Books Read: May 2010

May 15: Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

The latest in the series from which True Blood derives its inspiration. The series tends to divide into books where momentous things happen, and books where characters are largely reacting to previous momentous events. This book seems to fall into the latter category, but was still solid. I think the continuing storyline of the impact of Katrina on Louisiana's vampire hierarchy was a shot in the arm for the series that continues to deliver for Harris. (It seems like their runs will only overlap for a couple of weeks, but I'm really intrigued to see how True Blood and Treme play back-to-back. At the very least, it will be accent-tastic.) I also like that Harris revisited the concept of having a famous dead person appear as a vampire (this time with a less litigious estate than that of "Bubba").

May 18: Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Her work may be branded with the condescending "chick-lit" label, but I really enjoy Giffin's work. Her characters always feel like adults, whereas other books lumped together under that umbrella can often come across as adults acting like teenagers. Heart of the Matter was heavier and darker than Giffin's previous books, but it never shied away from the resultant complexity. I feel like I'm going to be musing on this one for a while.

May 19: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Someday I'll have to tally all the books I end up reading either in anticipation of seeing a film adaptation or after seeing a film adaptation. This falls in the former category - I'm interested to see how the book's very interior narrative will translate to the screen, particularly in the way that its guiding concept informs the story's progression.

May 20: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

No matter how deeply I recognize, at least on an intellectual level, the pull of a popular young-adult book, somehow I still seem to find myself in circumstances where I'm totally drawn into a book and find myself finishing it at some ungodly hour of the morning. Collins takes a fascinating concept - an authoritarian government demands tribute from its citizens in the form of teenagers who fight to the death in a televised competition - and milks it brilliantly for all its tension and drama. Believe the hype.

May 24: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Another film-inspired choice...about which I apparently don't have much to say.

May 25: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Again, another late night. What can I say, they're addictive. A solid middle book to a trilogy - it made me look forward to the last installment coming out later this summer, and drew upon the world Collins established in The Hunger Games without being too repetitive.

May 28: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

The most recent Newbery winner (sometime I'll devote a full post to how I was Newbery-obsessed as a kid) and a very good one, at that. I liked the way that Stead drew upon A Wrinkle in Time not only to frame the narrative of When You Reach Me, but also to evoke a sense of the way a particular book can impact you when you're young. A worthy addition to the pantheon.

Adaptations: A Wrinkle in Time

I feel compelled to comment on today's news that A Wrinkle in Time is being prepared for a new film adaptation. I don't talk about it much, but I'm a bit of a Madeleine L'Engle superfan, and though it's being adapted by the screenwriter who brought us Bridge to Terabithia, which made me so rant-y, I'm willing to reserve judgment. (I still haven't seen the Bridge movie - if I come across it someday on cable I'll probably try to give it a go, but I'm not actively seeking it out at present.) With decent studio money and quality computer technology, the range of space worlds that L'Engle presents in Time should be fully realized in all their detail and complexity. In my mind, the film will live or die in casting. The right young actors playing beyond-precocious child prodigy Charles Wallace, supernerd in a BMOC's body Calvin and queen of teen awkwardness Meg could make the movie great, and even elevate subpar scripting. Time will tell.

The part of the news item I find really interesting is the suggestion that Disney views Time and its closest sequels as a potential film franchise. The books that make up the "Time Quartet" - Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet - are connected through their protagonists, members of the Murry nuclear family, but are also fairly disparate works. Even if the film version of A Wrinkle in Time is successful, that doesn't necessarily indicate success for the other three. Wind features the same central trio of characters, but the book's plot, which focuses on an illness of Charles playing out on the mitochondrial level (it really doesn't translate well to concise summary) and utilizes a form of telepathic communication that L'Engle terms "kything," doesn't necessarily seem like it would transfer easily to film. Planet, my favorite of the four, is epic in scope but also features a lot of storytelling that is very interior to its characters. Additionally, Planet takes place about ten years after the events of Time, meaning that the filmmakers' ability to capitalize on any success of Time would be necessarily impacted by either significant passage of time or by recasting of the film's central characters. Finally, Many Waters is just an entirely different book than the other three. Meg and Charles are essentially swapped out for their twin brothers Sandy and Dennys, who accidentally travel through time and space to find themselves caught up in the story of Noah's Ark. In my opinion, Sandy and Dennys are L'Engle's most underdeveloped male characters; when they're introduced in A Wrinkle in Time, the twins are presented as the societal control subjects of the Murry family - the "normal" siblings against whom Meg and Charles are judged - which necessarily makes them kind of blank slates, and they're never given much more shading. It would be an understatement to call it a stretch to view success of the space-tripping adventures of Meg and Charles in Time as any indicator of the potential earnings of their boring brothers stuck in a tale from the Bible.

I could go into why I think the Austins have more cinematic potential than the Murrys, but I'll save any further ranting/cautious optimism for when more information comes out about the movie. Who knows, maybe against all odds and prior experience the people bringing this book to the screen just won't fight what's established it as a classic for nearly five decades. I suppose stranger things have happened.*

*I feel like I should have some perfectly selected classic quote to go here, a la Mrs. Who, but alas, I'm coming up blank.

Reading...and Watching

So I've been thinking a lot recently about the books I read when I was young, primarily because I feel incensed every time a commercial for the movie of Bridge to Terabithia. When I was in elementary school, I read constantly. At the library, I took out twenty books at a time. I would keep the books I was reading in a giant pile at the foot of my bed, growing book by book until the stack teetered precariously. Every once in a while, the pile came crashing to the ground in the middle of the night, which my mother hated.

I had special affection for books that won the Newbery Medal. I'm not sure why - certainly they're not the only good books out there, maybe it had to do with the thrill of trying to collect each one. I went through similar periods of obsession with list-y things - the presidents of the US, the fifty states - I was a weird kid. After about 1950 or so, there are some really amazing books among the Newbery winners (before that, they tend a bit more towards the educational and deadly boring) - A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Bridge to Terabithia, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Jacob Have I Loved, I could go on, clearly. Which is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that I can't believe the way that this movie is being marketed.

The film version of Bridge to Terabithia places it along with Harry Potter and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a fantasy. There's nothing wrong with those other adaptations being presented as such - they are fantasies, and part of the fun of a movie based on a fantasy novel is seeing the worlds and creatures of that novel brought to life. The thing is, Bridge to Terabithia isn't a fantasy. Not even close. The book is firmly rooted in real life, to the extent that everyone who I know of who has read it remains devastated by its reality years later. The fantasy exists solely in the minds of the main characters, which makes the real-life occurrences that much more real to the reader. I guess it worries me that kids will see the movie and then be disappointed by the book, and a world where a child can no longer be swept away by the emotions of a book like Bridge to Terabithia is one of which I want no part.