live joyfully

I just read the most thorough and smart analysis  I could imagine of Twilight in The Atlantic.  It was not as much about the book itself, but why girls are drawn to it so deeply, and what to make of the appeal of its confusingly 19th century morality.  It's pretty amazing.  AND it expresses effectively the strange appeal of the mostly silly books to me, a pretty savvy reader; an appeal that I feel like a fail over and over to explain. 

"It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued.""
-Caitlin Flanagan

Good criticism always knocks me on my feet.  Read it:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires