Welcome to Buzz Worthy News where the stories are awesome and not at all well-written. Need your YA industry news? Never fear, Kate Copeseeley is here to give it to you straight.

In this week’s Buzz Worthy News: Archie Adaption, Harper Lee Dies, New Fifty Shades Casting News, Cassie Clare is Sued, and more!

Buzz Worthy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly news post bringing you all the best information about the book and blogging world, particularly for the venn diagram of people who overlap between the two.

New Allegiant Trailer

I know, you’ve seen like 16 billion of these, and let’s be honest, we’d all rather watch the newest show trailer for The 100. But this is a book news post and we’re gonna post all the book news. So watch the damn trailer. (or don’t. You could also go to youtube and look up the ep 6 trailer for The 100. Just sayin’)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvq6cMtT5nA

 The Interestings Casting News

I really really loved Lauren Ambrose, but I haven’t seen her in much since Six Feet Under, so it was great to hear that she got cast in a new show.

Written by Nip/Tuck alums Lyn Greene and Richard Levine and directed by Mike Newell, The Interestings is described as a grounded. character-driven drama based on Meg Wolitzer’s novel about a group of friends who meet at an arts camp when they’re 15 in 1974. The series chronicles their relationships throughout the next three decades dealing with the great expectations of youth juxtaposed with the realities life hands you as you get older.

Ambrose will play Jules. Seen in her mid-20s and mid-30s, Jules is determined to forge an acting career, but winds up a struggling therapist with a young child, an unemployable husband (Gabriel Ebert) and a tiny New York apartment.

Ambrose can currently be seen as Agent Einstein on Fox’s The X-Files revival. She received two supporting actress Emmy nominations for her role as Claire Fisher on HBO’s Six Feet Under, co-starred on USA Network’s Dig and appeared in features Sleepwalk With Me and Wanderlust. She is repped by UTA and Kipperman Management.

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There Might Be an Archie TV Series??

I don’t even know what to say about this news. Is there anyone in the WORLD who is really interested in an Archie TV show? Really? Well, the CW certainly seems to think so, since they’ve ordered a pilot.(honest to god, sometimes I find it so hard to believe that this is the same network that airs The 100)

The show will focus on the eternal love triangle of Archie Andrews, girl-next-door Betty Cooper, and rich socialite Veronica Lodge, and will include the entire cast of characters from the comic books—including Archie’s rival, Reggie Mantle, and his slacker best friend, Jughead Jones. Popular LGBTI character Kevin Keller will also play a pivotal role. In addition to the core cast, Riverdale will introduce other characters from Archie Comics’ expansive library, including Josie and the Pussycats.

Cole Sprouse will play Jughead Jones and Lili Reinhart will take on the role of Betty Cooper.

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Two New Actors Cast In Fifty Shades Final Films

When I first saw this, I thought it meant that those poor actors who were starring in the first film had gotten out of their contracts, but nope. These are just side characters.

Two new actors have been cast for the final two installments of the Fifty Shades film franchise. Arielle Kebbel will play an architect named Gia Matteo in Fifty Shades Freed and Eric Johnson will play an editor named Jack Hyde in both Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.

According to Vanity Fair, Johnson’s character is an “Ivy League-educated commissioning editor at Seattle Independent Publishing who both 1) hires Anastasia Steele as his intern and 2) harbors a long-simmering resentment against Grey for reasons dating back to their childhood in the same foster home. In Fifty Shades Darker, the character complicates Christian and Ana’s relationship by making advances on the latter, and in effect, giving our steamy S&M film a proper love triangle.”

At least they’re hot??

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Gillian Flynn Short Story Is Purchased For Adaption

Fans of Gillian Flynn will be happy to know she has another adaption in the works, this time for a short story she wrote called, “The Grownup”

The story revolves around a con woman who is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when she meets an unhappy woman, whom she tries to help. The phony psychic accompanies the woman to her home, which the woman swears was haunted when she moved in with her husband, son and stepson. The con woman is charged with exorcising the evil within, and it’s soon clear she may have gotten in way over her head.

Michael De Luca is producing with Natalie Krinsky attached to adapt the script. Sources say while the rights have been acquired, deal points for Krinsky are still being worked out.

Sounds awesome!

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Harper Lee Dies at Age 89

It’s a sad week for the reading world. The author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, has passed away.

Lee’s family issued a statement Friday saying that the author “passed away in her sleep early this morning. Her passing was unexpected. She remained in good basic health until her passing.”

Hank Connor, family spokesperson and Lee’s nephew, said:

“This is a sad day for our family. America and the world knew Harper Lee as one of the last century’s most beloved authors. We knew her as Nelle Harper Lee, a loving member of our family, a devoted friend to the many good people who touched her life, and a generous soul in our community and our state. We will miss her dearly.”

We’ve commented a few times on this blog about how the debate over publishing her new book was taking advantage of a woman whose faculties were probably not at their best, and some of the statements we’re seeing reflect the argument against that. I leave it to you to decide if they ring true or not.

“When I saw her just six weeks ago, she was full of life, her mind and mischievous wit as sharp as ever,” Lee’s agent Andrew Nurnberg said in a statement released by the publishing house, ABC News reports. “She was quoting Thomas More and setting me straight on Tudor history. We have lost a great writer, a great friend and a beacon of integrity.”

