Like Oprah's Book Club, But With Slightly More Incest

I am generally late to the game when it comes to literary phenomena. I think I read Harry Potter for the first time in 2005, eight years after it came out. I'd read about it in my Entertainment Weekly, I'd heard people talking about it... I'd shrugged. How great could it be? I thought. It's just a kids' book.

Little did I know...

The same thing happened with Twilight, except in that case I didn't read the books at all (I give Stephenie Meyer props for dreaming about a vampire who sparkles like the cover of my 1989 Lisa Frank Trapper-Keeper and launching a thousand fan sites, but she is not a good writer. Sorry. I can forgive crappy writing only in the case of salacious celebrity autobiographies, and even then, there had better be some really good stories about sex with a member of an 80s metal band.) Anyway, I skipped straight to the movies, and mostly just so I could play a Twilight-themed SceneIt! with my friend Margaret. The best part of my introduction to Twilight was that it happened right as Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series, was being released, and I got to hear my otherwise-sane friends have conversations like this:

Friend 1: I don't know, Bella getting pregnant seems like bullshit. I thought all of Edward's bodily fluids were replaced with venom. Doesn't that include sperm?
Friend 2: I know. And even if he did make sperm, aren't his balls like the temperature of the polar ice caps? 

Maybe that's why he was so moody.

Anyway.

Yesterday I finally succumbed to The Hunger Games.

Only three years late, so I'm making progress. But OMG YOU GUYS. There is a reason people are freaking about about this. I opened the book as I boarded the A train at 42nd Street around 8:15, and I didn't stop until I finished it some four and a half hours later. This is better than that time I found a dog-eared copy of Flowers in the Attic at a church sale (the irony was lost on me then) and spent the next few years of my adolescence being grossed out that I was kind of rooting for the brother and sister to do it (I really hope you've read that book, otherwise I sound like a total perv).

Oh, who am I kidding, I am a total perv. Now that I've read the first book all I want to know is, do Katniss and Peeta have sex? This is what pregnancy hormones do to me. This and inspiring me to buy Twix ice cream bars at the grocery store but no actual dinner ingredients.

But seriously, who wants to read these books with me? Because I need people to talk to. Let's start a book club. It will be just like Oprah's, only instead of launching careers and influencing the zeitgeist mine will investigate whether or not Rick Springfield's memoir Late, Late At Night is composed entirely of "Jessie's Girl" lyrics.

Like Oprah's Book Club, But With Slightly More Incest