Ah, approaching the middle of December and when I really feel the pressure to keep these book posts up-to-date so I can get to the big "year in review" post without much delay.
It feels like I read Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn forever-ago as started it before the Italy trip and didn't finish to after! I think I only read it a day or two at most during the trip (and on the loooong plane rides, of course), but overall I spent 30 days with it... waaay too long for any book, but that's just how it goes.
I am guessing the first question one would ask a 40-somethin' male about this book is... why? Well, I was curious about the Twilight series from a pop-culture standpoint... and since I read the previous three books it seemed silly to stop before finishing it, despite not hearing great things about it from even "Twi-hards." Also, I needed a mindless vacation read that I knew I could drop for approximately 10 days without really worrying about losing the plot or momentum on it (tho I did feel I lost momentum, though I think that had more to do with the book than me!). Also, it was kind of a tradition. Of my 3 trips to Europe, each time I brought along one of these books... so seemed to make sense to bring it along this time and also I seemed to time my reading of each book right before the movie came out... tho on this one, I had know many of the "spoilers" a long time ago.
Begrudgingly I have to admit that at the start, I was wondering what all the criticism about the book was about. While I have never taken these books very seriously, I still thought Meyer's writing continued to improve as the series moved along... tho her dialogue still could slip into that grey area between awful and unintentionally laughable. But overall, I was thinking it wasn't *that* bad.
Then I got about halfway through, took those ~10 days off to enjoy Italy and when I got back to the book, it just was a totally different animal... and just got worse and worse as it dragged itself to the finish line.
While I can't imagine anyone does NOT know the major plot points in this one at this time, I will still try to remain spoiler-free. But let's just say, while I didn't really have problems with the brand new character that makes their debut about halfway through, I just could not stand this character's name. In fact, I hated it so much that I think my eyes tired from the eye-rolling more than from reading. But the nail in the coffin -- or should I say the wooden stake thru the vampire -- was the final conflict, which was painfully dragged out and bogged down by so many unnecessary characters, that the "stars" of the series -- Bella, Edward, and Jacob -- just get lost in the shuffle. Let alone it being much ado about nothing.
In my 5-star rating system (with half-stars), I felt this was a fairly solid 2.5 stars, and that's crediting what I thought was a decent first half of the book. But on Goodreads, I rounded-down to 2 stars, though overall I still want to give overall credit to Meyer for being a good storyteller and for getting so many folks - particularly young people - to read, and more important be excited about reading.
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