Twilight = Crack.

If for some reason you are not obsessed with a certain vampire series that has a large portion of the female population all hot and bothered, well then it is just a matter of time. Twilight is the first novel of a four part series by Stephanie Meyer that is creating Harry Potter-esque behavior in young girls and grown ass women everywhere. At first all the hoopla over this book and series just escaped me. How could books written for teenage girls cause such hysteria? Well, after teasing my sister and a coworker or two for their Twilight obsession, I have to admit that I have gotten in the long line of Twilight-ers. It got so bad that I was reading on the train [which is typically and quite strictly reserved for z's] and I was so involved that when the train pulled into Grand Central Station, the train emptied and I stayed on the train a good 5 minutes completely oblivious with the book just inches from my face - I was completely and utterly absorbed and lost all of my whereabouts. Very embarrassing! Coincidentally, Alicia even caught me reading on the train platform on Wednesday night. Now I am not generally one for romance novels, but this book isn't sappy. The implausible love between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen has got to be one of, if not the most severely intense love stories since Romeo and Juliet. If you crave a good romance, if scifi is your thing or if you prefer some action - I would safely bet that whichever you prefer, you will fall in love with this love affair.

I started the book on Monday and finished last night. I saw the movie today and I am posting this in the hopes that everyone who is reading will run out and get the book so we can gush about it together. All you have to do is read the first chapter and you will be hooked. Just do it! It'll be fun.
:)

Here is the movie trailer:


...and here is an excerpt from chapter one:

They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible in the long room. There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was safe to stare at them without fear of meeting an excessively interested pair of eyes. But it was none of these things that caught, and held, my attention.

They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big - muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be in college, or even teachers here rather than students.
The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. The short girl was pixielike, thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a deep black, cropped short and pointing in every direction.
And yet, they were all exactly alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino. They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes - purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all their features, were straight, perfect, angular.
But all this is not why I couldn't look away.
I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful - maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy.
They were all looking away - away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray - unopened soda, unbitten apple - and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster than I would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging.

"Who are they?" I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I'd forgotten.

As she looked up to see who I meant - though already knowing, probably, from my tone - suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine....