions were out there.

38:08Rebecca Schinsky:I also don't know that, and I don't know if this is a marketing decision, so this is really going to be a Kelly question. Was it marketed as a, were capital R romance readers picking this up at the time? Did the adults get in on the romance thing earlier? I'm not sure how that would happen. Because I guess the question, I guess, has the answer in it, which I guess it can't be a capital R romance from the beginning. because we don't know that they're going to be happy for now, I guess, is where they end up at the end. Yes. And also I can't answer your question because I don't remember. I don't remember.

38:41Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that part is interesting to see as well as that. I don't want to, as much as we talked about YA, I don't want to ignore the romance piece of this. Like it's a, it's a romance. It's a love story that turns into a romance.

38:56Jeff O'Neal:How romance and how like YA with love stories were marketed in like in at least 2007, 2008 when I was a book. So we're pretty different. Like we're sitting here in 2025 in a moment where there's a lot of crossover between romance and fantasy. YA has really robust romance fantasy and YA sub genres that are part of mainstream reading and are marketed to mainstream YA readers. And that's new and relatively and it's partially or really to a great extent a product of this like romance was pretty siloed still in 2005 like pre the blogging boom where romance readers found each other and created online communities it was its own like little section of the bookstore much more clinch covers and spinoracks with the mass market paperbacks like we were the idea that the some of the best selling books in the country in a given year were going to be mainstream trade paperback romances would not would have blown our minds in 2005.

39:59Jeff O'Neal:I feel pretty comfortable guessing that there weren't a lot of just like adult romance readers picking up Twilight because it was certainly like they would today.

40:07Rebecca Schinsky:Certainly not like they would be doing today.

40:09Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, today they'd be it would be marketed right into that into that market. But that market exists because those people were 14 at the time and they're 34 now. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

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41:08Rebecca Schinsky:Quaker, official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26 I, oh, let's go Got a Sam's Cafe pizza order up you know the best part about this spicy italian sausage i voted for this topping yeah just another perk of being a member come join us sam's club is there anything else we'd like to cover before we do a round robin of what it was like to read it over the last whenever y 'all read this anything else we want to any any contextual cloth throat clearing setup backstory we have we have our normal things to do but i think what we're ready for is what was it like to read this now. Anything else? No. All right.

41:49Rebecca Schinsky:I'm seeing shaking heads. Rebecca, you're first in the document. So why don't you tell us what your experience was like of picking Twilight.

41:55Jeff O'Neal:I was really glad that it reads fast. Fair. You know, it opens, as I said, with this quote from Genesis and the purity culture stuff is all over it. And that's something that I had experience with in the late 90s and early 2000s and have a very critical personal reading of today. So it's impossible for me to extricate that from my individual experience of this book. Also, this trope of a domineering man who's controlling and protective, but it's for your own good and because he loves you is so repetitive and also just not for me. This is not my flavor. And it It is just so repetitive. There's so much unnecessary description, like Bella telling us about how she walked to the car and then she cranked it and then it was cold and she put her jacket on and she sat there shivering.

42:47Rebecca Schinsky:One of the great car logistics books, by the way. Whose car are we taking? How are we getting there? Who's driving? How fast we're going? Which highways we're on? It's unbelievable. But you got to remember, this was a big deal in YA literature. It was a big deal to have a car. It's a big deal to drive. Like that is what gave you your independence. I remember. We don't see it as much now, you know, for a lot of reasons. But like in 2005, like car culture and teen driving was a huge like cool factor. That was like the first big reveal, right, is that her dad had bought her a car like that. She was shocked.

43:21Rebecca Schinsky:And that was that was very cool to see.

43:23Jeff O'Neal:And she is glad that she's not going to have to rely on him because he's the police chief in town. And otherwise she's getting dropped off at school in the cruiser.

43:31Rebecca Schinsky:Amazing.

43:32Jeff O'Neal:It is just there's a lot of like funny little details that I think are unintentionally funny in the book. The story structure moves a lot more slowly than the big YA hits that I've read from today, which admittedly are very limited. But I spent a lot of time in this reading thinking about what the construction of a book for young adults reflects about the other kinds of media that young adults are consuming at the time. The dopamine addiction from today's social media, I think we can't separate from how quickly and how there are constant cliffhangers in a lot of the big YA books. And it's just like peril galore and something big is happening.

44:15Jeff O'Neal:And there are like three big things that happen in this book across 500 pages. And only one of them is really like heart pounding at all. While most of the book feels like kind of low stakes and very everyday, we're in Bella's just ordinary experience. And some of that is also really pleasant. Like, oh yeah, I remember what it was like to be a teen girl in the nineties and just to go dress shopping with your friends. And it's refreshing that they don't have phones and they're not engaged in social media. Bella waits like four days after she makes the move from Phoenix to Forks before she even checks her email to see if her mom has written something to her.

44:51Jeff O'Neal:Like imagine four days without your email. And that's just normal. Like some of those time capsule things were really enjoyable to me. But I landed really where Elizabeth Spires, who reviewed it for the New York Times in 2006, landed where she said the book suffers at times from over earnest amateurish writing, a little more showing and a lot less telling would have been a good thing, especially some pruning to eliminate the constant references to Edward's shattering beauty and Bella's undying love. not the worst reading experience I've had in the last year though oh that's a tease Vanessa or no

45:27Rebecca Schinsky:Kelly you're up next on the document we're going to be honest here that's what people are listening for so go for it so I've got like four big things and the first is that I thought that reading this was like pulling teeth there was one big thing worth addressing and it's how much we really do get a teenage girl here that's something that Rebecca sort of talked about Bella is a bit of a mess, to put it nicely. But the way that she begins falling for this dangerous boy and the one who is ultimately controlling and annoying, always there to keep an eye on her partner, isn't beyond what it is to be a teenager in a new environment, especially after your life's been totally pulled out from beneath you.

