Reasons To Have More Kids: Only Mediocre Reasoning

Tags

book reviews, bryan caplan, economics, kids, parenting

PH got $100 in Chapters money from his workplace for being generally awesome, and I used part of my share to pick up a book I’ve been eyeing for a while:

Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids

It seemed apropos, since PH and I are starting to think about committing this insanity again. I liked the Freakonomics sort of look to it, since I really enjoyed NurtureShock, which is also full of wacky thought-provoking research.

It was interesting, if not as convincing.

Really, this book isn’t going to convince you to have more kids if you don’t want more kids. His only real argument in favour of kids is that if you enjoy the one or two you have, you’ll probably enjoy a third or fourth as well.

It’s mostly just full of stuff to convince you to commit to it if you’ve already been tossing around the idea by poo-poohing a lot of common reasons NOT to have more kids.

Objections that he lays to rest through careful logic:

Myth 1: Kids are too costly, time-wise and financially speaking.

He argues that kids are only time consuming because we make them that way. While the baby years are unavoidably filled with work, he says that people over invest their time and money in their kids these days, by spending thousands on organized sports and lessons rather than let them run off and play on their own.

According to his statistics, the average working mother still spends as much or more time actively parenting her children than the average home maker did back in the 50s.

As Hannah over at Hodgepodge and Strawberries once pointed out, scheduled activities really eat into your time – organized sports and the like are a parental time-suck that hardly existed a few decades ago.

When I was a child, things were different. For one thing, North America was covered by glaciers. For another thing, when it came to sports, we kids were pretty much on our own [….] We rode our bikes to the field, played the game, and rode our bikes home.

At dinner our parents might ask us how the game went, but they might not. It was no a big deal either way. We didn’t expect the grown ups to think it was all that important. We didn’t think it was all that important. It was Little League.

If an adult had appeared at the Wampus ball field and spend an entire game yelling at the players, everybody would have thought that person was a lunatic” – Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead

So Bryan Caplan says that parents spend so much time taking their kids back and forth to organized activities and trying to have “quality time” that they end up cheating themselves out of the joy of more children.

He isn’t telling parents not to sign their kids up for anything, but points out that if you cancelled the one or two lessons a week that you kid really hates going to, you might have time for another kid.

Myth 2: Kids need to be supervised to be safe

Caplan buys into the Freerange Kids philosophy, and even quotes from that book. He argues that today`s children are the safest in the history of ever, and that the chance of your child actually being kidnapped from the playground across the street is so remote that it isn`t worth you losing a lot of sleep (and time) over it.

He encourages parents to let their kids roam free, so that parents can have some downtime and be less stressed and more able to actually enjoy being parents when the kids come back inside.

Myth 3: Over-parenting can change your child`s life

This may be his most challengeable argument. He says there’s no point in spending a lot of time on one individual kid, because twin studies (he’s big on identical twin studies) show that separated twins raised by different parents still turn out pretty much the same. Thus, your children’s futures are largely genetically determined, and as long as you help them reach their full potential by feeding them nutritious food and loving them well, they’ll be just fine. Investing hours and hours on flash cards and piano lessons won’t actually have much of a measurable effect on who they are.

Personally, I found this to be a slightly odd argument. He’s trying to convince me that I should parent more kids, while convincing me that my parenting doesn’t make a lick of difference.

The point he should have made clear, is this:

If I want to have a child who turns out to be brilliant or famous, or good at music, or good at science, having more children improves my odds more than simply trying to turn my single kid into a prodigy. I know what it is to be the only child, and thus the seat of all hope and disappointment. I think THAT would be a great argument to have more kids, but I actually heard it from my mother when I was a teen.

I also felt really bad for adoptive parents when reading his twin studies, because he makes you feel like a total lame-duck parent, just a sparrow raising a cuckoo. But he does go on to say that if you do really want your parenting to make a difference, you should adopt from the 3rd world, because you will really be giving them a noticeably different and better life and helping them reach a potential they would not have reached in an African orphanage.

So there’s that.

Myth 4: We have too much population already

Caplan fights this argument with an economist’s point of view: more population is better, he says, because a higher population can support more people with fewer dollars spent per person. Sort of like Wal-Mart.