Her contributions to the book world will always be valued.

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Umberto Eco Dies At Age 84

The author of The Name of the Rose, famed Italian intellectual Umberto Eco died of cancer Friday night.

He was “an extraordinary example of a European intellectual, combining unique intelligence of the past with a limitless capacity to anticipate the future”, said Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi. “It’s an enormous loss for culture, which will miss his writing and voice, his sharp and lively thought, and his humanity,” Renzi told the Ansa news agency.

Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said Eco remained youthful until his last day. “A master who brought Italian culture to the whole world,” Franceschini wrote on Twitter.

Internationally, he remains best known for his bestseller The Name of the Rose, a medieval detective novel set in an Italian abbey, which follows Brother William of Baskerville as he investigates a series of suspicious deaths. The novel captured imaginations globally and was turned into a film starring Sean Connery as William.

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Men Give Up On Books More Quickly

In what might be one of the most interesting studies on reading, and one of the eye-rolling analyses to go along with it, we present to you, the findings of the “Jelly books” book study. Overall, the study didn’t really have anything super interesting to say:

If a man decides to read a book, is he less likely or more likely than a woman to finish it? In other words, is the completion rate of a book at all gender-specific?

In general, the result was a firm no. In most cases, the likelihood that a reader will finish a book is not correlated with gender; both sexes have an equal probability of finishing a book. Issues such as writing style, strength of characters, topic and other factors have a bigger influence on the completion rate.

BUT (yeah, you knew it was coming), because everyone has to make everything about gender, there was one finding of note:

There is one noticeable gender-specific difference in reading across most books, however, which is well-illustrated in the above example: men decide much faster than women do if they like a book or not. The initial decline during which most readers are lost is much sharper and earlier for men than it is for women, and this is a behavior that we observe for the majority of books (the above title also loses readers in the middle of the book, which is a rather rare occurrence).

So, I look at this and I think men decide more quickly if they like a book or not. Interesting, I guess, if you’re a writer you would want to know it. But no, Mr. Andrew had to make it into this(underlined by me for emphasis):

So put another way, men give up on a book much sooner than women do. Given the identical completion rates, we take this to mean that men either have more foresight in this regard or that women continue reading even if they already know that the book is not to their liking. We suspect the latter, but cannot prove it at this point.

Or how about this, Andrew: MEN ARE QUITTERS WHO HAVE NO TENACITY AT ALL. Women, on the other hand, will actually give something a chance a lot longer than men. Which is fortunate for you mens, I will say that, because otherwise you would probably get dumped a lot more than your fragile feelings would allow.

And I’m just being snarky here, but really, really… why did the analysis have to go this way? You could have left the results to stand as they were. Let’s all really think about our word choices in these types of situations. Mkay?

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Cassie Clare Sued By Author For Plagiarism(but not really)

In what has to be one of the most odd court cases the publishing world has seen in the last couple of weeks, Sherrilyn Kenyon has sued Cassandra Clare for copyright and trademark infringement. It’s not a plagiarism claim, but instead a concept one. The issue at stake is one of naming. Kenyon’s warriors (alive on the page since 2002) are called Darkhunters and Clare’s are called Shadowhunters(since 2007).

According to the document, 10 years ago, “distressed fans” informed Kenyon that Clare was shopping a manuscript for a first novel (eventually published as City of Bones) in a projected series about a group she called “darkhunters.” Kenyon claims that she protested the use of this name and that Clare agreed to change it. The complaint also alleges that despite “continuous assurances from CLARE and CLARE’s publisher that she/theywould not expand the use of the ‘shadowhunters’ term or adopt it as a trademark, CLARE has persisted over time in expanding her use of the term ‘shadowhunters’ from a mere description of her protagonists, first to a tag line on the cover of her works and eventually to a complete rebranding of her works so as to be confusingly similar to the Dark Hunter Series.”

As you would expect, Clare totally disputes these charges:

Clare’s attorney, John Cahill, issued a statement on Friday refuting these charges. Not only was there no such agreement, he told me, but the two women have never communicated at all. “They’ve never spoken, never met, and Cassie has never read her books,” Cahill said. In an email, Holly Black, a novelist and longtime writing partner and friend of Clare’s, told me that early drafts of and a proposal for City of Bones did use the name Darkhunters. However, while attending a publishing trade show in May 2006, Black was given a copy of one of Kenyon’s books and noticed that the term Dark-Hunter appeared on its cover, trademarked. “This was before any book of [Clare’s] was in print,” Black added. Cahill read aloud to me from an email that Clare sent to her then-agent, Barry Goldblatt, in which she describes Black’s discovery and both parties remark that they have never heard of Kenyon before. Implied in the emails, Cahill argues, is the decision to change the name.

To be fair to Kenyon, her actual complaint seems to argue not that she invented these traits but that, in bulk, the similarities between the two series are significant enough to lead people to confuse them with each other. However, even her own readers find this implausible. In just one example, a commenter on an article about the suit on the pop culture website the Mary Sue wrote, “I used to read Kenyon’s series. …  Not once in reading Mortal Instruments did I think of Kenyon’s work.”

So, take from this what you will, I guess? It will be interesting to see where this goes.

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