The newest installment of The Book Club, in which The Bunny trashes Twilight...

I did not do a great job of packing books to bring with me on a two-week trip to Israel. Distributed between my backpack and my duffle bag so as to cause minimum damage to the back muscles I have already destroyed by carrying bags of groceries up 16th street were:

• one book of short stories by Dave Eggers (contemporary, cold)
  

• two books by Ian McEwan (who, boy, if you thought he was just a nice Englishman who likes hiking, you were wrong, he's way creepy)
  


• one book by Michael Chabon (which actually would have been fun but I never got to it)
  


• one book by Primo Levi, in French, about the Holocaust (I mean, really)
  


• one book by Jonathan Franzen (that also would have been fun but was so long I couldn't get up the nerve to start it)
  

This doesn't even include the page-turners (=sarcasm) by Jim Crace and John McPhee that I was gonna bring but then decided not to at the last minute and left in NYC. Looking at this list, one notices a distinctive lack of what might be called "vacation reading." So I was pretty vulnerable to the lures of easy entertainment when I arrived at the bookstore next to our gate in JFK, with a twelve-hour plane ride and countless bus trip ahead and glossy paperbacks all around.

I had already heard about Twilight from friends, including my virtual friend Slate. I knew it was about vampires and teenage love and was written by a Mormon woman and had some sort of abstinence agenda to push but was also rife with sexual tension. So in the interest of cultural studies and also supporting the rights of the undead, especially their right to be fiendishly attractive, I bought it. It only took a few minutes to rationalize. Overall, I was quite pleased with myself.

Until I read it.

I was prepared for the unpleasant "men feel urges that they can't control without the help of women" message and the tired "he seems like a bad boy but that's just because you don't know him like I do" fanstasy and the altogether disturbing "I love him because he might hurt me" subtext. I was prepared to be fascinated, offended, appalled. But I wasn't prepared for a main character with no personality traits other than being utterly self-sacrificing, unrealistically clumsy, and hopelessly in love (which doesn't really count as a personality trait). And I certainly wasn't prepared to be bored.

My anger reached its pinnacle while reading the "preface" to the second book in the series, which the publisher thoughtfully appended to the end of the first text. This installment begins with Bella's 18th birthday, meaning that she is now technically a year older than Edward who is only 17 in human years, although ~100 in vampire years. This difference in age fills Bella with a sense of her own mortality and the bitter knowledge that she will age and grow while Edward will remain in the body of a gorgeous 17-year-old forever. She feels sad and anxious and resists celebrating her birthday with all her effort.

The utter absurdity and injustice of the fact that an 18-year-old girl would already be concerned about how the aging process will make her unappealing to her partner -- who is, of course, immune to aging and will be desirable for all of eternity -- is really too much to bear. It's almost too upsetting to bother complaining about. It makes me wish that Lyra Belacqua could move not only between worlds but between young adult science fiction series and show Bella what it means to be the heroine of an epic...