As the baby boomer generation ages and the younger population shrinks, the taxpayer burden gets heavier because fewer workers are around to help pay pensions for all of those old people. We’re like an upside down pyramid. Instead, the younger population should be larger, so that each person contributes a small amount of money while providing MORE social services to those who need it.

He also points out that our environmental and poverty problems are not a matter of how many people are in the world, but how unfairly the wealth is distributed and how messy our technology is. He points out that the best way to solve our current problems is to have some visionaries invent cleaner technology, more ways to use our world sustainably, and better ways to share the world’s wealth.

He says the best way to increase our chances of producing the next world-saving genius is simply to produce more people. It’s like buying more lottery tickets to improve your chances of hitting the jackpot.

I actually found this a convincing argument. I have always said that intelligent people SHOULD breed, because higher IQ is correlated to a lower birth rate, probably due to things like foresight, and putting off children until a higher level of education has been completed.

But since IQ is at least partially inherited, filling the world with more stupid people than smart people seems like a great way to not only supply morons like Akin as potential leaders, but to idiots to vote for them as well.

—

Ultimately, I can’t say this book convinced me to have more kids.

It spent far too much time trying to convince me that my parenting doesn’t matter in the long run (even he couldn’t argue that parenting doesn’t make a HUGE difference in the short-term, resulting in either a pleasant well-balance kid or a crazy brat), which was hurtful and not particularly inspiring (yes! I want to have more children who I will be unable to influence on a long term basis!) and not enough time on arguments like:

• The more kids you have, the more likely you will be to produce the musical/scientific/literary genius you always wanted.
• The more kids you have, the fewer taxes per person everyone else will have to pay in the future.
• The more kids everyone has, the better a chance that someone will come along to straighten out the oil barons.

The book is full of interesting statistics, research and data, but it’s not very convincingly written. However, I am inclined to check out that Free Ranged Kids book, since he quotes from it constantly and seems to get a lot of his data from there as well. 

He also promotes cry-it-out and I sometimes get the feeling from him that he is against abortion (he spends a lot of time arguing that you owe it to your future children to let them be born, which sounds suspiciously pro-life). That, plus his economist’s arguments for increasing the population, made the book feel a tad right-wing, and I wasn’t overly comfortable with it. 

I would say that Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids makes some interesting points, but isn’t very convincing, because he can’t argue the fact that people with small children are overall less happy than people who don’t have kids at all.

All he can really do to fight that is point out that people who have children are happier and more satisfied with their lives 20 years down the road.

That’s nice to know, but it doesn’t help me when I’m wondering how much more sleep my husband can lose without turning into The Hulk.

The No-Cry Discipline Solution: The New Model For My Future Dog Training Book

Tags

babies, behavior, book reviews, books, child development, children, discipline, Elizabeth Pantley, literature, No-Cry Discipline Solution, parenting, reviews, strategies

As you may remember, Elizabeth Pantley of the No-Cry Sleep Solution sent me some more of her books for me to check out. Since I love books, this made me pee my pants with excitement just a little bit. (Although that’s also a side effect of having given birth. Still working on those Kegels.)

So I started with The No-Cry Discipline Solution.

I really enjoyed this book, and I actually found it more useful than Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Toddler On The Block.

Elizabeth Pantley Landed On My Blog. I May Never Wash It Again.

Tags

book reviews, books, Elizabeth Pantley, no-cry sleep solution

GUYS.

I got an email from Elizabeth Pantley, the author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution, a couple of weeks ago.

@IfByYesTweets no WAY! Am just (re)starting her book. Cool that she's so accessible! What about?

— Diana (@BlesstheFunk) February 23, 2012

She said that she stumbled on my blog posts about Owl’s sleep and my search for and eventual use of her book, and she said she was happy to know that I had found her book helpful.

(I hope she actually DID find and read my blog posts, rather than get forwarded links by her editors/media relations people, but you never know. Still, I choose to believe that she did!)

She wanted to know if I would like some free copies of her other books.

So of course, I said HELL YES.

Today I went down to UPS to pick up a box with three shiny new books in it. They still have that new book smell. Since I buy most of my books from Value Village or the used book store where PH used to work, this is a big deal for me.

