Twilight
About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him -- and I didn't know how dominant that part might be -- that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. When Isabella Swan moves to the gloomy town of Forks and meets the mysterious, alluring Edward Cullen, her life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. With his porcelain skin, golden eyes, mesmerizing voice, and supernatural gifts, Edward is both irresistible and impenetrable. Up until now, he has managed to keep his true identity hidden, but Bella is determined to uncover his dark secret. What Bella doesn't realize is the closer she gets to him, the more she is putting herself and those around her at risk. And, it might be too late to turn back. Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight will have listeners riveted right until the end. -- Container. Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, a pair of star-crossed lovers whose forbidden relationship ripens against the backdrop of small-town suspicion and a mysterious coven of vampires.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
13mentions
12people
2009–2026years
46% neutral54% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the latter half of the 20th century).
On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.
I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.
- I think the point 2 will rub many people the wrong way (me included) though. That would make reading Fourth Wing or Twilight a more connecting experience than most classics. (Nothing inherently wrong with that, but... you know...)
- I worked in a library, though not as a librarian, for a long time. And I had worked in one as a high school student.
I no longer support libraries as they stand. Most of their current issues are self-inflicted. I will now lay out why. The Internet came along, and Google of course. (You remember when Google seemed to have the correct answer to everything, in the past) And then the scanning of books, and the librarians panicked. They had an identity crisis: What good is a library in the age of Google?
This contagious panic spread and the usual questions came about. "What will we be, then?" And they immediately started trying to be everything to everyone. In a university setting, that means that various small groups will immediately come looking. Maybe the library can help us! And so the library begins to do things outside of its original scope, further and further. We begin housing various student groups, despite not having enough space for books. Checking the logs of the prayer room and the breastfeeding room was a little bitter, but we still need that ... but we have too many books. Named faculty carrels, we keep those, but we have too many books. Bathrooms we have, but that one woman just likes to empty her bladder in the elevator. Librarians, in their helpfulness but lack of identity, have become janitors and people who help you fill out your tax forms and security guards who have to keep an eye out for that guy who likes to jerk off on Level A, in the back.
I received a survey from my library a couple of years ago. Multiple choice: "Are our libraries A) doing enough to help LGBTQ people? B) not doing enough?" Note the lack of the third option, maybe you're focusing on them too much because WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? My local "civilian" library doesn't seem to have anything to lend that isn't recent any longer. It's Redbox for books. The shelves are fewer, the shelves are shorter, the shelves have been shoved back for "community spaces." The local loan system is garbage, the statewide system is getting thinner and thinner, and inter-library loan beyond that, well, it used to be great, but they're shoveling out books (and I'm not talking about that thirty-ninth copy of Twilight which was once in hot demand but isn't any longer) that were once in most branches I visited.
Many academic libraries are playing a game of Hearts. There's only two ways to win Hearts. The first involves getting rid of your Hearts before the other players do, paring down books. The other involves trying to collect all the hearts, which makes you the hub of an interlibrary loan system that externalizes the cost of having and housing books, which is not insignificant. Before she retired, a librarian passed on to me a shocking paper describing the cost per year of the average book just to exist on a shelf. Most people don't think about that.
No, I don't think a middle ground is what is called for. Get back to books, by which I mean, the acquisition and organization of information such that the depth of it can be accessed by those in need of it, perhaps more so than they really understand, not just the first thing that Google (or ChatGPT) vomits out.
- Oh man, Literature Map looks really great for finding recs.
That said, I do think book-level might be much more valuable. My first thought for this was Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. I haven't read anything else by him yet because my brother informs me his other stuff is entirely different. Looking at Goodreads, I think that qualifies as far from his biggest hit. Is it "more profound?"? Doubtful, but seems likely that you shouldn't group it with his others. I want recommendations based on the book I like, not the author I mostly might-not.
A better example might be how Stephenie Meyer wrote the extremely popular Twilight books, and also The Host which is much less well-known, and better in many respects. Probably qualifies as more profound, too—it's told from the perspective of a parasitic alien. Picture the Yeerks from Animorphs if you read those.)
- Is money really a good indication of someone's skill as a writer? That's its own question, and I guess it depends on what you consider good or not. There are plenty of authors who become millionaires/billionaires because they knew what the market liked and how to sell themselves/their work, but many people would not consider them the pinnacle of their craft. It's undeniable that something like Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey is extremely successful, but whether that makes Stephanie Meyer and EL James better authors than Stephen King or George RR Martin is debatable at least.
But I guess the question of successful/fast/highly compensated vs skilled is probably also true of progammers too. Is a 10x programmers also necessary a successful one career wise?
- It's possible that both of these are true.
To be clear, when I say quality, I don't just mean this in the narrow sense of following the rules that writing teachers say you should. Harry Potter and Twilight both became popular because of some essence that they had---in my opinion, probably related to the world building and a certain difficult-to-describe experience of reading. Both of those books had "flaws" that were widely criticized. But they really hit home with their respective audiences.
Why did the first Harry Potter succeed, before J.K. Rowling had made a name for herself? In my opinion, it's because readers loved it so much that they went out and told their friends to read it. That's what I'm talking about when I mean quality---the irresistible quality that makes me fall in love with everything the author is doing.
Most books I see, even traditionally published ones, just don't have that.
