Oh, the Twilight phenomenon! You either love it or hate it. If you love it, you will rejoice in the fact that last weekend’s opening of the second film in the Twilight saga, New Moon, has generated the third largest opening in box office history (with an estimated $140.7M). If you hate it, you might enjoy all the bad reviews the film has been receiving even before its release. Or you might take pleasure in watching all the spoofs and sarcastic remake videos posted all over the Internet over the last few weeks. In any case, Stephenie Meyer's fictional characters have taken over our entire entertainment industry.

Forgetting about the sexy actors and Hollywood’s adaption of the novels, let’s just focus on the books. I’m sometimes a little embarrassed to admit that I have read all four of them. I read them out of curiosity - I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Here is what I think.

Yes, the books are badly written. The story is more like a never ending fan fiction about a teenager’s fantasy and her vampire lover rather than a set of published novels. I have thought often that any female teenager could have written these books. It is hard to imagine that they were written by a thirty-five year-old stay-at-home mom who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. The terrible syntax and poor vocabulary found in the Twilight quartet appear to have lowered the bar of our current literary standards. I have over and over again wondered how the editor could send a manuscript like this off to print.

But, the story is good. The intrigue captivated and maintained my interest throughout all four books and the idea that vampires could live amongst us is appealing. Yes, vampires are nothing new, but neither were witches and sorcerers (right, Rowling?). With the seventh and final Harry Potter book on store shelves and only two more films to go, the world needs a new fantasy to day dream about. Harry Potter created a whole new pop culture with over 400 million books sold, fan videos, and parodies taking over the Internet, obsessions over the characters and the actors, and endless controversies. Both Meyer and Rowling took outdated mythological and folkloric creatures and have modernized and adapted them to fit into our current society.

So what can we make of this? Well, we can see the Twilight phenomenon in a positive way. Just like the Harry Potter books, the Twilight quartet has drawn millions to simply sit and read a book. Nothing bad can be said about our society going back to reading. Take my forty-year-old neighbour for example; she had not picked up a single book since she graduated from high school over twenty years ago. When her teenage daughter started reading the Twilight series, she began reading them too and discovered the pleasures of reading. After she was done with the four books, she went out and bought more fiction novels and is now reading instead of watching television. The Twilight books might be a badly written collection of cheesy romance novels about a girl and her over a 100 year-old vampire boyfriend, but the fact still remains: they have attracted an enormous readership of all ages.