They didn’t want to give me my books at first, because they were addressed to someone named Doug. I don’t know a Doug, unless you count my friend’s dog, and he’s not much of a reader. I pointed out that my own name was also on the label, right under Doug’s. The UPS lady looked at me suspiciously through her granny-glasses.

“I can’t give this to you. It’s addressed to Doug, not you,” she said firmly. “But my name is right there!” I said, pointing to the label and waving my ID.

“I’d really rather release this to Doug himself.”

“But there is no Doug! I don’t know who Doug is.”

“Well, it’s addressed to him.”

Eventually her younger male co-worker reasoned her into letting my have my package. “Her name IS on the box.”

“Well, then why does it say Doug?” the UPS lady argued.

“It must be a mistake.”

“Look, I was expecting the package. I know what’s in the package. My name is on the package,” I said, pointing again to the label.

So they let me have my package from Elizabeth Pantley.

(When I opened the box, there was a packing slip billing the cost of my books to the self-same Doug, so he must be a media relations guy or an editor or something at McGraw Hill.)

As a thank-you to her for the free books, I’ll of course be posting reviews of the books as I complete them.

The books are:

The No-Cry Sleep Solution For Toddlers And Preschoolers

The No-Cry Potty Training Solution

The No-Cry Discipline Solution.

The potty training one especially will probably get a couple of posts – I’ll post one as I begin the process, and another when I finally succeed. Here’s hoping you won’t have to wait until Owl is five years old for that second update :-p

Rowling vs Meyer: As Requested

Tags

book reviews, Children's literature, feminism, Harry Potter, literary criticism, literature, sexism, Twilight

   VS   

Much like the Bella Swan vs Jane Eyre post, this is one of those posts that seems (on the surface) to be completely unnecessary.

I might as well make a post about why Saturday is better than Monday, or why music is better than construction noises.

And yet, there IS a need (not the least because people seem interested in it).

Harry Potter and Twilight are often lumped into the same category by two groups of people: People Who Haven’t Read Harry Potter and Idiots.

The reasoning?

1. JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer are both thirty-something mothers who wrote a story and hit the jackpot.
2. Neither of them was a professional writer before they hit it big, unlike authors like Stephen King, who carefully carved their way into the writing business short story by short story, edited paper by edited paper.
3. Both of them got the idea for their story seemingly by divine inspiration: Rowling with a mental image of a boy wizard on a train, and Meyer with a dream about a horny vampire.
4. Both series deal with fantasy.
5. Both series are attractive to young readers, and were excellent at getting 12 year olds to turn off their Xboxes for a while.
6. Both series have spawned a set of hardcore fans who are, quite frankly, a little odd and fanatical (although Harry Potter fans argue that they use much better grammar than “Twihards”).
7. Both series have spawned extremely popular and high-grossing movies, moving the phenomenon out of the bookstores and deeper into pop culture.

The exterior similarities are such that those who have read neither series tend to view both as pop culture nonsense; so much litarary slush blown far out of proportion to their worth.

These people are only half right.

Twilight is all of that. With writing reminiscent of fan fiction, and less polished than you would find in your standard Harlequin romance, Twilight is slush. I congratulate Stephenie Meyer on her success, but slush it is none the less.

The Harry Potter books, on the other hand, are modern classics which belong on the shelf next to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. If anything, I find them more entertaining than Tolkien and richer (and less didactic) than Lewis.

The only thing that Stephenie Meyer shares with C.S. Lewis and (sometimes) Tolkien is sexism.

So that will be my focus of my first rant.

“First rant?”

Oh yeah, well, I tried to write a single post about all the ways in which Harry Potter is amazing and Twilight is not, but it was like trying to cram the UNIVERSE into a teaspoon.

This is the best I could do:

[vimeo vimeo.com/26881967]

So… yeah, I’m going to be breaking this up into several rants.

Hope you’re cool with that.

Next: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.

Freaking Dawn

Tags

book reviews, books, Breaking Dawn, idiocy, literary criticism, literature, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

I’m not sure exactly how to review Breaking Dawn. It is like reviewing a train wreck.

I mean, I could go through it point by point and indicate everything wrong with it, but then it would look like this:

p. 6

(NB: These are the pages according to my E-reader. They may not correspond perfectly to the print book)

Preface:

It seemed oddly inevitable, though, facing death again.

