I know I'm about seven years late, but I've finally got around to reading the first Twilight book. Not being a teenage girl, or a girl of any age, I'm a long way from the intended audience for these books. Still, I wasn't in the target audience for the Harry Potter books either, and I read all of them pretty much as they came out. Of course I had kids of the right age, and it was nice to share something with them. But the early books themselves were a lot of fun, full of spells, potions, magical creatures and objects, odd characters and childish high-jinks, plus a villain dangerous enough to be scary but ultimately weak enough to be beaten by well-intentioned children. It's a shame the later books got bloated with badly written teenage angst and clumsy attempts to darken the atmosphere, but even then there was enough fun to keep me reading. No doubt many of the young readers who got hooked on the early books were less critical of the later ones than I was,
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson