While I was waiting in a doctor’s waiting room the other day, I overheard another lady admitting (confessing, bragging?) that she had read a book over 150 times.  Any guesses as to what book she was referring to?  If you’re thinking that she was a patient mother, faithfully re-reading her young child’s latest favorite, you would be wrong.  The book that this lady had read over 150 times was Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn.  Not only that, but this lady happened to have her copy of Breaking Dawn with her, and after her confession, proceeded to commence yet another re-read, pencil in hand to underline favorite passages.

There are many books that I have re-read many times.  My Personal Classics list contains quite a few of them.  But Breaking Dawn?  150 times?  Seriously?  Now I’ve never read the book, but I have read the first one in the series–Twilight.  I found Edward to be slightly abusive and Bella to be whiny and weak.  Nothing I’ve heard or read since then leads me to believe that anything has changed for these two characters.  In fact, Wired.com had a tongue-in-cheek article entitled Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight. I know that the article was intended to be funny, but it pretty accurately summed up my feelings about the series.

If you have a book that is worthy of being re-read 150 times, I’d love to hear about it, unless it’s a Twilight book, in which case I don’t want to know.  It hurts me too much to think of more reading time wasted on Edward and Bella.

I know that Meyer’s books are wildly popular right now, but I was quite disappointed.  While Meyer certainly is a gifted writer, her cast of characters are weak and flat.  Bella faints on every other page, lies to her parents, and is obsessed with a vampire boyfriend, to the point of hoping for her own death so that she can be with him forever.  Her vampire boyfriend Edmund is controlling and in my mind shows some of the classic tendencies of an abuser.  Although there are a few exciting moments, it’s certainly not the quality suspenseful romance I was hoping for.