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Written by Beth Woodward, CC2K Books Editor
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 With less than a week to go before the premiere of the latest film in the Twilight series, New Moon, CC2K’s Book Editor and resident Twilight expert Beth Woodward looks back on the book series and reflects on why she hated Breaking Dawn.
Picture it: Washington, DC. July 2008. I was having an unusually slow day at work, so I got on the internet and browsed my way over to the Entertainment Weekly website. They had just published an interview with Stephenie Meyer. I had read Meyer’s book The Host, about a group of body-snatching aliens, a few months earlier and really liked it. After I read the interview, I found another article talking about the Twilight series and the upcoming movie. I had always been a fan of paranormal romance, so the concept—a normal teenage girl falls in love with a vampire—was intriguing to me. So that day, I went out and bought the first book in the series. And I devoured it. (No pun intended.) Within a week, I had gone through both New Moon and Eclipse, and I couldn’t wait until Breaking Dawn came out.
Yes, it’s true. I drank the Kool-Aid.
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Written by Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer
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An extended dirge for the disappointing final chapter in the Harry Potter book series.
SPOILERS AHEAD!  The empress is naked.
After 10 wonderful years of books whose release dates arrived with the anticipation of fresh boxes of Wonka bars, we're left with the disheartening reality that J.K. Rowling couldn't write a Harry Potter novel set beyond the walls, curriculum and classes of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a stunning disappointment with a great ending -- and let me stress: The novel itself has a great ending. The seven-book series doesn't.
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Written by Carlton King, Special to CC2K
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 What is The Shack? It’s slight piece of Christian fiction that some guy named Willam Paul Young self-published for about $300. Something else you should know about this book: it is incredibly popular. My friend the Internet tells me that, as of May 2010, The Shack had been Number 1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for SEVENTY WEEKS. Seriously?
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Written by Beth Woodward, CC2K Books Editor
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 In honor of the release of Eclipse, the third movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster book series, I'm revisiting my 2008 piece comparing the Twilight series to True Blood, the HBO program based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries series. At the time, I noted that I wasn't familiar with many other vampire-themed books, movies, or television shows. However, in the two years since then, I've read enough contemporary fantasies to consider myself pretty familiar with them. Twilight uses a lot of the tropes that are common in the genre: the enemity between vampires and shape-shifters, supernaturally gifted being falling in love with an "average" girl, an extended love triange. The similarities between Meyer's series and Harris's especially are a bit much for me to believe that Meyer has as much ignorance of the genre as she has often claimed.
That said, True Blood's path has surprised me. Far from being a simple love story, True Blood has never shied away from the gritty and the gory or from making things complicated for its two leads. Unlike the chaste romance of Twilight, True Blood consistently provides scary, debauch summer fun. And unlike what I once said, it now looks like True Blood may follow the books' direction of splitting up Bill and Sookie. Of course, there is a love triangle. Shocker.
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Written by Beth Woodward, CC2K Books Editor
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 It’s been quite a few years since I’ve had a real summer vacation, the kind where you spend the months of June through August lounging at home, going to the pool, and hanging out with your friends. Nonetheless, there’s still something about summer that brings back memories of lazy afternoons and that gleeful escape from the monotony of school. But being the book nerd that I am, I still read compulsively during the summer
But summer calls for a different kind of book. Summer needs fun books, exciting, hot reads that will keep me entertained by the pool (or in the air conditioning, as the case may be). And with two major trips coming up this summer, this summer is going to involve even more reading than usual for me.
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Written by Beth Fred, Special to CC2K
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 With her novel indie girl, Kavitha Daswani accomplished a feat I was beginning to think impossible with her: publishing a mainstream YA novel with a non-white protagonist.
Indie girl focuses on the life of an American-born Indian girl who aspires to be a fashion reporter and struggles with the balance of what it means to be American, what it means to be Indian and what it means to be Indira Konnipuddi. (Indira is the birth name her parents chose for her in hopes she would be like Indira Ghandi). The balance she strikes is “indie.” Indira calls herself Indie, because it sounds less ethnic and “cooler.” I like “Indie” to describe Indira because in a lot of ways she is much more independent than the other girls in the Indian community she lives in and really even than the other girls at school. (Her fashion obsession doesn’t drive her to an eating disorder the way it does the girls at school).
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Written by Beth Woodward, CC2K Books Editor
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 I tend to glut on literary genres, reading one type of book almost exclusively for an extended period of time before I move on. In high school, it was the classics. In college, it was Nicholas Sparks-style romance and chick-lit. (Yes, I read a good bit of it before determining that I hate it!) Until a few months ago, it was young adult fiction. And now, it’s urban fantasy.
The reasons for my initial transition from young adult to urban fantasy were pretty simple: I liked the paranormal and fantasy aspects of the young adult genre that are so popular now, thanks to Harry Potter and Twilight, but I was tired of reading exclusively about characters who were 15-17 years old, sick of feeling like I was a decade past my prime. So I started delving into urban fantasy, discovering a world populated with supernatural creatures AND grown-up characters.
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Written by Beth Woodward, CC2K Books Editor
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 Since I originally wrote this piece about a year and a half ago, Nicholas Sparks fever has only intensified. With two films based on his books out recently, America still seems to be loving his brand of sappy romance. And although I actually really liked The Last Song (the book, not the movie), I still don't think he's gotten anywhere near the heights he reached with The Notebook.
In spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that I’m a total cynic, I am a sucker for romantic novels. And as such, Nicholas Sparks is one of my guilty pleasures. I first became acquainted with Sparks' novels when I was in college; for me, Sparks’ star-crossed romances set in small North Carolina towns provided an easy escape from the hustle-and-bustle of New York City. They were simple, formulaic novels, always some variation of the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy and/or girl suffers some unspeakable tragedy plotline. They were all fairly predictable, and they were never going to be great novels, but there was something reassuring and comforting about reading them. And then I read The Notebook… |
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Written by Beth Fred, Special to CC2K
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 CC2K contributor Beth Fred talks about why young adult fiction and adult fiction should be equally regarded in the literary world.
At twenty-five, I’m one of the youngest members of the staff at the law office I work for. Although this is probably not surprising, the fact that the Twilight books are swapped, dealt, and passed back and forth may be. What’s a group of overly educated women ranging from ages 25-55 doing reading middle grade books?
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Written by Beth Woodward, CC2K Books Editor
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 In the nearly two years that I’ve been CC2K’s Book Editor, I’ve spoken a lot about books I like. However, in that time, I’ve never talked about why I like books.
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of movies, watched a lot of TV. In fact, there were times in my life where I was spending more time in front of the television than buried in a book. Yet for some reason, it’s always books I come back to, to relax when I’m stressed, to be cheered up when I’m sad, to be motivated when I’m feeling lazy. With a book, I can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.
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