I love hearing from authors and publicists who’d like me to read and review their books. If you have a title you think I’d be interested in, please feel free to contact me at ibetnoonehasthisdamnid@yahoo.com .
For more information about what books I like and how I choose which books to review, check out Mt. TBR's review policy.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Well, if you thought I’d fallen off the face of the Earth, I didn’t. Life has been a bit busy for me. I got into playing World of Warcraft, for one. Then I got lazy about writing reviews, though I kept reading. Then I got burned out on reading. Then I lost my home internet. Then I battled some bad bit of depression. Fought my way out of that by excercising and bike riding. While biking, I met a man, who became the most important person in the world to me.
Got MARRIED on March 6th, 2012 (our anniversary is 3-6-12… fun for math geeks 😀 )
Been a newlywed since then, so I have to get out of the BED to read a book 😉
Started back at school and am working at getting a degree in Criminal Justice. So now there’s less time for book-reading.
I’m missing it, though… and writing essays and research papers is reminding me of what I’m missing, so I’m going to try to get back into blogging. I can’t promise it’ll be all book reviews, though. It may be a bit of everything from marriage, raising kids, school work… books, even, lol.
I might add that WORDPRESS has changed a bit since I last posted. Not sure if I like it or not.
I promise not to wait another two years and a half to post again 😉
Trisha at eclectic / eccentric has a really fun post, Adaptations Lists and Giveaways, where she’s listed 5 books that she wishes were movies, and 5 books that she wishes never were. I have to agree with her on Eragon, one of the worst travesties done to a book EVER, but not on a few of the others. I enjoyed reading hers so much, I wanted to play to 🙂 So here’s my 5 and 5.
FIVE books that I’d trade a body part to be movies:
Nation by Terry Pratchett ~ It was fantastic, funny, had a great message, and it just lent itself to visualization. AND it’d have gorgeous South Pacific scenery that would be breath-taking on a big screen. I think that’d be worth a spleen, at least… I mean, what does that thing do, anyway?
The Stephanie Plum Novels by Janet Evanovich ~ I’d trade a kidney for a TV series of this. Grandma Mazur, in my living room, every week. Oh, that would almost make up for the end of LOST!
Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism by Georgia Byng ~ It’d be worth a lung lobe just to watch a gummy Miss Adderstone use her false teeth like castanets. And I think they could do a lot of fun stuff visually with the hypnotism. Oh, any movie can be improved by throwing a pug dog in the story 🙂
Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper ~ Okay, I’d trade a cornea for this one. El Mochito, the Daredevil, the blind Wonder Cat who defends his mom from the burglar, and whose heart is so big that he enraptures everyone who ever meets him… well, except for Lawrence. He was too smitten with Vashti. It’d be way better than that Marley & Me movie, and BEST OF ALL, the cat would still be alive at the end. Gawd, I hated the end of Marley. I don’t want to think about my pets dying. I know it’ll happen, but don’t put it in my “feel-good” movie. Marley & Me was like being a manic/depressive for 110 minutes… and I still gave it 5 stars at Netflix.
There should be a special place in HELL for the people who made thes FIVE books into movies:
The Inheritance Cycle (or the movie Eragon) by Christopher Paolini, obviously. A place in Hell where they’re forced to sit in front of a movie screen and endure inane details of a random person’s life, but NEVER get anything good or inspiring or accurate. Every good part was cut from the books and then they watered down the surface story, left even more out, and called it a movie. First off, ERAGON is the name of ONE book, and yet they made the whole book series in this one movie. Nasuada is one of my favorite characters, and she’s an important character, but she’s no where in the movie. What about Eragon’s training with the Elves? and where’s Solombum, the were-cat? Grr… horrible rendering.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards ~ That movie sucked so bad, I actually dropped my rating on the book after watching it. The book was complex and had depth, but the movie was just weak. Whoever made THAT drivel should be stripped of their sense of smell, have their taste buds seared off, be stricken color-blind and then spend eternity seated at a table loaded with all their favorite foods.
Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King ~ You know, the sad thing about this one is, SK himself approved the script. The book itself has 2 novella stories to it, one centered around playing Hearts at college, and the second where the guy’s an alien hiding out and other aliens come looking for him. But the movie has NONE of the Hearts to it, and what’s left of the Atlantis part is stripped of all the magic that made me love it. In the end, it’s just another lousy Stephen King book-to-movie.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ~ Honestly, it’s not the movie makers fault that it was a bad book-to-movie. There was NO WAY for them to translate all that goes on inside the narrator’s head, the nuances of the people, and the sense of fear/doom/loss/inadequacy that made up this book. It wasn’t JUST about him not standing up for his friend and allowing him to be hurt, but it’s about how that one moment was the still point that his whole life and identity grew out of. I think it’s fair to give the movie people a pardon on this one.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham ~ Okay, I’ve never read the book, so I can’t say whether they did a bad job of making the movie, but here is what I can say: After watching that movie, I would NEVER read the book. What’s more, I don’t want to go near a Virgina Woolfe book because of it. It gave me the impression that her books are very depressing and I’d want to kill myself after reading it. I might’ve read one of her books before that, I think I even have Mrs. Dalloway somewhere, but every time I think about her books, I think about drowning myself in the bathtub and it’s all because of that movie.
A couple books being made into movies that I’m reserving space on my WORST movie adaptations EVER mental list are:
The Giver by Lois Lowry ~ right now, it’s set to come out 2011, but that’ll probably get pushed back. It’s suppose to be done by the director who did the last few Harry Potter movies, so they’ve had to wait for those to wrap up. I just can’t see how this book could work as a movie for the same reasons The Kite Runner was a miss. There’s so much going on mentally, how can they show that on the screen?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy ~ Viggo Mortensen as the man… big, big plus. It could really be another Mad Max or Blade Runner and be a raging success, but it could just as easily tank hard. It’s another one of those mental books, though the scenery could be amazing. They HAVE to have the cellar scene in it, though, or it’ll be a deal breaker.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak ~ The book was perfection. A movie will screw it up. There’s NO WAY it can be done.