46:04He's terrible, but he's stable, even if he's unpredictable. So there's some grounding, you know, that a 170 year old teenage vampire has when you're 17 and your parents are pretty much MIA, your husband or your mom's new husband, you're stealing her away from you and you've moved from one of the hottest and sunniest places in the u.s to the land of perpetual gloom so like in the tiktok lingo bella is very parentified

46:27Jeff O'Neal:like yes no one's ever taken care of bella she is raising her parents totally so the second thing and i i think i touched on this very briefly before class was really interesting here and i wish that meyer had kept at it before letting the story fall into the romance bella comes from very little and does a lot of remarking on her new classmates, on the cars they drive, on the lives they live in, compares it to her situation. I wish it had gone further. I wish we'd had more because it was interesting. And it was really interesting to think about those discussions in the 2005 context because they weren't happening quite as much.

47:05You know, there was there were stories about poor kids. There were stories about rich kids. But like, what about those kids who are really actively like engaging with this difference in class and what it means. I, this is a point three. I wanted to know more about the people that Bella basically wrote off immediately. Like I wanted to know more about Mike, the first guy who spends time with Mike. Yeah. I wanted to know more about the female friend she went shopping with. There was a lot of opportunity here and I can't help but wonder if Meyer, were she given the opportunity to rewrite the story now in 2025, we'd see more of that, particularly given her own experiences supporting other women in the arts.

47:46Rebecca Schinsky:Because things go great for Bella at this high school. People are super nice to her. I have a son starting high school right away. Everybody thinks she's a smoke show. Where you're sitting at the table, right away she gets invited to sit with the people. I don't know if they're cool kids or not. I don't care. There's kids and they want to talk to her. Everyone starts asking her out because apparently she's super hot, I guess. She got like four, she got like four invitations to the dance. It was almost like a myth where you keep turning down the, the prince's hand in marriage until the vampire gets you.

48:14Rebecca Schinsky:But like things were going great for Bella and Fork. She didn't need Edward. That's one of my hot takes, by the way. She didn't need Edward. My, my last point is, is one I know I brought up earlier and that I never realized Jacob was two years younger than Bella. And again, we're talking about this in the context of her and 170 year old vampire. Right. And like, but I think it matters because there's a big difference for teens between the ages of 15 and 17. Like you won't socialize with them. Like it's a completely different humans in that level. I agree with you. I didn't think about that. Right.

48:45And so like, it's not just age, but it's maturity. And I also don't think it was cast that way in the film at all, which like as I'm reading it, you know, I can't help but continue to see, you know, the characters as the people who played them. And in my head, I'm like, but that's no 15 year old. That's no 15 year old. Yeah, that's where I'm going to end that I'm I'm more struck by the 15 to 70 year old age difference than the 17 to 170 year old age difference.

49:11Jeff O'Neal:I just now want to subscribe to an entire podcast of Kelly that's called a Scorpio revisits Twilight.

49:19Rebecca Schinsky:Vanessa, we're gonna go to you. I'll hit clean up here. So why don't you go next? Okay, great. Well, as I already said, 20 something me clearly needed therapy is my like hot take because I was so in. When was the last time you read this since? um i honestly hadn't read it again since i was a teen i've watched the movies a ton because i again i'm a person who like unironically and unapologetically loves the fast and the furious franchise if that tells you anything about me like i don't need a thing to be good to enjoy it it's and that's that's how i feel about a lot of twilight but i hadn't read the books in a really long time to the point where i even said to a co-worker i was like did i actually read this because it doesn't feel like i would have because i found it such a slog i will give you one to two pages of i'm a bad boy i'm bad for you and like no i love him but this i we got that refrain what like every three pages it felt like and over and over again like I'm bad for you stay away from me I'm gonna hurt you but uh but I can't because I love you so I may as well and they just the fact that they say I love you to each other after saying maybe seven sentences to each other how much repetitive talk about his cold lips and whatever but his she calls him a god and a lord I don't know how many times as an angel I know I had to remind myself over and over again as Kelly said and that's when I came back around to like not being as harsh on it that we are talking about a teenage girl and that that whole daddy I love him energy is not only appropriate for that age but a thing that I think I probably experienced in my own life I've talked about the fact that I was raised in like a conservative Mexican Catholic household and it felt like I went from a parent raising me that way of like no you can't do this you can't do that give me the keys to your car you can't go anywhere so that when I went out and forward you know into the dating world I found that kind of concept romantic in a way that makes me now but at the time I thought was cool and when I read Bella I do remember being like oh my gosh she has so much more agency than I felt like I had as a teen because she yeah like as Rebecca said she was parentified like she was cooking for her dad the second she got in she makes all the meals she has her car she goes and comes as she pleases her dad is off on fishing trips and so she can go have you know vampire sojourns in the woods and I I can see why I liked it at the time I'm trying not to judge young Vanessa for being as into it as I was.

51:21But adult me is like, why on earth would you sign up to be high school age forever? That sounds terrible. Have some self-esteem.

51:27Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, why the high, they couldn't have been junior editors at a newspaper for 10 years? Like high school is like the worst, like every three years you're going to age out. That was the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Vampires were being around for 400 years. They're so dumb.

51:43Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. One of my notes is that vampires would have a better cover than this.

