Last night, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Oscar-winning Jennifer’s Body scribe Diablo Cody will be adapting Sweet Valley High, the beloved ’80s book series, for the big screen.
Beloved, that is, by seemingly all XX-chromosomed Gen Xers but me. Although I consumed my share of Judy Blume during some lazy, library-filled summers, the SVH books escaped me entirely as I leaped from tween-lit directly to Stephen King.
As a Cody fan, though, I was excited about the news — until I realized that I’d need to at least leaf through the books before the film’s release, pre-reviewing homework I try to tackle as often as possible.
Over the past few years, that’s meant that my steady diet of newspapers (the dead-tree kind!) and magazines has been almost exclusively interrupted by young-adult novels such as the Harry Potter and Twilight series.
Which has amusingly skewed my Amazon recommendations toward selections more appropriate for a middle-schooler. Or, considering that the only other books I’ve recently bought are The Night of the Gun by David Carr and This Is Your Country on Drugs by Ryan Grim (full disclosure: both are former CP colleagues), perhaps a budding Drew Barrymore.