About this time last year, my girlfriend and I went east to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Pulling into her driveway, her sister, Christina, ran to the car and said we absolutely had to leave that night to see “Twilight,” which she described as a movie about a high-schooler in Washington who falls in love with a vampire peer.

Vampires? Love? High-schoolers? I had just spent six hours driving, and this sounded horrible in any case. Yes, I liked “Teen Wolf,” but it had a healthy dose of basketball and humor, and this flick seemed to promise nothing but crappy pop music and lustful teenage angst. What’s more, I, ever the miser, was in no mood to part with $10 — actually, still feeling the need to never let my girlfriend pay for herself, $20 — a week after buying her birthday presents and with less than a month until Christmas.

Voicing only the financial concern to Christina, she offered to buy tickets for both of us. Not expecting this and recognizing that refusing her amazingly generous offer would be about the most impolite thing I could do, to “Twilight” we traveled. Two hours later, I was completely shocked. The movie had a good plot, good acting and good music — especially Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole.” No, I’m not saying I would have paid for myself to see it in theaters, but I — like millions of teenage girls — was entertained.

Yet whether you’ve seen “Twilight” — and whether you plan to see tomorrow’s big release, “New Moon” — isn’t that important. What’s important is that this movie saga has, like “Harry Potter” before it, encouraged millions of young people to read for fun who otherwise would likely not. As of this month, Time reports that 85 million copies of books in the series have been sold worldwide.

Juxtapose this number with the fact that two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population — most recently estimated at 16 percent by the United Nations — are women and that millions of young ladies have likely read all 2,444 pages of the four books in the series, and the real reason to feel good about “Twilight” is apparent.  

Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Md.