51:46Rebecca Schinsky:And when did the doctor vampire go to medical school? Right? Because he's just, medical school. Is he up on his continuing ed? Germ theory didn't exist in 1917 during the Spanish flu. He doesn't know anything. He never went to medical school. He doesn't know anything. Look, Jeff, he's still doing better than a lot of people in charge of health right now. Well, you know what, Kelly, thank you very much. Maybe I want, you could do a lot worse than your vampire doctor who got his medical education in the 17th century, I guess, at that point. um so yeah so finesse i think that's interesting because i was trying to imagine to you know i'm not trying to put myself in anyone's shoes but like i do remember when i guess we're just gonna get personal or at least i am i've been with the same person since i was 17 and i remember at 17 being in a serious relationship or what i thought was a serious relationship felt like being an adult it felt like the most important thing in the world and some of that for me was that my home life was not the most amazing thing it could have been at that moment so it was a refuge for me and has been for, I think, as you hope it is to be refuge in the time.

52:46Rebecca Schinsky:So that part I did get. You're in this new place and you feel safe with someone. The thing that strikes me about that, though, is that she doesn't feel safe with him. From her initial attraction is so physical because they don't say anything. They don't know each other at all. The way that love, desire, or whatever is formulated here is beyond primal. It's elemental. It is actually supernatural. because it's some factor of whatever his vampire whatever is combined with whatever pheromone she's shooting off whatever is in her blood like it's not even sort of about their personalities right like there's almost like a dna or genetic thing happening where she is so attracted to him as prey i guess is what we're supposed to understand is that if he wasn't reformed he would have just drank her blood and like that's that's the desire like it's so mapped so neatly about reformed vampires we didn't even mention that well that's what i think i think that idea was super cool this idea of the reformed vampires but like the reformed saints reformed vampires that's so strange to think about like versions like the perfected version of this other thing is so wild i i do think there's an easy way of understanding most phenomenons cultural phenomenons being about a fantasy of some kind superhero is about a fantasy of power and agency for yourself the ability to fix things this one seems to be principally the fantasy of a teenage girl let's say heterosexual, able-bodied, all this stuff that goes into it here, of a certain kind of wanting to be wanted, like almost a perfect way of wanting to be wanted.

54:18Rebecca Schinsky:That person who is a paragon of control, even they cannot resist you because you've just got it. Whatever it is, is so whatever. You're so valuable, so hot. You're so interesting. You're so desirable that it breaks down the defenses of someone who's trained themselves to defend against this very thing. And they still are subject to it. And they're in, you know, like it's the Tom Haverford thing. He says like, there's nothing sexier than a girl finding me sexy, right? There's something to that here. There's nothing, there's nothing hotter than someone who's unattainable, who's so good looking, who should have a stock portfolio managing Warren Buffett's because they've been in the market so long.

54:59Rebecca Schinsky:I hope they bought some index funds in the seventies, but like he represents kind of a pure ideal problematic form of male desire and she's the object of it no questions asked who doesn't want to do that for a living yeah there's a lot of like

55:14Jeff O'Neal:90s teen movie in this as well like the 90s teen movie she's all that yeah right if she just took her glasses off we could realize everyone would realize how hot she is and here it's just she needs to move somewhere else and be with new people who haven't known her her whole life and they see her the way that she's always desired to be seen. Everybody thinks she's a total smoke show. As Kelly said, four guys ask her to the same dance. She's like beating back the bed.

55:40Rebecca Schinsky:They just didn't have those pheromones in the Northwest. She brought those Arizona pheromones.

55:44Jeff O'Neal:At every turn. She's already done all the homework for all of the classes. Like she is flying by and the hottest guy in school who normally doesn't socialize with anybody wants to be with her and is willing to fight his own nature. Like this goes back to the purity culture stuff. There was like integral to that was the idea that girls are temptations that boys constantly have to resist and that the best thing you can do as a girl is not be a temptation to a boy. And the most caring, loving thing you could do as the boy would be to resist the constant temptation that just the presence of a woman brought into your life.

56:22Jeff O'Neal:And they enact that dynamic so repeatedly here where he's like, I can't bear to be around you, but I will bear it. Like at one point they're very close to each other. And she's like, I'm sorry, I'll move away. And he goes, no, it's bearable. And it's like what every girl dreams of.

56:38Rebecca Schinsky:Vanessa, can we do Pacific Northwest corner for a second? Can we talk about, this is where I break out into, because someone was pretty cool. Like I, like I said before, the first 150 pages when she's in news place, you know, kind of navigating as Rebecca said, it reads very quickly. And some of it is very easy to read. And I don't mean that as pejorative, Like her sense of Bella Wach getting through the world, she's pretty good at locating us in space and time and how things are put together. Like I kind of felt like I knew that world a little bit. What did you think of a representation of our rainy, cloudy Pacific Northwest here?

57:10Yes, because I was very much still a sunny Southern Californian at the time that I read this. I remember I've always, I think, wanted to live eventually in a place with trees. So I found it alluring, even if it was described as being super, you know, bleary and wet all the time. It seemed like it was, yeah, sort of cinematic. And this could also be colored by the fact that the film had just come out. And I hadn't seen it, but I'd seen the promo for it. And man, you give me a landscape of a bunch of trees with some fog and I'm in. It doesn't necessarily matter. So reading it really sunk me into that.

57:42And it made me want to come and visit. It worked on me. And it definitely set the scene for all the things that we eventually get. And it was very convenient for vampires. I do think it makes it stand out.

