Here’s a drinking game for a slow weekday morning. Watch Sportscenter and take a shot every time the anchors misappropriate urban slang.

Valen-time is two days away. The melange hopes you bought it roses.

Yen Press is printing 350,000 copies of the Twilight graphic novel. That’s an enormous number for an initial run. Most graphic novels only sell between 20,000 and 25,000. Of course, this is Twilight we’re talking about. Stephenie Meyer has sold about 45 million books from her angsty-vampires-in-love series. I’m pretty sure Yen will recoup.

I previously established that I have no love for Twilight, but I do like Meyer’s willingess to break into graphic novels (with help from artist Young Kim.) The graphic novel is a medium which has been treated as a genre, focusing on science fiction, fantasy and superheroics.

I’m interested to see what kind of stories people will tell with graphic novels when the emphasis is off the spandex.

Also, graphic novels and their lil’ cousin, the comic book, have been boys’ towns. With some worthwhile exceptions, sequential art has mostly ignored or objectified women. Its creators are also predominantly male. (It often feels like Gail Simone and Devin Grayson are the only women writing comics.)

Meyer has a fanatical female following. Perhaps, she and other female voices like Janet Evanovich (who has a Motormouth graphic novel coming) can generate parity for women.

Next on the itinerary: a Brazilian author talks about how difficult it is to be on the cutting edge of science fiction, when the cutting edge hasn’t been translated to your primary language yet.

Fabio Fernandes, author of Os Dias de Peste, said: Having no access to what’s new from the world outside, Brazilian SF writers either write stories using old, stale tropes (for example, writing space opera novels with cardboard characters and tremendously clichéd situations that reminds us, at the very best, of RPG campaigns) or reinvent the wheel.

This is a legitimate gripe. It’s almost impossible to push forward any school of thought when you’re using the eighth-grade model. If it’s any consolation, U.S. writers don’t read enough translations for some people either.

Finally, Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN, played the Smith Magazine game by writing 6-word biographies for a few athletes. (Scroll to his tenth point.)

Have a happy Valentine’s Day. Read Byron, lots of Byron.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

My New Year’s resolution is to stop taking my anger out on my night reporter.

Let’s see how long that lasts.

The end of the holidays is a great time to talk about regrets. Maxed out your credit cards? Drank your weight in egg nog? Hooked up with the wrong person at the office Christmas party? There’s plenty to regret by January.

GoodReads is asking people what they regret reading.

Unsurprisingly, Stephenie Meyer’s polarizing Twilight series own the four of the five top slots. The list was littered with bestsellers. (It makes sense. The more a book is read, the more it can be regretted.)

I was more surprised that Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye took the seventh and eighth slot, respectively.

A few other critical darlings appeared on the list, which was compiled by popular vote. Ayn Rand, Toni Morrison and Thomas Hardy all made the top 50. (I guess some vengeful high school students could have voted, but how many of them are trolling GoodReads?)

I rarely regret reading a book, because I usually get something — a character, quote or single turn of phrase — that I like. For example, I loathed much of Finnegan’s Wake, but I still enjoyed some of Joyce’s coinages. (My favorites were caligulate, meandertale and lustsleuth.)

A book’s bad would have to severely outweigh its good before I regretted reading it. That having been said, I could see why Meyer would be an easy target.

She got some critical buzz, raising people’s expectations, and her plots deal with high-school concerns and move at a glacial pace. In fact, Twilight is one of the few books that I would say I regretted reading. (Heart of Darkness, voted 94, would be another.)

I imagine Tricia, with her no-book-is-good-or-bad policy, would regret nothing. Am I wrong?

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

With New Moon premiering today, Tricia and I thought it would be fun to read the first Twilight book. Besides, it’s been awhile since we’ve done anything for our massive fanbase of teenage girls.

Turns out “fun” was the wrong word...

Tricia
I wanted to like Twilight, truly. I’ve almost given up on having books to discuss with my kids and my daughter has devoured the Twilight series. I thought this could be it.

But having read the first in the series, I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest.
Don’t misunderstand though. I am glad that my daughter and her friends enjoy the series and I hope they keep reading the books.

