Book Club - Issue #1

About a month ago some of us “cool” kids decided to start a book club. I like reading, but I’ll be the first to admit that I usually only do it in the summer – vacations, beach days, no tv shows . . . so committing to read one book a month is pretty big for me. It’s only month one, so we’ll see if I’m still blogging about Book Club a year from now. :) Well, Karen C, as Planner and Schemer Extraordinaire, picked the first book – Twilight by Stephanie Meyer.


I bought the book and then put it on my dresser – where it sat for about a week. Well, in that week or so, I feel like I started hearing about more and more people reading the book. Who knew? I’ve always been a fan of teen books – I read the first three Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books in less than a week when I first moved to NYC. And Twilight was published about the same time (and by a BYU alum too), so who knows why I’d never heard of it.

Karen C told me a few days ago that she’d already finished Twilight and had moved onto the second book, New Moon, and was getting ready to buy the latest book Eclipse. I finally picked it up and read it at the beach on Saturday. And then last night I couldn’t put it down. I seriously kept telling myself I could only read one more chapter and then I had to go to bed – which turned into, okay fine, one more and then another and another. You get the idea. Before I knew it, it was almost 2 a.m.

Then I came into the office this morning and there is was on the front page of the Life section in USA Today:

Vampire tale takes bite out of 'Potter'

Move over, Harry Potter.

After three weeks, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J.K. Rowling's series, has been knocked off its perch atop USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list by another fantasy aimed at teens.

Eclipse, the third book in Stephenie Meyer's series about a girl whose boyfriend is a vampire, enters the list today at No. 1, edging out Hallows (No. 2).

Little, Brown reports Eclipse sold nearly 250,000 copies its first week. The publisher is printing another 100,000 copies after a 1-million-copy first printing. Hallows sold a record 11.5 million copies in the 10 days after its July 21 release, according to Scholastic, which declined to release sales figures for the past week.

Meyer's back story nearly rivals that of Rowling, who was a single mother on welfare in 1995 when she finished her first Potter book after conjuring the boy wizard on a train ride.

Four years ago, Meyer, 33, was a stay-at-home mom in Glendale, Ariz., with no plans to write a book. But after a vivid dream about a girl talking to a handsome young vampire, "I starting writing it down so I wouldn't forget it."

Those 10 pages became Chapter 13 in her first novel, Twilight, published in 2005.

When she began, Meyer says, "I wasn't a writer; I was a reader, but I was curious to see what happened next." She kept writing, telling only her sister, who urged her to try to sell it.

In one of those rare success stories that inspire unpublished writers, Meyer found an agent via the Web and got a contract.

Eclipse is Meyer's first book to make its debut at No. 1. Before its release, she had been no higher than No. 39. It's also boosting her earlier books. Twilight, in paperback, is No. 10; New Moon (2006) is No. 31.

Many of her readers are girls, but Meyer is thrilled when boys tell her, "My girlfriend made me read this, but I really like it."

The books mix fantasy with romance, without sex, drugs or foul language. Meyer's "pet peeve about the (young adult) genre is that there seems to be an empty spot for novels where kids aren't doing drugs and having sex."

Meyer, a Mormon who studied literature at Brigham Young University, says her novels "aren't overly religious, but my characters, even the vampires, think about religion."

Ironically enough, I’m on chapter 13. I can’t wait to get home and read where her story all began. If you haven’t already, go pick it up!