Guilty Pleasures

Everyone has their guilty pleasures. Among the most common are eating ice cream straight out of the carton, cookie dough, Facebook stalking, hitting the snooze button and curling up under the covers for another five minutes and, for guys (correct me if I'm wrong on this one), walking around in their underwear.

The period between Thanksgiving and New Year's always seems to be a good time for guilty pleasures - they're harmless, fun, slightly indulgent and distract us from winter weather and the holiday shock to our bank accounts. My biggest guilty pleasure is chocolate (in any form), followed closely by romance novels (which 95% of the time means Nora Roberts). Eating ice cream out of the carton is up there too, but I don't really eat ice cream unless I have a particular craving for it, so when I think about it, there usually isn't any in the freezer and by the time I've gotten to the grocery store, the urge has passed. Which is fortunate for my exercise routine, given that I'm a sucker for all those calorie-laden Ben & Jerry's flavors, like Phish Food and Chocolate Fudge Brownie.

This weekend, I added a new one to the list: Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. I tore through the first two books, Twilight and New Moon, in one long Friday afternoon to very early Saturday morning stint a few weeks ago. I didn't think anything of it, other than that I liked the story and had to laugh at the echoes of high school crushes the first one brought back. But then, spending most of the night reading isn't a singular event for me - I don't do it that often anymore, but if I do get really caught up in a book, I'm usually more than willing to pay the price of being exhausted the next day.

This weekend, I did the same thing with the last two, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, and when I went back Sunday afternoon to re-read parts of the last one since there was no fifth book to start on, I realized I was hooked. And will probably spend random hours re-reading pieces of all four books for years to come.

There's nothing spectacular about Meyer's writing - she tells a good story at a pace that's comfortable for the reader, but she doesn't have the incredible attention to detail of J.K. Rowling, to whom she's often compared, or any unique literary style, like Hemingway (although I doubt she set out to write another For Whom the Bell Tolls, so that's probably irrelevant). But she's written a very touching love story with a cast of incredibly likeable characters, headed by the endearingly klutzy Bella Swan and the unbearably handsome vampire-with-a-conscience, Edward Cullen. And Meyer draws enough from the typical high school experience to keep it all grounded in reality long enough to ease the reader into the "otherworldly" side of things and make it all seem believable, if slightly fantastic.

Given that before this weekend, Twilight brought to mind a mass of screaming teenagers in front of a movie poster in which I recognized no one except the kid who played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire... I think this new guilty pleasure may mean I'm either still a 14-year-old girl at heart, or really need a date. Or possibly both. (Kidding! Mostly. If the human, 20-something version of Edward Cullen showed up on my doorstep, I certainly wouldn't say no.) Regardless, I really enjoyed the series and would happily buy the fifth episode if one were written, so it's a winner in my book!

And now, if you'll excuse me, the hopelessly romantic teenage girl who apparently lives in my head and I are going back to sighing over vampiric happily-ever-afters...