57:51Rebecca Schinsky:Like a Pacific Northwest setting. The iconography is pretty recognizable. I've got a couple of weather notes for Stephanie Meyer. I don't know if she did any research here. If all the trees and roads are covered in ice, school is canceled. No one's getting in a car and driving to school. They're not doing that. And another thing that happens is two months after there's black ice, there are no wildflowers in a meadow in the mountains. We're six months away from that. So that's just my Pacific Northwest notes there. All right. Anything else about reading experiences that when you get out there? Is there a version of this that's 100 page shorter that's 40 % better?

58:25Jeff O'Neal:200 pages shorter. 200? Maybe. Yes. Yes. Up to that.

58:29Rebecca Schinsky:Yes. Okay. How do you know if it's for you, Rebecca?

58:33Jeff O'Neal:I think if you're curious about the origins of some of the biggest trends in publishing today, Twilight is a must read for all the reasons that we cited at the top of the show. It paves the way for Fifty Shades of Grey, which is Twilight fanfic, inspired by Bella and Edward's relationship. that opens the door to spicy romance being in the mainstream in a really serious way. Those things combine and lead to what we have happening with romanticity today. So if you really want to understand what the building blocks were, in not just a theoretical sense that we're giving you here, but in having read the books, you should pick up Twilight.

59:08Jeff O'Neal:If you like the trope of the really normal girl and an extraordinary guy, that's a thing in romance. You're going to get a lot of it here. And if you want the yearning, if that is what you're looking for, there is just so much yearning, so much yearning and so much longing. If you prefer that to having the sparks fly or you're leaning more towards like a closed door romance, this first book is for you. The door does not stay closed for the rest of the series.

59:37Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think that's fair. So Vanessa and Kelly, one thing we do here is we're talking about modern classics or classic classics. It's what questions that are asked and which of these are messed with here. I'm not actually sure. This should be an interesting segment. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? We could also, if there's a different question that it's interested in, we could enter it here. Do any of these seem central to this?

1:00:11I think a couple of them do. I think your last one there what's the deal with good and evil certainly plays a role here and what is the deal with good and evil here I think the reformed vampire thing really gets I'll let Kelly

1:00:25Rebecca Schinsky:I mean agency is part of it right like you can choose yeah yeah I mean that's a big part of it I also just think good and evil when it comes to like what your desires are I think to the other question you bring up here how to deal with the certainty of death is a central theme. Exactly, yeah. To welcome it. Which is what? Like there's a way out? Like this fantasy of there being a way out? Yeah. I mean, I guess. The immortality of vampires is generally perceived by the vampires as like curse, right? Like if you're mortal, you think, well, that's cool. And the vampire's like, I'm not so sure. And that's always an interesting one.

1:01:05Rebecca Schinsky:I think that's an interesting way of dealing with that same question of like how do we wrestle with our own human mortality? And it's a contra example. It's a negative example. What would it be like if you really weren't mortal? What would the consequence of that look like? I think there is a what is the good life here, right? There is a, is it love? Is it running away with the one true whatever and leaving my friends and my family and my education and my personal will and agency all for a God, a walking God amongst us? I think what else might there be is interesting, right? Because as soon as you enter in a world in which they're vampires, the whole world is different than what you thought.

1:01:42Rebecca Schinsky:There is so much beyond this mortal coil to explore and experience. And I do wonder at some point, understanding her desire for Edward is a desire for the knowledge of the rest of the world, of seeing the big, seeing everything that's out there and what might be there. Rebecca, you're smirking at me.

1:01:58Jeff O'Neal:Well, I mean, Edward as knowledge of the rest of the world is really like, is Edward the snake in the Eden, you know, construction of this? I was going to get to that, right?

1:02:06Rebecca Schinsky:Is he the fruit of the tree? Do we think that the book thinks they are weak for desire? Like, are we supposed to be pulling for them? We're supposed to be pulling for them to get together, right?

1:02:17Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, but we're supposed to be pulling for them to get together and then be strong enough to not have sex until they get married.

1:02:23Rebecca Schinsky:That's what we're pulling for. Okay. That's really what it comes down to. That's so beyond my pale of caring that I forget that people care about that. Anything else about the immortal questions? I was just going to say that the what else might there be and the certainty of death reminded me of the conversation that I had with Rebecca and Danica about another vampire book, which is Sparrow Our Bones in the Midnight Soil and the way we compared it to the boom and huge release of Sinners. The concept of those books treating death as freedom. And that is very much as far as, is that all there is?

1:02:52That I think is how Bella has viewed her entire life. She waxes on a lot about that over the course of four books, is her looking at her clumsiness and her state of being and how awkward she's been as all leading up to this moment of her being destined for some bigger purpose and that bigger purpose is being undead where she welcomes it with this you know romantic paint job that obviously is is interesting but i i don't know i just love the way it meditates on the theme that we see a lot in vampire fiction this might be the easiest

1:03:19Rebecca Schinsky:version of this question are we sure this is about art and writing i'm pretty sure if we're ever going to do this i don't think this is about art and writing am i wrong i'm not even going to torture i think we're good there okay um i don't know who put oh actually i do let's do best and worst lines um are is there a good line did we put these any of these are in there for good reasons no i'm not that sounds terrible but i don't have any good ones no i don't think we put any good

1:03:43Jeff O'Neal:lines none of the ones i entered were because of the goodness kelly you put one in why don't you talk about the one you put in oh yeah it's the one the one i i every time she talked about smoldering in reference to edward's eyes i my eye rolls were causing some smoldering on my end But they were topaz, Kelly. Never mind that topaz comes in like five, six different colors or topaz color. Unless they were black. Unless they were black.

