Did Baz Lurhmann’s Great Gatsby adaptation leave you feeling a little disappointed? Then consider Kate Kelsall’s short list of “utterly compelling cinematic adaptations” to be just what the doctor ordered.
“The Book Was Better.” Or Was It?
Teach Yourself Italian
Recommended Reading: This essay by Jhumpa Lahiri on language and translation, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her collection of stories The Interpreter of Maladies.
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Carrots: Lies and Truth
When I was young, my mother always told me I should eat my carrots so my vision would improve. For twenty four years, I’ve obeyed. But now it seems I’ve been living a lie all this time. (Bonus carrot link: the most common type used to be purple, but orange was normalized to please the Dutch monarchy.)
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Hits and Misses
"You’d be hard-pressed to find a book that was at once so bold in style and ambitious in structure and so much fun to read." The Guardian asks indie publishers about the books that made their year, including Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue (whose own Year in Reading you can find here).
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Greatest Geek Books
These are the nine greatest geek books of all time, according to Wired readers.
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Writer as Painter
“The past fascinates me obsessively, I suppose, because it’s such a strange phenomenon. The past was the present at some point, and it was just as boring as the present. What makes it so important? What gives it that luminous, exalted quality where it becomes the past?” John Banville addresses these and many other heady questions in his new novel, The Blue Guitar.
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Unfortunately, no mention of Blade Runner.
It’s tempting to make comparisons between a novel and its movie adaptation, but print and film are two disparate media. Each can do what the other cannot. Each has to be taken on its own terms, with its strengths and limitations. More on that here, with examples from Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day,’ Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ and others: http://www.praguerevue.com/#!stirring-words-moving-images-when-novels-become-movies/cug1
Speaking of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ here is Robert Towne, one of Hollywood’s most revered script writers (Chinatown, Shampoo etc) on why he steered clear of screen adaptations of Gatsby: https://twitter.com/ScottFeinberg/status/316836677664534528/photo/1