ow is as good a time as any to discuss this book I suppose. It’s being adapted into a film, slated to be directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Little Red Riding Hood, Thirteen) [note: I started this post back in May].

If I haven’t made clear my general dislike of book to film adaptations, let me do so now: 9 times out of 10 I am disappointed. I do not subscribe to the belief that because film is a different medium that makes it OK to make unnecessary changes. Nay! I subscribe to the belief that yes, film is a different medium…and that’s why it should stay the hell away from books. My favorite films consist of two adaptations of novels (Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind). And in the case of Pride and Prejudice I’m not talking about that adaptation with Keira Knightley (which quite frankly I loathe), I’m talking about the BBC mini-series, which isn’t technically a feature film, so there you go. When I say I don’t have high hopes for The Bitch Posse as a film, I mean that the chances are so high that I’m going to hate it that I might not even bother watching it for fear the actors chosen to play the parts will ruin the experience of the book for me.

But let’s talk about the book. In the summer of 2005 I found myself at the Rockefeller Center Barnes & Noble (the original one that closed, not the one that’s currently on 46th & Fifth) wandering around looking for a book to read.

The idea that I could go out and buy a book, all on my own, with no help from anyone or anything else: not a recommendation, not an author I’d ever heard of, not a book club pick, not a book I found lying around the house (i.e. belonging to my mom), not a book required for school or that I felt I should. No. Simply a book I came upon quite by accident, that I wanted to read because it sounded interesting. Period.

All other books before this had fallen into one of the aforementioned categories, which isn’t to say that I didn’t have plenty of favorites among them, but I often think of The Bitch Posse as the book that got me reading again, which is funny because I hadn’t actually stopped reading. I’ve never stopped reading. I did go through a 2 year dry spell in which I couldn’t finish very much, but that dry spell came AFTER The Bitch Posse, so it seems false to call The Bitch Posse the book that got me reading again. And yet.

And yet, I do think of my reading life as divided in half: books before The Bitch Posse and books after The Bitch Posse. Almost all of the books I still consider to be favorites today came after The Bitch Posse (and a whopping 10 of them I read in 2006). Favorites before The Bitch Posse seem somehow less legit, particularly those books I’d read in school. Yeah I told people I loved To Kill a Mockingbird, but what did that really mean? I still thought those books were great, but I was already starting to forget them. I was experiencing what’s known as I love you…who are you again? though I had no name for it at the time. They’ve become old lovers I remember fondly but have no real desire to go back to again. A crucial emotional bond is lacking for many of the books I read before college, something that prevents them from being absolute favorites even though I know at the time I thought they were fantastic.

It should be noted that I did choose my own books as a child. No one recommended Wayside School Is Falling Down to me. I saw a description of it in one of those Scholastic mail order things my school used to get and ordered it. But once I started reading with an eye for analysis (beginning in junior high school), my reading habits changed, my method of selecting books changed. And while I can easily explain why the way I read changed, I really don’t know why I never thought to go into a bookstore a select a book at random after that. I know reading was somewhat ruined for me after To Kill A Mockingbird (a book we analyzed to the brink of extinction in 6th grade) and many of the books I read on my own time were more commercial in nature. Reading for school became somewhat taxing even when I genuinely liked the books, and my outside reading was largely an effort to counter that. But going into a bookstore and selecting a book on the basis of the synopsis alone? No. Not until The Bitch Posse. And so, though I’ve said virtually nothing about the book itself, The Bitch Posse is the book that changed the way I read. It got me to take chances with books again. And I haven’t taken as many recommendations since then. That’s not why I love the book, but it is why it can truly be called one of the Books That Made Me.