Personally I'm not particularly raging at the authors. They'll write what they'll write. Publishers will publish what they think will make them money. As I said, it's not the fault of people who are involved. Stephanie Meyer genuinely thought she wrote something good and something that needed to be out there. Fine. That's her conviction and I can respect that. Doesn't mean I don't think what she wrote is horrid, but I respect her convictions.
I care because if, in the future, these novels are on some student's required reading list, it'll be my, our, fault for not ensuring that these pieces remain firmly in the gutter where they should be. If people want to read them, fine. But finely-crafted works of literature they ain't. (not that you can tell that from the hype.)
Personally I wanted to hear other people's opinions before I offer up one of my own. Speaking as the child of a teacher and having gone through public-education here in the U.S., I think a chunk of the blame can go on schools. More specifically English/Literature teachers and programs that essentially stuff books that are considered classics (whether they are or not is another discussion entirely) down hundreds of students' throats and in many cases to said students these things are boring, and have no relation to them in life as far as the student can see. Instead of teaching children to ENJOY reading, they're force-fed it. While the books themselves that I remember reading throughout middle-school and high-school were not bad per-se, and I appreciate them now that I'm an adult and I'm capable of reading them at my own pace and for my own enjoyment, I can see where and why there are so many people around me who say "I don't read.".
I think that part is where stuff like Twilight or Harry Potter got it's ravenous fans from. I can only imagine the amount of people who heard what those serieses were about and gave them a try and went "WOW! I didn't know books could be about stuff like THIS!"
It's not their fault. They are just discovering something that some of us have known for a long while: books can be about just about anything and they can be very entertaining and engaging when they are about something you like or are interested in or something you can relate to. They were not taught that, though. They were force-fed a progression of books that in some cases were difficult for them to make sense of or even read, TOLD what their opinions should be in that these are 'classic' titles and said titles are AWESOME despite whatever they think. All of that soured them on literature, only to be woken up now to the broader spectrum and, unfortunately, unable to tell trash from treasure.