1:04:10Rebecca Schinsky:Are you gem tone shading her? Come on. Let's be careful. So I know of a quote that didn't make it in here, but because she just said it, there's literally a quote where she says, I have noticed in my observance, and it's usually men that when they're hungry, they're grumpier. Like that is an actual thing that gets said in this book. Did Stephanie Meyer invent hangry? Is that what you're saying? Hot take. Anyway. She's the first one to spot that. Low blood sugar. but kelly we need the quote please give us the quote we give us the quote what read the quote i have to i have somebody has to read it on the podcast the top one oh the top one is mine oh yeah

1:04:42Jeff O'Neal:i only i only put one in there oh gather around friends my bad yes about three things i was absolutely positive first edward was a vampire second there was part of him and i didn't know how potent that might be that thirsted for my blood and third i was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. Tough. I have known him for two weeks. I am 17. I recited this to my husband the other night and he just looked at me like, have you had a stroke?

1:05:13Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know how many times perfect muscles were described. It's almost to the point where an editor should have caught it. Can we do something else with describing the muscles? That happened a lot. There was estrogen rush, Vanessa. I maybe skipped over this as I was rushing through this one. yeah she's a really bad friend to her girlfriends and like as kelly said i wish we would have spent more time talking about like her girl friendships especially because they're all so receptive to her like they're kind they welcome her in they're like trying to make her a part of things and the minute edward so much as glances in her direction she's like bye but she does go on this girl's night out for a shopping trip for dresses and she says it had been a while since i'd had a girl's night out and the estrogen rush was invigorating and i am absolutely going to say that to any group of women that i hang out with like do do we feel it is the estrogen rushing is it invigorating i'm pheromones this is all pheromones and hormones it's just coursing through pheromones here is

1:06:05Jeff O'Neal:the number one crime that was committed in this book is bella or edward saying to bella if you didn't smell so appallingly luscious and that's where we all leave i'm bringing one thing for you everyone today the number one quote from twilight on goodreads the most liked quote

1:06:24Rebecca Schinsky:by a factor of 10. Hit us. Wait, can I guess? Yes, please do, Kelly. Is it the line about the lamb? No, that's second. Very good guess. Excellent guess. Why didn't I put that in here? Oh my God. The first one is, I like the night without the dark. We'd never see the stars. Which is like that brand of faux poetry. Yeah. Like everyone literally knows this, but I guess there is a tween somewhere that hasn't encountered that line before. We all put that kind of line in our aim away messages. Oh, 100%. Yeah, it's like they always say someone's born every minute that hasn't seen the Flintstones. Someone's born every minute that's done with.

1:07:00Rebecca Schinsky:The second one is, and so the lion fell in love with the lamb, he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word. What a stupid lamb, I sighed. What a sick, masochistic lion. If you've not seen the synigmatic version of this, I entreat you to do so immediately. I was going to ask you, we've got to run through some of the rest of this. Vanessa has the best note of any of us here. dicing double question mark enchiladas triple question mark i okay i always do this thing where i'm like okay you are from one part of mexico there are many parts of mexico there are many parts of latin not all not all enchiladas hashtag not all enchiladas not all enchiladas

1:07:36Jeff O'Neal:i spent an hour on the good youtube trying to find somebody making enchiladas with diced chicken because she talks about how she's dicing chicken for enchiladas what are you talking about like enchiladas do not have to be with chicken but if they're with chicken it is shredded chicken

1:07:52Rebecca Schinsky:Vanessa, I'm sorry to tell you that my white people have done things to enchiladas your people cannot imagine. I was so angry, like unnaturally angry. What do you mean you're dicing chicken for enchiladas? The part that I did laugh that I did not put in here is the part where she reheats lasagna for her and her dad and then does the most Vanessa thing there ever was, which is to pour each of them a glass of whole milk. I felt seen, but that's the kind of thing that generally gets me labeled a serial killer. So I just wanted to call that out.

1:08:18Jeff O'Neal:My notes are like lasagna and a glass of milk. What psychopaths are these?

1:08:21Rebecca Schinsky:I don't think Mormons are lactose intolerant. That's what I learned. That's so much dairy. That gene doesn't.

1:08:26Jeff O'Neal:That's so much dairy. That's my mom.

1:08:28Rebecca Schinsky:So much dairy.

1:08:29Jeff O'Neal:Above, re-appallingly luscious.

1:08:32Rebecca Schinsky:Also, Stephen Meyer, you can tell he's in her 30s because the dad here must be in his 40s. No 40-year-old dad who's been working all day is coming home to a hot, huge plate of lasagna in a glass of whole milk. It's not happening. We're going to the hospital if that happens. They ran out of fish. It was so bad. They ran out of fish. I have a question for you here, Vanessa, that I want to add to our ongoing agenda, Rebecca. So we'll try it out here. Could you get most of the gist of this thing having watched the prime adaptation of it? Yes, because I watched it immediately after to ask myself that question.

1:09:03It varies very little. There are some little key bits that they get rid of, but I could have just watched that instead of reading this. And I would like down to some of the uncomfortable quotes. She doesn't dice the enchiladas. I would have saved myself that part. but like almost of like the major quotes, the cringy stuff, like the repetitive, I guess we don't maybe get as much of the monologue about her finding him gorgeous. But as far as the actual gist of what happened,

1:09:27Rebecca Schinsky:even the screenwriter couldn't handle saying, yeah, they were. Yeah. Again, the masochistic lion bit is difficult. Right. Like it's a whole thing, but yeah, it's, it's, it's a thing. Rough. Hey there. I'm Travis Hoyam. One of the hosts of Motley Fool, hidden gems investing each weekday on Motley Fool, hidden gems investing. We talk through the business news. you need to know, and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industry's shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and, of course, stock ideas, plenty of them.

