When something gets a lot of hype, I tend to get a little resistant to it unless I’m already “a part of it” – so to speak. I got into Harry Potter just a smidge before the maddness, so I was able to unabashedly join the mayham. I still have not, however, seen Titanic.
The main reason I have not read the Twilight series though, despite the fact that I love YA Lit, is that I am uninterested and indifferent to vampires, and for a long time the Twilight books were just vampire books to me. It was easy to keep up this mindset since I have a lot of other books and media to consume and distract me from anything I’m not interested in.
However, the hype for the fourth and final book, Breaking Dawn, that was released Saturday made me miss the Harry Potter release parties and the fun and anticipation surrounding the release of a long awaited next installment. Plus, I began to admit that there must be more to the Twilight books than just vampires, since so many of my trusted reading buddies on RBC have read and loved the series.
I picked up Twilight, the first book in the series, at a bookstore last week and read a few pages from the middle. It seemed like I would enjoy it. What completely sold me on trying out the series was that Amazon had the paperback on sale for only $6. It arrived today, and I intend to read it this month. I’ll post about it as soon as I finish it.
The only thing that’s a little discouraging is that I’ve seen a lot of very negative reviews of Breaking Dawn so far. If I do like Twilight, it will be a bummer to read the whole series and be unsatisfied with the final book. I have not yet heard the thoughts of RBCers that have finished the book though, and I’m very interested in hearing what they think. So if you are one of the RBCers I’m talking about, I hope you’ll leave me a comment when you’re done with Breaking Dawn and let me know if you liked it. Especially since I will probably be wary of the threads about it in the forum, since I won’t want to see spoilers. :)
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Today I got thinking about my resistance to “hype” because I read a blog post on a publishing company’s blog by a girl who is considering giving the Twilight saga a try. Like me, hype can turn her away from trying something. Despite deciding to possibly read Twilight, she said in the post that she still maintains a strict “no-harry-potter-4-life” policy. (The publishing company’s blog that I was reading obviously wasn’t Scholastic or Bloomsbury.) Reading that, my first thought was how narrow minded and ridiculous she sounded to me. How sad to deny something to yourself (even if you don’t realize you’re missing out) just because it’s popular. I felt bad for her, because I know what a special place Hogwarts and the entire HP world holds in my heart, and how I feel cozy and contented just by picking up any one of the seven books and reading. How sad to not even give it a chance, to just read the first book, only because it’s hyped. After reading that post, I made a concious decision to make more of an effort not to get discouraged by hype. I know it’s said often – but things that are wildly popular are wildly popular for a reason: many people love whatever it is, and chances are you might too.
Who knows, maybe I’ll even watch Titanic someday soon. :)
PS – I just read the blog post I referenced above, and I’m not actually sure it’s a girl writing it. So just thought I should put that disclaimer out there.
(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)