I understand the appeal, and if I were in high school I’d likely be entranced by Edward Cullen too.

What girl doesn’t dream of an impossibly handsome, well-to-do guy who does anything to ensure her safety and happiness!

Edward fills that bill.

But the novel itself is so not good.

Has no one noticed that the Cullens don’t age? Don’t eat?

How can Bella discover Edward is a vampire in a matter of weeks while others just accept the fact that the family is odd.

How can she accept that he’s a vampire in a matter of seconds?!

How can this story drag on for 500 pages!

Where is the depth? Even when Edward talks about his “change” so little is revealed to the reader. The same is true when Bella talks about why she moved to live with her father, why the Cullens are “vegetarians,” how they manage to survive undetected ...

And the writing itself drew more than a few eye rolls.

“The meadow, so spectacular to me at first, paled next to his magnificence.”

“I wanted so badly to run, but I was frozen. I couldn’t even flinch away.”

“Directly behind me, Tyler Crowley was in his recently acquired used Sentra, waving.”

“His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface.”

Yet, somehow Stephanie Meyer has managed to capture the hearts of millions with her series.

I won’t be picking up any of the sequels, but I know my daughter and her friends will.

Jason
Twilight is to teenage girls as superhero comics are to teenage boys.

It’s emotional pornography. It touches the right spots until it elicits a cheap feeling of gratification.

Reviews of Twilight tended toward the positive. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and said it was “propelled by suspense and romance in equal parts.” New York Times selected it as an editor’s choice.

I don’t see how anyone older than 18 could get into it.

Some sort of disclaimer is necessary before I continue. It’s easy — fashionable, even — for an online critic to bash a mega-successful book. Jumping on a bandwagon may be trite, but snubbing a popular book is still pandering to a specific crowd.

So let me make this clear. I’m not a literary elitist. I’ve never read anything by Marcel Proust book. I dislike Charles Dickens. I read all of the Harry Potter books and unapologetically enjoyed more than half of them. (The first two were typical children’s fare. The fifth one was bloated beyond justification.)

I was willing to give Twilight a fair shake, but its tactics are as subtle as Batman headbutting a henchman.

Twilight is designed to dazzle adolescent females, and I can see how it would work. The reader is supposed to be Isabella Swan — bookish, awkward, isolated. She doesn’t feel accepted by anyone anywhere. And then she meets Edward.

Edward has the musculature of a Greek sculpture (Meyer’s words), the face of an angel (also Meyer’s words), plays the piano and, yes, ladies, he can dance.

He’s also protective of Isabella and completely devoted to her.

In other words, he’s about as realistic as Wonder Woman asking me out for a date.

Comic books have been fairly criticized for creating impossible ideals of female beauty. Edward is their inevitable counterpart, the impossible ideal of male chivalry.

He exists for young woman to swoon over, and Twilight has a few passages that seem borrowed from bawdier bodice-rippers. (To be fair, vampires are a ready metaphor for the dangers of sex. A sex-less vampire is like a hair-less werewolf.)

Edward’s non-character would be more forgivable if there were something else to sustain this story, but Meyer has no new ideas to add to the vampire genre.

This is a stereotypical teen romance (new girl meets brooding loner) paired with a stereotypical vampire story (young woman is endangered by bloodsucking villain; hero must save her.)

Also, Meyer paces Twilight frustratingly. A romantic plot meanders for 375 pages until a villain is introduced. The villain, another vampire named James, actually isn’t half bad. He’s sadistic, clever and adds tension to a narrative that often drifts. But his motives are generic. He seems like an afterthought, something an editor told Meyer to add.

Meyer’s heart seems to be invested in the romantic will-they/won’t-they/how-can-they relationship of Isabella and Edward. Meyer only gives Edward the slightest of reasons for his unshakable devotion to Isabella. (You’re my favorite flavor, he explains.) But that’s fine, as long as you can identify strongly with Isabella.

But I can’t. Pick your reason: age, gender, social skills...

It’s all decent escapism if you’re a teenage girl; but if you’re anything else, Twilight is a waste of your time.