NOTE: This post discusses Twilight, the movie, and the Twilight book series (particularly the latest book, Breaking Dawn), and is SPOILER HEAVY. If you've not read the books and don't want to read spoilers, do NOT read this post until you've read them. It's also longer than my usual column, as I had a lot of ground to cover, so if you hate reading long pieces, skip it. Thanks.

You're probably aware, even if you're not into books about vampires and clumsy, average teenage girls falling in love with one, that there's a popular book series called the Twilight Saga, and the first book in the series, Twilight, is being adapted for the big screen by director Catherine Hardwicke. What you may not be aware of is the little undercurrent of female writers decrying the series as inherently anti-feminist.

The Twilight series grew in popularity, mostly off the radar of the feminist set, until it got so popular that the feminists started to take notice -- and offense. I first became aware of this anti-feminist backlash when Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries (among other girly books) responded on her blog to readers writing her to ask what she thought of the series, thusly: " I didn't take my husband's last NAME when we got married. Do you honestly think I'd like a story about a girl considering changing SPECIES for a guy? No offense to any of you, but as a feminist, I just can't go there... "

I found Cabot's take interesting because I'm a feminist myself, who also didn't take my husband's last name when we got married, but I don't happen to find the series inherently anti-feminist. Nonetheless, since the release of the fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn, on August 2, the feminist mutterings have started to escalate to a dull roar.

If you were going to make a movie that's part The Princess Diaries and part The Devil Wears Prada, you'd have to cast Anne Hathaway in the lead. Well, hopefully HarperCollins knows enough about movies to understand that obviousness, because the News Corp-owned publishing company is officially in the film biz. Well, Sharp Entertainment, a banner headed by producer Jeff Sharp (Boys Don't Cry) and housed at HarperCollins, is anyway. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sharp has announced its inaugural slate of projects. This includes a movie about the private lives of astronauts based on Jay Barbree's memoir Live from Cape Canaveral -- described as The Right Stuff meets Almost Famous -- and a movie described as "a next-generation Nashville" (hmm, we'll see). Publisher's Weekly also reported recently that Sharp at HarperCollins will be adapting Eli Gottlieb's new thriller Now You See Him.

The Princess meets Prada movie is another in the pipeline. Based on the Queen of Babble series (Queen of Babble, Queen of Babble in the Big City, the upcoming Queen of Babble Gets Hitched), which is written by Princess Diaries author Meg Cabot, the movie will follow a "fashion-obsessed" American girl who travels to London to spend time with her British boyfriend. But he isn't the guy she thought he was and so she heads over to France and falls for someone new. Unlike Cabot's Princess books, the Babble series is more grown-up. In fact, the Publisher's Weekly review (via Amazon) of the first book points out there's some "blunt dialogue about oral sex." Again, if HarperCollins knows anything about movies, it will be sure to do away with most of that stuff in order to make this movie at least PG-13, for the kids, or if it plans to make the Babble books into a trilogy.