Saturday, August 11, 2007

Girls and Books

There seems to be a successor to the Harry Potter series of books for today's teenage reading market. In the popular new series, author Stephenie Meyer's gentlemanly vampire and the girl who loves him is capturing the imagination of young adults around the country. "Eclipse" is the third in the series. Just released, the author sold 150,000 copies in its first day of sales, Tuesday.

The two previous books are "Twilight, published in 2005 and "New Moon" published last year.

"I've been in this business for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this," said Megan Tingley, publisher.

The series is especially popular with teenage girls. The author heavily uses the Internet to promote her books, mostly MySpace and her own web site. Meyer is a mother of three young boys, 33 years old and lives in the suburbs of Phoenix. The idea of the first novel came to her in a dream one night, she said. The books have vampires, romance and suspense.

Yesterday I read an article in the Houston Chronicle by Hillel Italie of the AP. Laura Bush and daughter Jenna are writing a book to be illustrated by Denise Brunkus of the Junie B. Jones series. The story is about "a mischievous little boy who likes to do everything but read. With the help of his teacher, he finds out that books and their characters can be a lot of fun.", according to HarperCollins. Experiences from teaching in classrooms will be used by both Bush women. Jenna Bush is a teacher in an elementary school in Washington, D.C.

Jenna also has her own book to be in bookstores this fall. It is titled "Ana's Story" where she draws on her experience with UNICEF in South and Central America. The story is of a 17 year old single mother who is HIV-positive.

Other Bush twin, Barbara, works with health policy issues for African nations, concentrating on HIV/AIDS and distributing medicine to children and women.

Last week the New York Times ran a front page story on the former first daughter, Chelsea Clinton. Front page story. She's fabulous, according to the news rag. I don't recall them running stories on her as she was falling down drunk in London while a student at Oxford, out on the town with her boyfriend. Plenty of stories to go around on the Bush twins and their younger, college days though. The Clintons, who want socialism for you and me but not themselves, installed Chelsea in a job at a Hedge Fund on Wall Street, starting salary in the six figures. The New York Times would like you to know how perfect a human being she is.

Hey, isn't her mother running for President? Just one of those crazy coincidences, I know.

6 comments:

Gayle said...

Ack! The bs the left MSM pulls makes me ill... or it would if I would let it! I haven't seen anything on the Bush girls, so thanks for posting this. What a pronounced difference there is between the Bush's and the Clintons.

In another 20 or 30 years Chelsea will look almost exactly like her mother. Please let us pray she stays out of politics!

Frasier said...

Not fair!Because of the media I have always thought that the Bush twins were only capable of drunken acts !!!I always felt sad for the parents but this post really helped put things in a differant perspective.
About the books,my step daughter is very much into them and and gave them to me to read,it was a a long drawn out book so it lost me halfway but I read thro them all for her sake !!

Paul is a Hermit said...

Leno jumped on Laura and Jenna writing a book together about a "boy who didn't like to read." As his eyes looked knowingly at the audience, he wondered where they had got that idea from? Meaning, the President.

Wasn't Chelsea involved with some good deed work while Dad was President? Or is that just some subliminal message the media has fed me?

Paul is a Hermit said...

Oops, guess not, I looked on Wikipedia about her - nothing, except serving on the Board of American Ballet.

AmPowerBlog said...

Love this last part:

"I don't recall them running stories on her as she was falling down drunk in London while a student at Oxford, out on the town with her boyfriend. Plenty of stories to go around on the Bush twins and their younger, college days though. The Clintons, who want socialism for you and me but not themselves, installed Chelsea in a job at a Hedge Fund on Wall Street, starting salary in the six figures. The New York Times would like you to know how perfect a human being she is."

Great job, Karen!

Burkean Reflections

Anonymous said...

I've seen some youngsters reading the Edgar and Ellen (I think that's the name of them) series. I read one book to a 9 year old, and they were pretty interesting.