Books We Love July 2013 Movie Edition
Every month we here at Books We Love list out the great books we’ve read and the books we are looking forward to. This month we are doing it a little differently in that we are listing out the coming (and just a few already arrived) movies based on books we have loved. Enjoy!
Coming Movie Versions of Books We Love
Title: The Spectacular Now
Author: Tim Tharp
Release: 8/2/2013
TSN was a finalist for the National Book Prize in 2008. The story is about a life of the party type that gets involved with a bit of a different type of a gal than he’d ever gotten involved with before. Think Can’t Buy Me Love or Sixteen Candles? The book has been on our list to get around to for so long we lost the list. But now that its coming to the big screen we are definitely circling back to read before we watch.
Title: Paranoia
Author: Joseph Finder
Release: 8/16/2013
We read this originally when Finder was still giving this book away for free digitally. It was the first free book we’d ever finished and we loved every minute of it. Free usually means bad, right? Incorrect. Paranoia went on to great things and now it is going to be brought to the silver screen with Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman of all people. So we are thinking free might not be that bad after all.
Title: Serena
Author: Ron Rash
Release: 9/27/2013
we have not read this book yet, but Ron Rash is a magician with words and it is on our very short list to read. Oh and a movie reunion between the Silver Lining Duo? Gold. : “When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.”
Title: Ender’s Game
Author: Orson Scott Card
Release: 10/1/13
Ender is one of those truly great Sci-Fi books that even non-geeks say they’ve read, whether they have or not. Asa Butterfield will play Ender, and Harrison Ford will play Colonel Hyrum Graff. I only wonder if the book ending will have to be changed because it too clever by twice. If you’ve never read Ender’s Game, now’s definitely your chance.
Title: The Wolf of Wallstreet
Author: Jordan Belfort
Release: 10/15/2013
Martin Scorsese directing Leonardo DiCaprio in a book that was supposedly the seed material for the movie Boiler Room? We just can’t see any downside to this particular movie adaptation to this sometimes hysterical and simultaneously sad commentary on not only one individual but an entire society that allowed this kind of excess to happen.
Title: The Monuments Men
Author: Robert M. Edsel
Release: 12/15/2013
We love WWII non-fiction. And it would seem that the depravities and heroism of that particular war were so vast that we would have a hard time ever plumbing the depths of it. And what greater reason to read The Monuments Men than a new movie featuring Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett and George Clooney?
Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusak
Release: 1/17/2014
we read this book when it was initially published six or seven years ago. It reminded us of “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer but for kids? We are a huge fan of Foer, so this is not light praise. It is a complex book in its adult innocence. It isn’t quite YA, and yet it isn’t fully at home in the adult world. It isn’t afraid of death and issues around the holocaust, but it is mostly death as metaphor. It should be a very complex movie to recreate… but we are very interested in seeing how it goes.
Title: The Maze Runner
Author: James Dashner
Release: 2/14/14
IThomas awakes on an elevator and he can’t remember who he is or anything about where he’s come from because he has had his memory wiped. When he arrives in the maze he learns that there are others who have been searching for a way out for years. But Thomas believes might just be the one to crack this riddle.
Title: Gone Girl
Author: Gillian Flynn
Release: TBD
The film rights to Gone Girl were picked up by Reese Witherspoon. So far Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult are unofficially attached. Theron would be an inspired pick though if there is any truth to it at all. It is zero secret here that we absolutely adored Gone Girl. Charlize has the range to play the good girl / bad girl / good girl that not many could pull off. Theron may be the only person better for the role than Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black.
Title: The Fault in Our Stars
Author: John Green
Release: TBD
We have intended to post The Fault in Our Stars the past several months – and we aren’t exactly sure how that happened. We loved this book, that is for sure… though a bit depressing. Basically the story is about a terminal cancer patient named Hazel and her struggle to beat her diagnosis. And then when a patient named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
Recently Arrived Movie Versions of Books We Love
Title: Warm Bodies
Author: Isaac Marion
the concept of a Zombie love story was just daft in any form when we first heard about it. Book, movie, play, ad… stupid. But it worked better than we thought it would. Obviously Marion broke many of the rules of zombie fiction – like the fact that zombies are the brainless dead and don’t have a thought in their head. But other than that, we think it works just fine here.
Title: Great Gatsby
Author: Fitzgerald
we recently just had the privilege of watching the most recent version of Gatsby with Leonardo DiCapprio and adored it. But how could the director of Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge lead us wrong? The design was awesome, and the acting was fantastic. We especially loved the brilliance of an innocent individual dying on behalf of someone else and how Baz captured the incongruity of it all. Very Christ figure-esque even.
Title: World War Z
Author: Max Brooks
We can’t really tell you why we disliked the book World War Z so much. The choppy chapters? The infinite points of view? The so Robopocolypse sort of feel? We aren’t sure… but we hated it. But we absolutely LOVED the movie. And what’s funny is that the movie was under the gun and being rewritten right up to the last minute. And normally that spells disaster. But this time the rewrites worked.
Title: Silver Linings Playbook Author: Matthew Quick
Books We Love has already belabored our love for both Silver Linings Playbook in word and video form. So we won’t continuing the love fest here except to say that we are fairly excited about Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence getting reunited in Serena. Which we should talk about when you finally get to it… not here. Move along, nothing to see here.