1:10:04Rebecca Schinsky:To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

1:10:10Jeff O'Neal:Every Tuesday, we talk security on Security Now. Hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me and Steve Gibson as we talk about AI, the new agentic adversary, actually fixing bugs. We'll also talk about hundreds of bugs that were fixed in the newest version of Chrome. And the new chat control may come to the EU. That's scary. All of that this week on Security Now. You'll find it at twit.tv slash sn or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10:38Rebecca Schinsky:All right. We're on to trivia, adaptations, rumors, mischievous quotes, whatever. I don't know who put this in here. it. Let's popcorn it. No one won't take anything.

1:10:45Jeff O'Neal:Oh, yeah. This top one is me. Twilight fans still flock to Forks, Washington. I was there a couple of years ago in the Olympic Peninsula. And you can go to a diner that sits on the line that marks the division between vampire territory and werewolf territory, which we learn about later in the books. There are also tons of stores that have like Twilight art and memorabilia. I have a picture of my face and a little cardboard cut out of Bella and Edward's wedding scene. And my favorite one is that you can go to the restaurant in Port Angeles, which is a slightly smaller town where Bella and Edward go on their first date.

1:11:18Jeff O'Neal:And you can go to the restaurant or like something similar to where they go and reenact the first date, which as recently as 2022 is a thing that people were still doing. Folks at our hotel told us about it. And the way the young couples would do this is go to this restaurant and the girl would order the mushroom ravioli or like whatever the closest thing on this menu is and the poor guy would just sit there and not eat anything because edward is a vampire so he doesn't need food so if you're reenacting if you're cosplaying the first date because if you ordered something

1:11:49Rebecca Schinsky:you'd be like well maybe that guy isn't a vampire you may not be right gotta commit to the bit what else do we want to hit here mine's related i'm just gonna jump in real quick which is that the actual house like that's it's not in forks but the house the bella house the charlie house is an actual from the movie yes from the movie yeah that you can actually stay in it's not in forks it's actually in the same town that you can go to that is halloween town like the recreation of like that movie so like if you're just wanting a bunch of fall kelly's googling airline tickets right now i have gone it is absolutely ridiculous but i yeah the house is there and of course they've got it kind of cordoned off so a bunch of looky-loos don't bother you if you're staying there but you can actually go stay at the house it's an i did have this question while reading I don't put this in here, but the mythology of the local native folks, I was like, I'm sure that wasn't handled super great.

1:12:36Rebecca Schinsky:And it turns out that wasn't.

1:12:37Jeff O'Neal:The way that Bella first starts to learn that Edward is a vampire is when she first meets Jacob Black and she and a bunch of kids are down at the beach. Jacob is a member of one of the local indigenous tribes. And he starts telling her that there is mythology going back generations in his community about how his people descended from werewolves. And they have this ongoing battle against the cold ones and that the cold ones are vampires and that many people believe the Cullens are indeed cold ones. Stephanie Meyer did get some criticism and some hot water from the actual Kuala Yut people today for misappropriating their mythology.

1:13:13Jeff O'Neal:But also, I think that was much more common in fiction in 2005. than it is today. This would be like a cancel culture conversation, like end Stephanie Meyer now is the thing that would happen if somebody really took a story like that to the extent that she did, but pretty common for 2005. And I think she, you know, discussed it and made repairs to the degree that you can when the books are already out the gate. All right.

1:13:37Rebecca Schinsky:It's time for hot takes. Rebecca, you're up first. The Fifty Shades fanfic that was inspired by this, it really did take a

1:13:46Jeff O'Neal:lot of heat, but the relationship dynamics of Fifty Shades of Grey are actually healthier than what happens in Twilight. That's my first hot take.

1:13:55Rebecca Schinsky:My only hot take I didn't write here is related, which I didn't really get why Fifty Shades happened until I read this. I get it now. I get if you were a fan of this book, you're like, just flipping bone. Just come on. Let's go. And I get it. I see you, E.L. James, understand it. Not my choices, not my body, but I get it. I understand. Kelly? Yeah, I don't know why I've got extra letters before my name on this. It was so hot, your fingers were burning. Woo, I had a lot to say. I have two hot takes. So my first one is, you know, we have talked about all the reasons that this book is important, but I think you can get away with not reading it and still be web read, as long as you know the context, history, and related outcomes of the book.

1:14:41And so that leads to my second hot take, which is that back when I was a teen librarian is when the graphic novel for Twilight came out. And I remember reading it and thinking it was really quite good. You know what?

1:14:54Rebecca Schinsky:I believe that because there's less dialogue. There's less dialogue and you get the images, right? So I would say if you're going to read it to be well read, try the graphic novel and see how that goes for you. Diaz, you didn't have one here. Anything? uh no the one hot take that i have which is not super hot take but if you just want to laugh is that obviously stephenie meyer has been asked whether or not her mormon faith like informed the book and she has gone record as saying no but i you know i i think your experience just bleeds into the art you make if we want to call it art and if you just there's two shade shade i'm so sorry but if you pay attention to the clothes that she describes and then go look at what tumblr was doing to those characters i had a khaki skirt moment khaki skirt with a blue top And then she describes Edward as having like a collared shirt on, but then he goes into the meadow and reveals himself to her and unbuttons it.

