Posts tagged Books
I met Charlaine Harris!
0On May 8th, 2010 I met Charlaine Harris at a book signing in San Diego, CA at Mysterious Galaxy Book Store. Harris is the author of the popular Southern Vampire Mysterious, which later became the basis for the HBO show, True Blood. She was there signing her latest release in the series, Dead in the Family.
I was so excited to meet her! San Diego isn’t exactly a short drive for me, but once I heard she would be there, I had to go. I was actually at the LA Times Festival of books when I heard about the event as I walked by the booth Mysterious Galaxy had there. Charlaine was so sweet, I loved her Southern accent! There were so many people there to meet her, and she stayed for HOURS signing books, I was amazed!
I can’t wait to meet her again and have her sign my next book
Since when do I like YA?
2For those of you not in the know, YA stands for “Young Adult” novels. You might know of a couple really popular ones, like Harry Potter and Twilight. I didn’t begin reading the Harry Potter series until after the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out, and by that time I was long past being a “young adult,” in fact I was 20 years old. Two weeks later I had the entire series read and I couldn’t wait for the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows to come out.
The same thing happened with Twilight, I didn’t start reading the series until the last book, Breaking Dawn came out. I saw the huge display inside a Borders store the day it came out, got curious and bought the first book. 5 days later I had the entire series read. I tend to get into things at the tail end of them
Since Twilight, I’ve been reading more YA novels at the recommendations of friends. First was Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, which I absolutely LOVED. Once I finished Catching Fire, I was disappointed to learn that the last book wouldn’t be published until August 24th of this year.
Next up was the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, starting with The Lightening Thief, since the movie was due in theatres pretty soon. I was actually reading the books over my Anniversary vacation. I thought they were alright, but very Harry Potter-esque. I didn’t like them as much as I liked The Hunger Games & Catching Fire. And The Lightening Thief movie? Incredibly disappointing! Not faithful to the book at all (what is all this business about Persephone’s pearls?), tons of elements of the movie were completely made up when they didn’t need to be, the book was fine as it was.
Now I’m on to the His Dark Materials series, about 100 pages into The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights as it sometimes called). I never saw the movie, and apparently it wasn’t faithful to the book at all so I’m not planning on it. So far I’m really liking the book. It has a parallel universe to our own, much like The Hunger Games, and I’ve found that I enjoy those novels more.
Feel free to comment if you also enjoy YA novels and have some to recommend to me!
Midnight Sun on hold ‘indefinitely’
0So Stephenie Meyer (author of the Twilight saga) finally posted a reaction to the Midnight Sun leak on her personal website. Needless to say, it’s obvious she’s very hurt by the leak. I can’t imagine what it must be like not only to know that someone close to you betrayed you, intentionally or not, but also to have your hard work splashed all over the internet for everyone to see before you were done with it, before it was perfect, and having to hear everyone’s criticisms of a rough draft. It must be incredibly hard. But I wish she would have a different reaction. So many people have read it (myself included) because we’re so in love with her work that we’re dying to get more. I wish she would see the flattery there, that people love her work so much that we would sit through reading a badly scanned, and in lots of cases out of order, rough draft of a project just so we can get more. And I very much doubt that it would have hurt sales of the book at all, although I’m pretty sure Meyer doesn’t really care about that part of it. At any rate, Meyer has decided to put the project on hold indefinitely because she’s so hurt about the leak, and has posted the project online for everyone to see. And for anyone thinking that they’ve read the leak already, so why bother? This draft that Meyer has posted is longer, by almost 100 pages. So there’s that. (Edit: I just got done reading it, it’s still just the first 12 chapters, but the paragraph spacing is different, so the “official” one is longer.) But I am really disappointed with her decision. I know that indefinitely doesn’t mean never, but any more delay on this is really hard for me, haha. Other than Twilight itself, I haven’t liked any of the other books as much as I like this draft of Midnight Sun. I hope that she can return to this project soon and share it with the rest of us. I am really looking forward to it.
And now, back to (re)reading the Midnight Sun draft!















