What are you currently reading?

[SimonNZ]

Starting:



I seem to remember someone here giving this the highest praise, but can't remember who it was now

[Brian]

I do think that these dissonant slow introductions to relatively conventional music --  there are other examples  too -- are so strange that they beg for an interpretation of some kind.

Erroll Garner's song introductions, too. They seem to come from such a completely different place than the rest of his playing.

Woolf has for the longest time been to me a writer that I more admire than love. But, quite honestly? This is the first work of hers that has gripped me from the very start and never let go so far.

Maybe I should try this next! After feeling rather left out by Dalloway and Lighthouse, I finally had my big falling-for-Woolf moment with, of all things, Orlando. It's a sheer delight.

I ought to read it. I have yet to read anything from Austen, though I've been especially curious to after reading the aforementioned A Room of One's Own. Woolf seemed to find Austen to be one of the only female writers worth the paper she writes on, and that in spite of never having had "a room of her own".

Oh, do give Austen a read! She's so far from the costume romance cliches that surround her in the popular image. She is a satirist of the first rank, a cuttingly funny analyst of human nature and human weakness, a politically aware and astute writer with layers of meaning around her priests, soldiers, gentry, and even slaveowners, and the creator of a narrator voice I find totally irresistible: omniscient and reliable but judgmental and prone to snarky asides. I like my Austen mean and fierce and full of narrative complexity...which is, truth be told, almost all of it. Emma is delightfully savage. Most people start of course with Pride & Prejudice, which is a delight as long as you know from the start to be looking out for satire, irony, and bad behavior, rather than dainty young lovers sipping tea with their quaint wholesome parents. 

[San Antone]

I would say that , as good as they are, the film adaptations of Jane Austin do not replace experiencing the books.  The movies do not capture the multi-layered and subtle manner of her style.

But I think this about most movie versions of novels, but I feel it is even more true concerning Austin.

[Mandryka]

I would say that , as good as they are, the film adaptations of Jane Austin do not replace experiencing the books.  The movies do not capture the multi-layered and subtle manner of her style.

But I think this about most movie versions of novels, but I feel it is even more true concerning Austin.

Someone told me that No Country for Old Men was better as a movie than a novel - I haven't seen it or read it, yet.

[San Antone]

Someone told me that No Country for Old Men was better as a movie than a novel - I haven't seen it or read it, yet.

That movie was very faithful to the book (I'm not sure if McCarthy had input) but I enjoyed both the book and movie very much.  While the movie was faithful to the novel there is still much in the book, internal dialog, motivation, etc., as is the case with any novel that no movie adaptation can include.

[DavidW]

Starting:



I seem to remember someone here giving this the highest praise, but can't remember who it was now

It was probably the estimable Vela C. Raptor.

[SimonNZ]

Heh. Looks like I was remembering this:

 

Currently re-reading the best general science book I've encountered over the last fifty years, Steven Brusatte's The  Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.

[vers la flamme]

Someone told me that No Country for Old Men was better as a movie than a novel - I haven't seen it or read it, yet.

As much as I love the movie, I think the book is better. I'll say this: No Country, and The Road, which I just reread, both read almost like screenplays. Very dialogue heavy, with terse descriptive sentences.

[Brian]

I would say that , as good as they are, the film adaptations of Jane Austin do not replace experiencing the books.  The movies do not capture the multi-layered and subtle manner of her style.

But I think this about most movie versions of novels, but I feel it is even more true concerning Austin.

I would even say that the best adaptation of an Austen novel remains Clueless.

[San Antone]

As much as I love the movie, I think the book is better. I'll say this: No Country, and The Road, which I just reread, both read almost like screenplays. Very dialogue heavy, with terse descriptive sentences.

I don't really want anyone to attempt to adapt McCarthy to the screen.  NCFOM is actually the best - but there have been some real disasters: Child of Man. All the Pretty Horses was okay but far to slick and "pretty". They all have to leave out so much of what makes McCarthy great, IMO.

I've heard that someone (could have been James Franco) has spent years trying to get funding, cast, production crew, etc. for a movie of Blood Meridian.    I hope it never happens.

[vers la flamme]

I don't really want anyone to attempt to adapt McCarthy to the screen.  NCFOM is actually the best - but there have been some real disasters: Child of Man. All the Pretty Horses was okay but far to slick and "pretty". They all have to leave out so much of what makes McCarthy great, IMO.

I've heard that someone (could have been James Franco) has spenxt years trying to get funding, cast, production crew, etc. for a movie of Blood Meridian.    I hope it never happens.