There is nothing “odd”, Bella, about death’s inevitability. Death and taxes, Bella, death and taxes.

Like I really was marked for disaster.

Bella, you are not “marked for disaster” just because you keep surviving dangerous situations. You’re goddamn lucky. 

“If you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options.”

It isn’t noble to sit there and let someone you love kill you just because you love them. You can still call the cops and then love them from effing afar. 

Also, chiming in with some hindsight glasses – given that this rant most likely pertains to your life-sucking pregnancy, this is risking your life for your child, not just letting someone you love kill you.

There is a difference. The fact that you can’t distinguish that difference is one of the many reasons why I think that you are a complete twerp.

Chapter 1:

Two pedestrians were frozen on the sidewalk, missing their chance to cross as they stared. Behind them, Mr. Marshall was gawking through the plate-glass window of his little souvenir shop.

But this is a town where the Cullens regularly drive sport cars about. Bella is supposedly driving a Mercedes Guard, but here’s the thing – the car may be a tank, but it’s not that flashy. That makes sense if you think about it – it’s meant to protect people, not look cool.

I sincerely doubt that this car is stopping pedestrians on the street and making people gawk out of shop windows. Bella is a paranoid weirdo, as usual, who thinks that everything is about her. Probably there’s a flamingo walking up the street and Bella has totally missed this bizarre occurrence because she’s such a self-obsessed whack job.

If I hadn’t been running on vapors, I wouldn’t come into town at all.

That brings up a good point. Bella, you live in small town America. If you don’t like driving your crazy new car, why don’t you walk like a normal person? You’ve obviously been driving this car, since it is “running on vapors”.

Either walk, or stop whining.

I had been going without a lot of things these days, like Pop-Tarts and shoelaces, to avoid spending time in public.

Not Pop-Tarts and shoelaces! How long-suffering is our heroine? The starving children of Africa don’t know how good they have it. If only there was someone else in the household who could do shopping, oh right, her father, but he can’t shop because he’s just a man, you know.

Of course, there was nothing I could do to make the numbers on the gauge pick up the pace. They ticked by sluggishly, almost as if they were doing it just to annoy me.

Bella, I realize you have paranoid and narcissistic tendencies, but try to get a grip. EVERYTHING is not about you.

p. 7

It was stupid to be so self-conscious, and I knew that.

Do you? Do you REALLY?

I briefly contemplated my issues with words like fiance, wedding, husband, etc. I just couldn’t put it together in my head.

I realize that it must be exhausting to try and make both neurons fire at once.

I just couldn’t reconcile a staid, respectable, dull concept like husband with my concept of Edward.

WARNING, WARNING – if you can’t imagine your intended behaving in a reliable, respectable way as a husband, then DON’T MARRY THAT PERSON. As much as teenagers want to believe that romance remains exciting forever, the fact remains that a few years down the road, it’s going to be much more important to you that your husband is the kind of guy who comes home and helps out with the dishes than whether or not he sparkles in the sunlight.

p. 8

I swiftly put away the nozzle and crept into the front seat to hide while the enthusiast dug a huge professional-looking camera out of his backpack. He and his friend took turns posing by the hood, and then they went to take pictures at the back end.

If someone is taking photos of the hood of your car, the front seat is a really stupid place to hide. Even if your side windows are tinted, the state of Washington doesn’t permit tinting on the main body of the windshield, so YOU ARE IN THOSE PICTURES. Especially since we have already established that it is “a typical drizzly day”, so the reflection of the sun won’t save you.

And missile-proof glass? Nice. What happened to old-fashioned bullet-proof?

There is no such thing as missile-proof glass, Bella, unless you count “missile” literally, meaning anything someone has thrown, like a rock or maybe a grenade. Then again, you believed that Edward was a vampire without much persuasion.

p. 9

I hadn’t seen the ‘after’ car yet. It was hidden under a sheet in the deepest corner of the Cullens’ garage. I knew most people would have peeked by now, but I really didn’t want to know.

Let’s get this straight. Your reason for not “peeking” at your gift is not because “it’s wrong to peek”, it’s because you just don’t want to know. You also think that “most people” would have peeked, which means that you either think that “most people” are bad people, or you actually don’t understand that it is wrong to peek at a gift. That makes YOU a bad person. But I knew that already.

