Book2Screen – The Pre-Blog Files (Part 4)
Apart from books themselves, I’ve long found both movies and TV shows as a prompt to know more. When I see an interesting person portrayed on the screen – fictional or real – or a place or situation (ditto) I all too often want to know more about it or them. If the small, or large screen, is portraying a real (often historical) situation it’d be off to the library or Amazon to see if there were any books on the subject. If fictional I’d want to read the novel (if such a thing existed – I was often annoyed that a screenplay wasn’t based on a previous novel or play). So it was that I picked up and read the following:
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Carrie by Stephen King
Harry’s Game by Gerald Seymour
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Make Room, Make Room! By Harry Harrison
First Blood by David Morrell
Sphere by Michael Crichton
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
Point Blank by Richard Stark
The Abyss by Orson Scott Card
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Jennifer Lynch
Empire of the Sun by J G Ballard
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor
The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
Patriot Games by Tom Clancy
A Sense of Guilt by Andrea Newman
The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire by Andrea Newman
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
House of Cards by Michael Dobbs
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley
Rising Sun by Michael Crichton
Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L Beach
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Congo by Michael Crichton
Enigma by Robert Harris
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
Kiss the Girls by James Patterson
Well, I wanted to finish this at Part 4, but that’s a MUCH longer list than I expected! A nice, varied mix, I think as my brain is normally firing in all directions to chase down wherever my curiosity takes it.
4 comments:
Have you ever thought of going on the Jeopardy game show? Well read people usually do well.
'University Challenge' was one of my fave shows growing up. We watched it as a family and I often came up with the most correct answers. Likewise 'Who Wants to Become a Millionaire' and 'Mastermind'. But I'm confident that I'd totally freeze as a contestant....
Oh, and my friends *hated* playing 'Trivial Pursuits' against me. They'd only play if I had an automatic handicap... [lol]
Over the years I've gone both ways, sometimes reading the book and later watching the film version; however, more rarely, watching the film version and only after that
reading the book. I usually find the book to be better than the film with rare exceptions. One director who stands out in his ability to successfully bring a book to the screen is John Huston with such film versions of great books like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Wise Blood, Under the Volcano, and The Roots of Heaven.
Definitely agree that the book is almost always better than the movie version. It's really hard to cram a decent novel into 90 minutes or even 2 hours of screen time. The example of the opposite that jumps out at me is 'Ready Player One'. Whilst the film is hardly stellar for a host of reasons, I thought that the book was a hot mess and was deeply disappointed by it. Although I did really enjoy the film on the first few showings I've actually come to the conclusion that the adaptation, although very different in many ways, is poor at best.
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