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Back when I was a miserable little home schooled boy, my brother and I did an absurd amount of reading over the summer in addition to our reduced but still present schoolwork load. Due to my mother's very basic misunderstanding of the purpose of public school reading lists, we wound up reading in excess of fifteen books apiece each and every summer through middle school and part of grade school. Really, kind of painful in retrospect. The noose was finally loosened at some point, and we both fell out of the habit of reading during the summer.

I've decided that I want to up my reading habits again. This summer, starting this week, I'll be attempting to read one book per week until classes start up again. To add an element of challenge beyond actually reading, I have set forth some guidelines:

-I cannot pay for any of the books. I have to have them, borrow them, or receive them as gifts.
-Fiction only; I read enough non-fiction for classes and my own curiosity.
-No re-reading. That's practically cheating.
-Nothing shorter than 100 pages. I know that's a low, low, low number, but I'd love to be able to finish a book even when I don't have time.

This project started yesterday, and I've yet to start any book. That, of course, brings me to my next point:

I have, in the past, been exposed to fanfic which I described to the curious only as "The Twilight of _____ fanfic," which only recently started to feel like an unfair sort of thing to say for a number of reasons, the most glaring of which being that I've never even read Twilight. Yeah, I've heard plenty about it, but I'm not exactly within the target demographic and even before I became aware of its legions of dedicated haters, I had no drive to actually pick it up. Unremarkable slip of a girl swept off feet by hunky supernatural whatsit. Uh... fascinating? On the other hand, the damned things are so explosively popular while at the same time so enthusiastically derided that I almost feel left out not really knowing what everyone is talking about.

At the moment, I am in the unique and questionably desirable position of sharing living space with a Twilight fan. Of my three housemates, one unironically enjoys Twilight, and has every book. When next she emerges from the warm cocoon of her room, having taken a break from Farmville, I will request permission to read the first book. I will be posting synopses of my progress each day as I try to finish it and find out once and for all why people love it, and why reasonable people hate it.

I'm going to read Twilight.

I'm a little afraid. Hold me. :|