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And they are almost entirely forgotten — except by a few people, like me, who remember those long still afternoons in the library. Skurnick says that's because most of these books were written by women, for teenaged girls — and written off by everyone else. "I've never met anybody who didn't know this period of literature and doesn't immediately assume that it's cutesy and about romance."

Some of the books are romances — and what's wrong with that? — but Skurnick is also publishing things like Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family stories, about a Jewish family on the Lower East Side before World War I. And A Long Day in November, Ernest J. Gaines' novel about a young boy on a Southern sugarcane plantation.

Skurnick herself is a teen author; she's written several books in the Sweet Valley High series, and a few years ago she started a column for Jezebel devoted to discussing the books she remembered reading as a girl. That column became a book, called Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. And it attracted attention from publishers.

"I had followed her columns and remembered these books that I loved from the past," says Elizabeth Clementson, who runs Ig Publishing with her husband, Robert Lasner.

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What Terrifies Teens In Today's Young Adult Novels? The Economy

Months after federal agents raided its Knoxville, Tenn., headquarters over charges that it withheld millions in diesel fuel rebates from customers at its truck stops, Pilot Flying J says it is paying the companies that were cheated.

From Nashville, Blake Farmer of member station WPLN filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"The family-owned company is accused of withholding millions of dollars' worth of diesel rebates. Seven members of the Pilot Flying J sales staff have pleaded guilty to fraud charges, and others have been put on administrative leave during the federal investigation.

"CEO Jimmy Haslam – who also owns the Cleveland Browns – says the shortchanging represents a fractional part of the company's $30 billion in annual sales. He says most has been paid back, with interest. Still, he says the episode has taken a toll.

"'This has been a very humbling, very embarrassing time for myself, for our family and for Pilot Flying J. There's no other way to say it.'"

Canada is ushering in what it projects to be a $1.3 billion medical marijuana free market this week, as it replaces small and homegrown pot production with quality-controlled marijuana produced by large farms. The market could eventually serve 450,000 Canadians, according to estimates.

As Toronto's Globe and Mail explains, a transition phase began today that will allow more price fluctuation and phase out home and small-scale production.

"In its place, large indoor marijuana farms certified by the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and health inspectors will produce, package and distribute a range of standardized weed, all of it sold for whatever price the market will bear," the newspaper reports. "The first sales are expected in the next few weeks, delivered directly by secure courier."

Large-scale growers have begun applying for licenses to produce marijuana — including one Ontario company that hopes to grow cannabis in an old Hershey chocolate plant, as Reuters reported last week. At least two large growers have already received their licenses.

The free market will likely establish a price of around $7.60 per gram of dried marijuana bud, according to "Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations" posted by Canada's health department. [And if you're wondering about that spelling, it follows a precedent set in Canada's controlled substances law.]

The health agency projects that the legal marijuana supply industry "could grow to more than $1.3 billion per year in annual sales" within 10 years. Officials say the illegal cannabis market "represents a multibillion dollar per year industry."

The Canadian government says the new plan will also reduce its own costs, on a website explaining some of the changes.

"The current program costs Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars each year because the $5/gram charged to program participants who choose to purchase from Health Canada is heavily subsidized," Health Canada says.

[Hopefully, we don't have to point out that a piece about the Breaking Bad finale contains information about the Breaking Bad finale. But here we are.]

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan signaled in interviews leading up to Sunday night's series finale that those who craved some redemption for Walter White were the ones most likely to leave happy.

"We feel it's a satisfying ending," Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly. "Walt ends things more or less on his own terms."

For Gilligan, those things were self-evidently connected: the satisfaction of the ending and the degree to which the terms of that ending are set by Walt. And that's probably true for broad segments of the show's legions of fans who continued to root for Walt at some elemental level, or least to root for him to become root-able again.

It's not just true for the darker elements of "Team Walt" — the holders of the unsettling view that Walt was always simply killing people who deserved it, a brilliant and good man forced into bad deeds by the foolishness of others. It's also true for fans who fully recognize the monstrousness of Walt's deeds but craved a glimmer of hope that even people guilty of the worst deeds can find a modicum of grace, perhaps grace in love and death.

This is, for instance, the view taken by Emily Bazelon in Slate, who sees in the finale repeated acts of love: Walt figuring out how to get the money to his family, Walt accepting that he can't be forgiven, Walt saving Jesse. It doesn't make up for his misdeeds, but it represents redemption of a kind and the reassuring flicker of his humanity.

I think that's what Gilligan saw in the finale he wrote: no undoing of consequences, but moments of grace and mercy nonetheless. The show was, to the end, a Western of sorts, and Walt ended his life as the lonely cowboy, the desperado finally able to come to his senses, tragically alone but no longer lost — now found.

I wish I'd been able to love it on those terms. I wish I'd been able to respond to how fundamentally sympathetic the finale was to Walt. I wish I'd felt like I was vibrating on the same frequency Gilligan was. Because normally, I do crave those moments of grace — in fact, here's what I said about the finale of Lost (which I consider woefully over-loathed and underappreciated):

There is emotional heft to the idea that after all your struggles and battles and mistakes, you will have the opportunity to give and receive love and to gain perspective on what you've experienced. And while there have certainly been missteps in the final season (and in previous seasons) and not everything worked in the finale, that last sequence in the church is based on a very old and widely honored idea of grace in death.