No matter how many times I drove down the familiar road home, I still couldn’t make the rain-faded flyers fade into the background.

Are you incapable of naming a noun without slapping on an adjective? Also, why did you just use the word “fade” twice within a single word of each other? It’s called a Thesaurus, Bella. USE IT. Or even better, let the occasional noun pass undescribed. It won’t kill you.

Finally, rain doesn’t fade things, you everlasting moron. THE SUN fades things, and you’re always moaning about how little sun there is in Forks. Rain melts things, or washes them out, it doesn’t fade them. The only thing that rain can fade is radio waves. You fail at adjectives in every way possible.

He was more disappointed with Billy, Jacob’s father – and Charlie’s closest friend. For Billy’s not being more involved with the search for his sixteen-year-old “runaway.” For Billy’s refusing to put up the flyers in La Push, the reservation on the coast that was Jacob’s home. For his seeming resigned to Jacob’s disappearance, as if there was nothing he could do. For his saying “Jacob’s a grown up now. He’ll come home if he wants to.

Why are those periods there, particularly that first one, between “closest friend” and “For Billy’s”? That period should not be there. I realize, Bella, that you have a real hate on for writing normal sentences, preferring either nonsensical sentence fragments or multiple sentences that have been conjoined like Siamese twins, but this is a particularly atrocious example.

Let me play the part of editor, for a moment, since yours seems to have been on a smoke break through the publication of this entire series. Here are some ways you could have worded this in a way that didn’t suck balls and make the God of Grammar want to smite you from above:

[My father] was even more disappointed with Billy – Jacob’s father and Charlie’s closest friend – because he was not more involved in the search for his sixteen-year-old runaway. Billy refused to put up the flyers in La Push – the reservation on the coast where they lived. He seemed resigned to Jacob’s disappearance and kept saying, “Jacob’s a grown up now. He’ll come home if he wants to.

Was that so hard? Doesn’t that read better? Christ on a waffle, Bella, full sentences are your friends.

[over four hundred pages omitted for length reasons]

Stargirl

Tags

book reviews, books, Jerry Spinelli, literature, stargirl

I pledge allegiance to the United Turtles of America and to the fruit bats of Borneo, one planet in the Milky Way, incredible, with justice and black bean burritos for all.

There are all kinds of books.

There are funny books and informative books and comfort books and junky books… and things like Twilight which Perfect Husband refuses to catagorize as a book at all. When I say, “can you hand me my book?” and gesture at a Meyer novel, he responds irritably “that’s not a book!”

But some books are more than just books.

Some books have a soul.

She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music.

She had no friends, but she was the friendliest person in school.

In her answers in class, she often spoke of seahorses and stars, but she did not know what a football was.

Stargirl is one of those books.

Whenever I read this book, I emerge feeling reverent, and sad, and joyful, and somehow cleansed.

I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain

Cleansed of what? Conformity, perhaps. Selfishness. Obliviousness. Or maybe it’s more what I have been given. New eyes to see with, a new heart to feel with. A feeling of guilt. A feeling of hope that I can change.

She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.

She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.

It is a celebration, more than anything else.

For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the halls; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled. If someone got an A, others celebrated, too. If someone sprained an ankle, others felt the pain. We discovered the colour of each other’s eyes. 

It was a rebellion she led. A rebellion for, rather than against. For ourselves. 

But there is a wistfulness, too. A feeling of “wouldn’t it be nice?” A sense of opportunities lost, and lessons not learned in time.

The Amish in Pennsylvania have a word for it.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Shunning.

Like a flower or a newborn baby, it makes me marvel at how something so small can be so perfect. Spinelli’s prose is concise and flawless, and it has the same delicious flavour of legend you find in Maniac Magee. The story is short and simple – you could read it in an afternoon – but will change the way you see the world.

Stargirl, you just can’t do things the way you do.[…]You can’t just wake up in the morning and say you don’t care what the rest of the world thinks.”

Her eyes were wide, her voice peepy like a little girl’s.

“You can’t?

…at least, for a while.

Babby’s First Book Review

Tags

babies, book reviews, books, literature, reviews, Twilight, videos

A budding intellectual, you can tell.