1:15:45But she talks about it being sleeveless. So there's some really great Tumblr mashups of what both of those outfits would look like. And I implore you to go look for them and have a nice cackle. So, yeah, and that's fine, girl. Like that's it was a product. That's your culture. Of course, you like wrote it into your books. But like, let's be real. The purity culture alone is something to reckon with.

1:16:01Rebecca Schinsky:I was thinking about is there a version of this where could you remake the movie today? would there be an appetite for this? Because we're getting remakes of stuff that's not that old right now. This launched a couple careers. We're not doing the movie here, but I think you could remake this now and again. I think it still works. I think you could. Honestly, I think you could skip remaking it and just throw it back in the theaters. Which is what's happening. Yeah. I mean, as we're recording this, Jaws hit theaters for the 50th anniversary and was like one of the top box office hits of the year.

1:16:36I think we'll see the same for Twilight. Yeah, I think so.

1:16:42Rebecca Schinsky:Read-alikes. Where should we go? I am happy to jump in on this one. I've got two here. I would call them less read-alikes and more read-alongs with this one. So I wrote a story for School Library Journal two months ago about the pop-cultural staying power of Twilight. And it talked to a bunch of librarians and authors, as well as folks in the publishing industry, about what they remember from when Twilight came out and how it impacted them and their art and their work to this day. And I talked to a couple of authors who were never fans of Twilight. And honestly, I thought that their answers were as interesting, if not more interesting, than the folks who were like super into this.

1:17:28And so these two recommendations come from two of those authors that I talked to. The first being Man-Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers. Rogers was inspired to write a vampire book. So this book that did everything exactly the opposite of how Twilight did it.

1:17:44Rebecca Schinsky:She Costanzid it. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is the What If No book. And then the other one I wanted to recommend is Sunhead by Alex Hassan. This is a graphic novel that came out last year, and it's not solely inspired by Twilight. The author is not a fan of the book, but it is this really interesting coming of queerness graphic novel that grapples with a lot of the same topics as the series, including relationship dynamics, society's expectations of gender, and then how queer folks interact with heterosexual texts, which is something that has a long history in the Twilight fandom. So that would be the other one.

1:18:20So Man-Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers and Sunhead by Alexis Han. I have one. Yes, go for it. Yeah, Midnight is the Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead, which is kind of a murder mystery thriller. But it is also a meditation on feminism, on obsessive love, religious celetary and class. But the book is both a little bit inspired by Twilight. But like one of the main characters, she is this basically the 17 year old daughter of a pastor in a conservative small Louisiana town who reads as are described as heretical text. One of them is Twilight. she looks to Twilight as a bit of like a love roadmap, which is obviously wrong for several reasons, but it is an interesting mix of inspired a little bit by Twilight, kind of digs into the problematic parts of Twilight and what it might be like if you took that kind of text as something to follow.

1:19:04It was a really interesting read.

1:19:05Rebecca Schinsky:I didn't write mine, but mine here is if you want to do the classic version of it, I couldn't help but think about Pride and Prejudice the whole time because the Bennett-Darcy dynamic is, I think, much more interesting, but he is extremely wealthy, right? He is the vampire of like these kind of, he's like, he's got everything. He's almost all powerful. Like the whole town revolves around just him being in town because he's got so much money. And he treats Bennett so coldly. Like he's just a stone the whole time. And he falls in love with her so hard that he can't help but be like, he says, if I could, I would not love you so much.

1:19:42Rebecca Schinsky:And like the famous Matthew McDonald hand clinch. Hand? 19, like that is there. and then Elizabeth Bennet herself is like charming like you kind of get it right like you're supposed to sort of fall in love with her as she falls in love the difference of course is like the reason she ultimately cares for him is because of something he does like he does an act of sort of quiet generosity versus just Edwards I think the muscles were described as perfect I'll have to check my notes on this if that's how they're described but like it's physical of course to some degree but it's much more of a meeting of the minds kind of a situation and the flirtation is the dialogue.

1:20:17Rebecca Schinsky:The action in those books between them is the dialogue between those two characters. So if you love Twilight as a tween and never have made it back to Pride and Prejudice for whatever reason, again, classics are classics and it's 300 years old. It's kind of all that stuff that goes with it. But the virtues and delights there are not, they're not different species of attraction.

1:20:36Jeff O'Neal:Which I think is a compliment to Stephanie Meyer because she was so inspired by it.

1:20:40Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I mean,

1:20:42Jeff O'Neal:is it a compliment that said

1:20:44Rebecca Schinsky:you did a thing but worse? I don't know. Maybe.

1:20:48Jeff O'Neal:You executed on your influences? I guess.

1:20:51Rebecca Schinsky:Or I didn't completely miss that. Like that I'm saying it suggests that she sort of hit the target in some degree. All right. It's zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest historical importance. Let's see. So it's not 2000 years old. Like this is not a classic classic. So it can't be a 10 or an eight or nine really. But I think based on what Kelly says in my own cultures, I think this is like a five or six. I think it's, it's up there. Like it's, it's going to be hard to be a seven, but I'd say five or six for a modern reader.

1:21:21Jeff O'Neal:And like for y 'all's reference, we gave Gatsby like a seven or an eight here. Oh, interesting.

1:21:25Rebecca Schinsky:Like a 10, you have to be like the Bible. Like you have to be just sort of a pillars of the earth, sort of a situation. Kelly, any thoughts about a five or six there? Yeah. I mean, I was going to say seven only because it is so historically important to YA and what YA has been. But if we're looking at it from a broader perspective, I would give it a good five, five and a half. Yeah, right. Okay, I think that makes sense. Go with a five. Readability. I mean, this one's interesting. You can blow, in a way, it could be a 10, Vanessa, because you just blow through it. That doesn't sit well with my screen.

1:21:56Rebecca Schinsky:Not all of us blew through it. Oh, you didn't? Okay, I mean, I was flipping through. Now, maybe some of that wasn't, I wasn't looking at everything. Well, there's blow through it, like, can you do it quickly? And there's blow through it, like, was this, is it because it was just so readable? and what is, yeah, I can't go 10. I'm... No, no, I know. Yeah, yeah. But you're not going to bump on it. Easy to read and compelling read are not the same thing. Yes, those are, that's a better way to put that. So maybe a six? Yeah. Seven? Six, seven. Let's go seven. Current relevance of central questions.

1:22:30That's a toughie.

1:22:31Rebecca Schinsky:That's a tough one. Four? Four. okay for because it's about some stuff but also totally not yeah and the regression of purity culture isn't something i book nerd read cred i have i want to try something out on you guys for this and i don't know if this is fair i don't know if this is centralizing whatever but i think if you're a dude that has read this you get more read cred than if you're a woman who's read this and i don't know that that's fair

1:23:04yeah i'm trying to think if i know a single in my own and like whether i would have ascribed that

1:23:08Rebecca Schinsky:i do yeah i think because like if someone said to you like i read this because i want to see what it was about you like oh that's kind of interesting yeah whether or not that's read this i was gonna say we we need to talk about that excellent note excellent note yeah yeah but putting that to the side just straight up you know you're filling out a form what books you've read it can't be a one three four three i'm going with four four for me it can be good with four four okay the oh damn factor this one takes a little explanation this is can you believe books can do this i was blown away transcendent kelly's laugh you believe that was that what you're Are you waiting for it, Kelly?

1:23:51Rebecca Schinsky:So 10 for Kelly. Kelly gives it a 10 on O down. 10's all the way down for this one. No, I'm going to give it, like, if I'm being realistic, I don't know, one and a half to I think a one. One or two. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. So that 12, 16, 21. 21 out of a possible 50. Our lowest score to date, but not a surprise. Not a surprise. But I think that does maybe argue for bumping. historical importance changed over time because recency bias can be, no, it's not recency bias, like things that are closer to us in time, especially when it comes to cultural phenomenon. I think I'm willing to bump that up to like a seven, actually, when I think about it that way, just in terms of the YA-ness of the romance, the romanticity, paranormal romance, like all the things that happened after.

1:24:34Rebecca Schinsky:I think it has to be higher than a five.

1:24:35Jeff O'Neal:It is such an important domino. Like if this domino doesn't fall, I really don't know that we get to 50 Shades of Grey. Well, we don't get to 50 Shades of Grey because it's directly inspired by this but i don't know that we get to spicier romances going mainstream and that that leads the way to romanticity also for all the work that kelly laid out about it's i mean ya alone i just feel like yeah yeah i mean i i think back and i think that this is important context too if we had not gotten twilight would we have seen we need diverse books happen would we have seen a growth and diversity. You know, I think about a book like Ash by Melinda Lowe, which came out in 2009, I believe.

1:25:18And I believe she's written or talked about, if it weren't for Twilight, publishers wouldn't have taken a chance on her books. She was published, I think that book was published by the same publisher, so they had Twilight money to take chances on the kinds of titles that weren't really being picked up before. Because there's gold in them, their hills.

1:25:38Rebecca Schinsky:Let's scratch a lottery ticket, maybe those will be the next twilight one of these ya stories right right yeah well and and like i said before it really built up a true midlist and if we look at ya right now the midlist is shrinking um because they have not had the kind of juggernaut that twilight has been you know there's been big sellers i don't want to say that there haven't been but it's very different now it's a different yeah the big money is sitting

1:26:03Jeff O'Neal:behind colleen hoover and rebecca yaros and sarah j mass now with adult fiction and with science i

1:26:09Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, the science is, you know, eventually someone's going to discover nuclear fusion, right? Like, you know, they have, there's inexorableness to that. Whereas with art, it's different. Like if Stephanie Meyer didn't write Twilight, it's not like someone's going to write it two years later. This was not inevitable. This is going to be a thing. Time and place voice is so historically contingent.

1:26:27Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I think it's very like Stephanie Meyer walked so that Rebecca Yaros and Sarah J. Maas could run.

1:26:32Rebecca Schinsky:I think Stephanie Meyer ran with the bag for a while. I think she's doing okay. I don't think she was just walking on that particular. Well, this... It's a term of... Metaphorically, yes. Metaphorically, yeah. What a phenomenon. Again, if you weren't around in 2005, it is very difficult to describe how much a phenomenon. We haven't seen anything like it in the last two decades, I don't think. Even the fourth wings on it storms of the world haven't had the same sort of cultural weight that Twilight had.

1:26:57Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, comparing their book sales, of that 160 million copies that Meyer has sold in the last 20 years, 60 million of them were in two years together. She was the best-selling author in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009, like 28 and 29 million books per year in each of those years. Unparalleled. Not even close to what Fourth Wing did. Or Fourth Wing didn't even come close to her.

1:27:21Rebecca Schinsky:Our middle school librarian, I was having a conversation, people are still picking up at the library. The tweens are still picking it off the shelf. And it seems like it sort of comes in waves every few years. And I don't know what that is, but it's going to be around for a while. Kelly, thank you so much. Kelly Jensen, Vanessa Diaz, thank you so much I had more time talking with you about the book than reading the book but that's why we're doing this to some degree thank you so much for joining us show notes bookriot.com slash listen you can email us at zero to well read at bookriot.com zero to well read is a proud member of the airwave podcast network