Chapters Eight and Nine: Stupid, unreliable sleepiness.

I couldn't sleep last night, so I broke out Twilight, figuring that a chapter or two would encourage my brain to shut off. Worked like a charm!

Bella finally has her trip to Port Angeles with the girls so she can help them pick out dresses for the dance. It's about as girly as it sounds; like most of this book, it was clearly not written with the 28-year-old male in mind. But in a shocking turn of events, the dress-buying scene only takes a few pages! Yes, there are descriptions of all the dresses and shoes and whatever, but Bella eventually takes off to go walking.

In rare form, Bella manages to not only get lost, but to attract criminal attention. Four men trap her away from any large pedestrian crowds. Bella gets ready to fight them, recounting how she's going to rip their eyeballs out of their sockets and mash their noses into their brains (really!). Then, to add to the drama, Edward shows up, ready to tear them apart. Time for some good old-fashioned vampire violence!

But of course, that doesn't happen. No, not in Twilight, where our heroic vampire is VERY VERY DANGEROUS but always manages to stay just barely in control for his Bella. He takes her away, she calms them down, they eat dinner at a restaurant where every woman working there wants to jump Edward in the walk-in freezer. You see, he's JUST. THAT. BEAUTIFUL.

And yet, Edward is not interested in these women and their "beauty," or their "ability not to endanger their lives every day or two." No, Bella is his dream girl. They have a cryptic conversation that starts to explain this; it seems that a hypothetical vampire might hypothetically be able to read hypothetical minds, except in the hypothetical case of Bella. This is all hypothetically interesting to the vampire.

At the end of dinner and their drive home, Bella is FINALLY convinced that Edward is a vampire, but she's also sure he'd never ever hurt her, even though he's said over and over again that he might. To be honest, given his actions so far, I'm siding with Bella on this one. Bella has also decided that she's completely in love with her vampire. In most novels, I'd assume this is the kind of "in love" that all teenagers (even boys) go through a few times a year, but the way Meyer writes it, I'm pretty sure that's not what she means. She clearly thinks it's normal for Bella to be in love with a guy who she's hung out with along exactly once, and who has repeatedly expressed a desire to eat her. Umm, literally, not in the good way.

On the controlling boyfriend watch, these chapters featured Edward following Bella out of town and spying on her. For her own good, of course -- he would have worried about her all night, and he couldn't stand to see her get hurt! That's what they always say.

Will to Continue: 92 (-3)
Oh no, I can see the vampire romance coming! I also get the feeling Meyer is going to tease me with scenes that promise to be interesting, but end up petering out to nothing.