Agreed... Blood Meridian seems unfilmable to me, though that book has a LOT of fans in my generation, many of whom are big film fans that would love to see it adapted. I'm perfectly content that they should be disappointed, especially if it is James Franco who's trying to do this movie. Franco's several film adaptations of McCarthy and Faulkner books are terrible. I watched a bit of his As I Lay Dying recently after rereading that book and found myself annoyed at how bad it was... he did something, no doubt in an effort to replicate the multitude of perspectives in the book, where almost every scene features a weird "split screen" effect where we're seeing the same event from two perspectives. An interesting idea, but the execution was terrible.

But this is something that's happening to me more and more these days; almost every film adaptation of a book I've read ends up annoying me and disappointing me greatly. Somehow seeing these stories on screen kicks the "suspension of disbelief" up a notch, to where I'm unable to find myself believing in what I'm seeing. The dialogue seems fake, the props and costumes seem fake, and I just can't get into it. Maybe book dialogue is unrealistic too, but it doesn't matter as much when I'm not forced to watch actors actually say these lines. I'm sorry to say it but I think reading fiction has ruined film for me; maybe I'll come around again.

I have not seen Franco's Child of God, and don't intend to, though that book is so fucked up as to seem unfilmable to me too. (Very good book though; the bit near the end about the great flood of Sevierville, Tennessee has stuck with me immensely for some reason.) Nor have I seen All the Pretty Horses, but based on the trailers I think I would hate it and I highly doubt it would do the book justice. I think the only other film adaptation of McCarthy that I've seen and liked was The Road with Viggo Mortensen playing the part of the father, but I haven't watched it since shortly after my first time reading the book in high school.

[Mandryka]

Agreed... Blood Meridian seems unfilmable to me, though that book has a LOT of fans in my generation, many of whom are big film fans that would love to see it adapted. I'm perfectly content that they should be disappointed, especially if it is James Franco who's trying to do this movie. Franco's several film adaptations of McCarthy and Faulkner books are terrible. I watched a bit of his As I Lay Dying recently after rereading that book and found myself annoyed at how bad it was... he did something, no doubt in an effort to replicate the multitude of perspectives in the book, where almost every scene features a weird "split screen" effect where we're seeing the same event from two perspectives. An interesting idea, but the execution was terrible.

Do not watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9NeAzZbZYg

[Bachtoven]

[Iota]

I agree with the sentiment that films nearly always fall short when compared with the book. But films of books are like arrangements of musical works, they take the original ingredients and recast them. And I think it's a rare musical arrangement that you'd say equals or improves on the original. Nonetheless they can be interesting and enlightening commentaries the originals imo.

TD:



It is of course frustrating how little is known about WS, but Bryson fills out the gaps genially, ambling down all manner of fascinating and amusing side roads to flesh out the picture. There's a wealth of interesting detail about life in London in the late 16th/early 17th century for example, which as a local boy I found particularly intriguing.
He also paints an extraordinary picture of the various highly eccentric obsessives who dedicated their lives to discovering the tiniest slivers of information about Shakespeare, often being overcome by disillusion/madness and unhappy endings. Lots of detail on what we know about people he worked with, his business dealings, and actually quite a bit on what we don't know about him - a fascinating subject in itself in the hands of Bryson.
Anyway, lots more beside, and he ends with a very convincing dismissal of the Anti-Stratfordian argument and its proponents (who claim Shakespeare didn't write the plays).

[JBS]

Two films I can think of that are better than the books they are based on:
The Witches of Eastwick
The World According To Garp

Updike's text has a wide streak of misogyny, so the title characters come across more bitchy than witchy. The movie script excised that, and of course Cher and Nicholson get to romp through their roles.

Garp is less clearcut, but the movie cuts some digressive content for a clearer story, and has Robin Williams and John Lithgow at the top of their game.

[Mandryka]

The obvious choice is Jean Luc Goddard's A Bout de Souffle. The book is not interesting.

My top choice would be Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz - though I've only read Alfred Doeblin's book in French. Not that the book is bad, it's just that the film is really special.


And Pasolini's Salò,  but that's really because Donatien Alphonse François's  book is very boring.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Doctor Zhivago. Belle de Jour.

[vers la flamme]

And Pasolini's Salò,  but that's really because Donatien Alphonse François's  book is very boring.

Is it? Pity, I've gotten myself very curious to read Sade's works after reading some of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae. She seems to view Sade as a kind of Dionysian counterweight to the Apollonian Rousseau, and to admire his work greatly. I wonder if you've read her stuff; you'd probably understand a lot more of it than I do.

I'm rereading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I must say remains as deeply moving as it was on my first read a few years ago. One of my favorite novels.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Katherine Mansfield. Her First Ball, The Garden Party, etc..

[AnotherSpin]

It seems to me that the question of what is better, a book or a film based on a book, is not quite correct. Each format has its own advantages that are not available to the other format. Rather, we can talk about great films that have eclipsed books. For example, The Godfather, Metropolis, The Shawshank Redemption. Hitchcock's films - Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, etc.