More posts...And more books

Sometimes I read a whole book in one night. Sometimes I don't. Tonight I did.

I have wanted to read this book since the last day of my Adolescent Literature class when Chris Crowe had all of these young adult books scattered on the carpet. Each person in the class chose one, judging from the back cover, and we played a type of white elephant exchange game. I ended up with some stupid book about wanting to "trade my little sister in!" or something. Someone else ended up with this book with an amazing cover called Peeled. I had no idea what the book was about, but I loved the cover art. Never judge a book by its cover? I think not. I do it all the time.

Every time I go to the library, I check to see if the book is available but it never is. I never thought to request it though....

Luckily for me, I live 5 minutes away from where Scholastic was having a warehouse book sale. I found a couple of books I've been wanting to read and Peeled was one of them. Hooray!

So I read it tonight. It was pretty interesting. It's about high school journalism and it made me suddenly very interested in journalism. It's not something I have really thought about before, but it sounded like so much fun and something with a lot of passion in it. I love books that infuse passion in me. Now, this one was nowhere near as passionate as Matched, but it was good to read a realistic YA novel after all the fantasy ones of late.

p.s. Dana, if you're out there, I picked up Lawn Boy purely on your recommendation ;) wink face.

The Immortal Series

Well, I finished this book:

Pretty much just like the others.

Lots of these lines in it:

"I press my lips together..."

"blah blah blah, But still, blah blah blah"

"I answer too quickly to ever be believed."

I actually just did a Google book search for the phrase "but still" in the her books and it came up with 38 results in Night Star. In Dark Flame, the book just before this one, she uses it apparently 43 times. I think that's too many times...

These books just have that lovely Stephanie Meyer touch to them, where the author just might have had a thesaurus out while writing it, giving her characters things to say that normal 16 year olds would never say.

I don't know how I've read 5 of the 6 books in this series so far. I cringe and make faces while I read them, and yet I keep thinking, well I have to know what happens I guess... so I keep getting them from the library and they keep getting read.

I think I keep convincing myself that since my 8th graders love this series I have to find out what they're reading and keep up with the in crowd. Except when they say, "I love this series! Have you read it?!" and then I don't know how to respond.... "Uh, yeah. I have...they're...great?"

Waiting for books...

Know what's crazy? The way books are reverting back to their old ways, being released in installments; making us wait. Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many other authors during their time had novels released chapter by chapter in installments in newspapers.

It's happening again...Series and trilogies are so big right now; it's officially "the thing" for an author to do. It's interesting to me that you can read a book and instantly go online and find out if there will be a sequel, what it will be called, and when it will be released. I imagine it's like Twain's fans waiting until the next installment in the newspaper to find out what Tom Sawyer was up to! I'm currently anxious to find out what happens to Cassia, the heroine in Ally Condie's Matched.

I took a Print Culture class at BYU as my capstone and I learned some awesmoely interesting things about the history of print and the book industry. I found out that the reason I have to wait until November for Crossed, the sequel to Matched, to come out is because of Harry Potter. Thanks, Potter.

Apparently after Harry Potter got so popular, there were some problems with the British publishing company, Bloomsbury, releasing their copies before Scholastic could. So, of course, the crazed American fans would contact the British company and have them ship out their earlier editions. This did not work for Scholastic, they were losing money!

"Hence, the millennial release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire brought with it major changes in terms of how it and the three remaining installments in the series would be issued in the English language. Bloomsbury, Scholastic, and Raincoast (Potter's Canadian publisher) would guarantee one another's territorial publishing rights by agreeing to what the book industry calls a 'global lay-down date.' Together they would agree on a single day on which they would release their respective editions simultaneously, thereby denying shoppers the opportunity to exploit systemic imbalances in the global market for Potter books...While it's unclear whether Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the first book to be issued this way, it undoubtedly was among the very first to follow what's gone on to become a common industry practice for hotly anticipated titles." (The Late Age of Print, 146)

Thanks a lot, Potter and crazed American fans.

To learn more about crazy Harry Potter fans, might I recommend the documentary We Are Wizards? You can find it on Hulu...