Oh, and by the way… Don’t forget to Trisha’s having a contest for this:
Giveaway:
If you make a post about this topic and leave a link in the comments section, I will 1) add you to the list below and 2) enter you into a giveaway for one of the following books:
…[Camel] comes to a stop in front of a stock car. “Joe! Hey, Joe!”
A head appears in the doorway.
“I got a First of May here. Fresh from the crate. Think you can use him?”
The figure steps forward onto the ramp. He pushes up the brim of a battered hat with a hand missing three of its fingers. He scrutinizes me, shoots an oyster of dark brown tobacco juice out the side of his mouth, and goes back inside.
Camel pats my arm in a congratulatory fashion. “You’re in, kid.”
“I am?”
“Yep. Now go shovel some shit. I’ll catch up with you later.”
–Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, page 33
Jacob Jankowski was one week and his final exams away from being a vet. Then tragedy hits, claiming the lives of his parents, and revealing that they’d mortgaged everything to keep their only child enrolled in Cornell University. The weight and guilt of this bears down on young Jacob, and he just walks off from school… and keeps on walking. When he finally stops for the night, he decides to jump aboard a passing train, only to find he’s just joined the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.
Vividly imaginitive and well-researched, Water for Elephantsby Sara Gruenis a compelling, character-driven tale with the feel of magic and wonder we feel as children going to the circus for the first time. It has a gritty realism to it and exposes the behind-the-scenes working and stratification of classes of the travelling circus. Bosses, freaks, an exotic menagerie, performers, clowns and dwarfs, working men and roustabouts… in that order. Everyone has a history, and a pervasive loneliness binds them all together.
I was enrapt by both the writing and the story in Water for Elephants. Gruen, a female writer, captures the male perspective amazingly well. The story takes place in two timelines: Young Jacob at 23 and joining the circus, and the elderly Jacob, who is either 91 or 93 (he can’t remember anymore), in an assisted living facility, dealing with the emotions of being left behind -by his kids and his deceased wife- in a place where there’s baby food to eat, your neighbor poops his pants, and your desires and opinions are discounted and ignored. I was carried along through the story, and it was over before I even knew it.
My name is Towner Whitney. No, that’s not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.
I am a crazy woman… That last part is true.
My little brother, Beezer, who is kinder than I, says the craziness is genetic. We’re from five generations of crazy, he says, as if it were a badge he’s proud to wear, though he admits that I may have taken it to a new level.
…My mother, May, for example, is a walking contradiction in terms. A dedicated recluse who (with the exception of her arrests) hasn’t left her home on Yellow Dog Island for the better part of twenty years, May has nevertheless managed to revive a ling-defunct lace-making industry and to make herself famous in the process. She has gained considerable notoriety for rescuing abused women and children and turning their lives around, giving the women a place in her lace-making business and home-educating their children. All this from a raging agoraphobic who gave one of her own children to her barren half sister, Emma, in a fit of generosity because, as she said at the time, there was a need, and besides, she had been blessed with a matching set.
–The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry, pages 3-4
In Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader, Towner Whitney lets the reader know from the start that she is an untrustworthy narrator. Hospitalized after having suffered from depression and hallucinations at the age of 17, she has memory gaps caused from the shock-therapy she’d received as part of treatment. She tells of her family’s gift of fortunetelling by reading lace, of her mother’s “generosity” in giving her twin sister to her Aunt Emma when they were born, and of the subsequent abuse her sister received from her adoptive father, Cal Boynton.
After being gone from Salem, Mass. for over a decade, Towner finds herself back in her Great Aunt Eva’s house, after Eva has gone missing. Visions of past happenings, as well as psychic dreams and visits from Eva’s ghost, fill Towner’s present. She struggles with second-guessing herself as to whether she is going crazy again or if she is really experiencing the surreal events. The disappearance of Angela Rickey, the girlfriend of Towner’s ex-Uncle, now the Reverend Cal, sets final events into motion that bring everything to a head with some surprising twists that will keep you guessing until the very end.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about The Lace Reader. For the most part, my issues aren’t really with the book itself, but with how it’s affected me after reading it. Some of the things in the story hits very close to home, and, combined with the bad sinus and chest cold I have, has caused me to have a few nightmares.
I really enjoyed and appreciated how Barry presented the way reading taught, how having this particular talent affects a person’s everyday life and the way they interact with people, and the way it is talked (or not talked) about within the family. I’ve never heard of lace reading, though the principal is easy enough to understand. I prefer tarot cards, but I’ve also read tea leaves, and all these are is a focal point to allow the vision to present itself. I grew up in a family of “gifted” people, and I myself struggled with the question of sanity. On page 320, Barry describes this perfectly:
You walk that line… between the real world and the world of the possible.
Towner says that this isn’t a line, but a crack into which she fell long ago.
The Lace Readerby Brunonia Barry is definitely a book meant to be read at an easy pace. If you rush through it, you will miss a lot of the nuances. I think I would have to say I liked it; it is a haunting story. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.
Tainted by Brooke Morgan
The Triumph of Deborah by Eva Etzioni-Halevy
Strange But True America: Weird Tales from All 50 States by John Hafnor
Red Letters by Tom Davis
Dragon House by John Shors
Book reviews, entertaining and humorous posts, as well as memes and giveaways, In the Shadow of Mt. TBR is a fun and informative place to relax in the shade!
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