TwiBash

Tags

book reviews, books, characters, grammar, literature, mary sue, Twilight

Santa gave me Twilight in my stocking, and I was pleased.

Because I hated Twilight.

Allow me explain:

I have long been opposed to Twilight, but had never actually read it or seen the movies. I objected to it on principle.  I read that teenage girls were dumping their boyfriends for “not being enough like Edward”. I also heard that Edward was an obsessive creep who stalked Bella and couldn’t decide whether he wanted to eat her or kiss her. That he tried to physically stop her from seeing people he was jealous of, and that he bossed her around constantly.

This offended me.

So I wanted to read Twilight so that when I got aerated about it, I could actually have something to go on other than sheer hearsay. I asked for it for Christmas, but with the condition that it had to be a used copy, so I didn’t end up funding the publishers. This way I could give it a chance. Much the way I gave caviar a chance, even though I hate both eggs and fish. I was right, I did hate it, but it was worth a try, right?

So I read Twilight, and I came to three conclusions:

• That Twilight is even bigger literary garbage than I had expected, and consequently hilarious.
• That Edward is not so bad, if you give him leeway for being undead.
• That I hate Bella.

Perfect Husband said it best. On page 2 of Twilight he looked up and said, “My gawd, this reads like Mary Sue fan fiction. It’s fan fiction of itself.”

That’s totally what it is.

It’s written about as well as the standard fanfic slush you’ll find on the net. The characters are about as three-dimensional. It’s just… garbage. I wasn’t surprised by that, although I was a little baffled. Considering how successful these books were, I was expecting them to be entertaining, if vacuous. Like a Dan Brown novel. Instead I had to read it in segments, filling in with a Stephen King book when the awfulness became too much (as an aside, King once said, “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn” and I trust Stephen King’s judgment . I like children’s fiction best, so his subject matter doesn’t usually appeal to me, but GAWDDAMN, that man can write well).

I had also read that Twilight is loosely based on Pride and Prejudice. Whoever said that is off their nut, because Twilight bears the same resemblance to Pride and Prejudice that a turd bears to a diamond. If you want a good modern re-telling of P&P, pick up a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary. But Twilight doesn’t come anywhere close. If anything, it’s closer to Jane Eyre, and by “closer” I mean the proximity of the Earth to Pluto as compared to, say, Betelgeuse.

On the bright side, Edward didn’t piss me off nearly as much as I expected him to. I mean, he is a terrible model for a boyfriend – the man suffers from such radical mood swings that he might benefit from lithium, and he is possessive, insultingly bossy/condescending, and a creepy stalker, but actually he has a couple of redeeming features.

First of all, I feel obligated to cut him some slack because after all, he is an undead creature. But barring the wants-to-drink-your-blood issue, he seems like a decent person. For one thing, he is aware of the fact that he is a creepy, obsessive, undead monster and frequently warns Bella that she really should try to stay as far away from him as possible.

Now, I am a bit of a sucker for a Byronic hero, and Edward fits the mold so well that Meyer might as well have drawn his character directly from the Wikipedia definition (and she very well may have). The love of my literary life when I was an impressionable thirteen year old girl was Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (for whom Stephenie Meyer named her male hero). These two Edwards could go head-to-head when it comes to passionate, obsessive love… which is extremely attractive to pubescent girls for some reason.

Edward Cullen’s love for Bella is selfless, passionate, and unreasonably unconditional. He is about as two-dimensional as you could ask for. He’s pretty much written to spec: *Insert Female Fantasy Here.* Characters like him are to women what porno women are to men – a fantasy object, not a person. That is what sells the Twilight books. It certainly isn’t Meyer’s writing ability.

So here’s what pisses me off: Unlike Jane Eyre, who is awesome, Bella deserves no such attention.

Bella is a self-centred, melodramatic, self-martyring twatwaffle.

While I can suspend my disbelief cling to the supposition try to pretend that an extremely sexy and selfless vampire with extraordinary willpower is attending high school in small town Washington, I can’t believe I refuse to accept I find it impossible to imagine that he would choose Bella to fall in love with.

If you haven’t read Twilight, but aren’t afraid of spoilers (and I assure you, spoiling Twilight would be like trying to spoil last year’s fish heads) or if you have already suffered through this book, read on: