Foiled By Illness

An idea for a blog post started percolating in my head when I finished Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot last week, but it requires a bit of research. Unfortunately, I came down with a cold on Friday and spent the past five days on my couch watching baseball and movies. I finally started to get my energy back today, but there were too many pressing items on my to do list to allow me to spend time researching for a blog post.

That was just a very long-winded way to say that I don't have anything to write about this week (but at least I'm actually getting this posted on Wednesday). I will make the time to do the research, though, and I will have something to write about next week.

Movie Adaptations

I learned last night that The Fault in Our Stars is being adapted into a movie. (My source was none other than John Green himself, too, so I think it's legit. When you stop to think about it, Twitter is amazing.) Green was pretty positive on Twitter and Tumblr, so I'm hopeful that they'll make a movie that lives up to the book.

The news got me thinking about other movie adaptations, especially adaptations of books I read last year (Stephenie Meyer's The Host and Shannon Hale's Austenland). Both The Host and Austenland are set to hit theaters this year, although I don't believe Austenland has a firm release date yet. I adore both of those novels and have been eagerly anticipating the movies from the moment I learned about them. (In fact, news of each film sent me running to my bookshelves so I could re-read the book in question.)

There are differences between them, though. I immediately agreed with the major casting decisions for Austenland because I love Keri Russell and JJ Feild. And who doesn't love Jane Seymour and Jennifer Coolidge? I was less thrilled with the casting of Saoirse Ronan as The Host's protagonists, Wanderer and Melanie. (Yep, one actor is playing two characters. It's intriguing, right?) In her defense, though, I've only ever seen her in Atonement and I strongly dislike her character in that film, so I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

The Host is coming out in just over a month and I am conflicted about it. I'll probably see it because I love the book, but I'm afraid I'm going to dislike the movie. The first and third trailers make it look like an action movie and it really shouldn't be. In particular, the third trailer (which was just released) features an alarming number of car stunts; I don't remember reading anything about a car crash or a high-speed chase in the book (and I've read the book five or six times). So, yeah, I'm worried I won't like the movie but I'll probably see it anyway.

In a way, it's funny that I'm so worried about The Host movie not being faithful to the novel because my favorite Jane Austen adaptations aren't the most faithful. Case in point, I adore the 2005 Pride & Prejudice with Keira Knightley and don't really like the 1995 BBC miniseries with Colin Firth. The miniseries taught me that there is such a thing as a movie adaptation that is too faithful to the original novel. (I know that a Janeite slamming the miniseries simply isn't done, but I have to be honest. The thing dragged at times and we need to acknowledge that.) I have always felt that the 2005 film captured the essence of the novel and hit all the high points even if the clothes were from the wrong period and the last scene was kind of dumb. And that's my concern with The Host; the trailers make me worry that they didn't capture the essence of the novel at all.

I will be sure to share my thoughts on the film version of The Host if when I see it.

Literary Crushes

I saw a post at HelloGiggles this week about literary crushes that struck a nerve. I've always been one to develop crushes on fictional characters. So not only do I have that in common with the writer, but she and I have crushes on several of the same characters. We even discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries at about the same time. Clearly, we should be friends. Before we become friends, though, I thought I would discuss a few of my literary crushes.

• Fitzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice - I've hinted at this but I love Mr. Darcy. He's not perfect, but he loves Lizzie so much that he goes above and beyond to save her sister's reputation. I can't say enough wonderful things about Mr. Darcy.
• Captain Frederick Wentworth, Persuasion - The letter he writes Anne at the end of the novel is one of the most swoon-worthy things I have ever read.
• Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre - He's so dark and brooding and tortured. (Those three words are like catnip to me when it comes to fictional characters.)
• Sirius Black, the Harry Potter series - I didn't even realize I had a crush on Sirius until I found myself bawling my eyes out at the end of Order of the Phoenix when he died. I knew I liked Sirius, but it took his death for me to realize it was a crush. He shares the dark, brooding, and tortured thing with Mr. Rochester, although with fewer crazy first wives locked in the attic.
• Joe Willard, the Betsy-Tacy series - Joe Willard was probably my first literary crush. I received a set of the first six Betsy-Tacy books as a kid and my desire to find out what happened with Betsy and Joe largely fueled my decade-long quest to find the rest of the books.
• Peeta Mellark, the Hunger Games series - I know that people have strong opinions on the issue of Peeta versus Gale, but I'm not one of those people. I am, however, Team Peeta. There's something so romantic about his unwavering devotion to Katniss and his selfless desire to give his life for hers.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Literary crushes are fun.

There's A Wednesday Every Week

And they really sneak up on you sometimes. Like today, for instance, when I realized I needed to write a blog post and I had nothing to write about. I need to do a better job of looking out for potential blog post topics. One would think it wouldn't be that hard considering I only do this once a week. But it appears that it was beyond me this week.

Or it was.

I was watching tonight's episode of The Americans (which I am really enjoying thus far) and Keri Russell's character called Ronald Reagan insane or a madman or something like that. I instantly agreed with her. And then I started wondering how much of that was due to Drift. Admittedly, I've never been a fan of Reagan, but I didn't start thinking of him as crazy until I read Maddow's book. It was interesting to find my opinion of Ronald Reagan (or at least my opinion of his Cold War rhetoric) agree with that of a (fictional) KGB spy.

Happy Anniversary

I don't mean to sound smug, but I'm really impressed with my sense of timing right now. It is really quite something.

In my post from two weeks ago I discussed re-reading all of Jane Austen's novels last summer because she is my favorite author. Shortly after writing that I discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which became the subject of last week's post. After getting caught up with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries I felt a very strong pull to re-read Pride and Prejudice because I just wasn't getting enough Mr. Darcy in the series, so I did.

I finished Pride and Prejudice on Sunday. The remarkable thing isn't that I read my favorite book in six days, but that Pride and Prejudice was published 200 years ago Monday and I'd had no idea such a big anniversary was coming up when I decided to read the book in six days. I found out about the anniversary shortly after I woke up on Monday (who says you can't learn anything on Twitter?) and I would've dropped everything and started reading Pride and Prejudice in celebration of the anniversary if I hadn't just finished it the day before. See, timing.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the British Library for tweeting a link to this delightful article about Pride and Prejudice's 200th anniversary on Monday morning. I highly recommend it.

How Did I Miss This?

In last week's non-YA book recommendation post I mentioned my love of Jane Austen novels and briefly noted that Pride and Prejudice is my favorite. That being said, I am horrified that I only discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries last week, especially because the series was created by Hank Green, brother of my new favorite YA author, John Green.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as I just implied, is a Web series and an updated re-telling of Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie Bennet in the series is a grad student studying mass communications who started a video blog as part of her thesis project. She has two sisters, Jane and Lydia, an overbearing (and apparently Southern) mother, and a father who is pretty hands-off. Her video blog is in the confessional, girl-sitting-in-front-of-her-computer-in-her-bedroom style even though her best friend Charlotte Lu, a wannabe filmmaker, films and edits them.

Lizzie's video blog might have been pretty boring if a rich med student named Bing Lee hadn't bought a house in the neighborhood just before she started it.

Lizzie isn't the only character we've seen, though. There's been quite a lot of her sisters, Jane and Lydia (in the series Mary Bennet is their cousin and Kitty Bennet is Lydia's pet cat - how cute is that?), and Charlotte Lu (Charlotte Lucas in the book). We've also seen Bing Lee (Charles Bingley in the book), Caroline Lee (Caroline Bingley in the book), George Wickham, Ricky Collins (William Collins in the book), Fitz Williams (Colonel Fitzwilliam in the book), Gigi Darcy (Georgiana Darcy in the book), and, of course, William Darcy (Fitzwilliam Darcy in the book). Other characters mentioned but not seen are Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and (Lady) Catherine de Bourgh.

As someone who has read Pride and Prejudice at least six times and watched the Keira Knightley movie more times than I can count, I really love seeing how the writers update the story. For instance, Mr. Collins is no longer a clergyman, but is now a guy with a start-up Web video company. And Catherine de Bourgh is the venture capitalist who is the primary backer of his venture. Furthermore, the major characters all have online lives complete with Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. (In fact, I discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries through Tumblr.) I haven't become immersed enough in the story to follow any of the characters on Twitter (yet), but I have seen a few tweets and it's enough to tell me that Twitter is used to expand the story rather than just promote the series.

I watched every episode of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries in the last week and now I am all caught up. The downside of that, though, is that I have to wait for the next episode. The episodes are no more than six minutes long, which allowed me to watch a lot of them in one sitting, but I won't be able to do that with new episodes any more. All things considered, though, I'm glad I'm caught up. And even more glad that I discovered this gem of a Web series.

Book Recommendations: Not YA Edition

What do you call books that aren't YA books? I don't like calling them "adult" books because that seems to imply that the books in question are x-rated. Trust me, I'm not recommending Fifty Shades of Grey. I actually read Fifty Shades of Grey last year, too, but I would never recommend it to anyone because it's terrible; it's poorly written and has a boring narrator. In other words, it reads like the erotic Twilight fan fiction it started out as. But I digress wildly; the point of this post is to recommend books not tear them down.

• Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - I decided to lump these together so I wouldn't end up writing six bullet points about my love for Jane Austen. I normally re-read an Austen novel or two every year, but last year I decided to read all six completed novels over the summer. It was a good decision. I've listed them here in the order in which I rank them, but I suggest you read or re-read them all and come up with your own ranking. Austen's novels are also incredibly popular fodder for adaptations; I've seen great (and at least one terrible) movies of each of these books.
• All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey with Jane by Amy Elizabeth Smith - I used this book to put a bow on my Austen re-reading. Smith decided to take a sabbatical from her position as a university professor to travel through South America, holding impromptu Jane Austen reading groups in each country she visited. Part travelogue, part literary discussion - this book is a great read. I ended up reading it in two days. I think it helps to be familiar with the Austen novels Smith discussed with her groups (Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice), but it's not necessary; my mom also enjoyed this book and she isn't a Janeite.
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - I read this book for my YA class, but I'm including it here because it was never marketed as a YA book. When I finished this book (at 2 in the morning, mind you) I wrote a Facebook message to my old roommate who'd lent it to me that simply said, "The Book Thief. Holy crap." Frankly, I'm disappointed that it took me so long to read it (it was released in 2007). It took a little while for me to get used to the narrator's voice (in my defense, Death is kind of a strange narrator), but once I got the hang of it I was mesmerized by the story. So thanks, old roommate, for lending me this book :)

I also enjoyed Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner. Somehow I'm always a year or two behind when reading Weiner's novels even though she's one of my favorite authors.