Books to Screen (Movies, TV, Streaming)

The best movies always start out as books! Here's what to look for streaming and in theaters:

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden


I wasn't sure about this at first because it seemed very cliche and predictable, HOWEVER, the action picked up and the plot swung in several wildly different directions. Quite the compulsive read! 

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic story about a security bot who hacks its compliance program and goes rogue. Honestly, one of the most relatable and likeable protagonists I've come across in a while.
This is what happens when the humans it's assigned to protect discover that it's rogue:

"Gurathin hesitated. 'It's downloaded seven hundred hours of entertainment programming since we landed. Mostly serials. Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.' He shook his head, dismissing it. 'It's probably using it to encode data for the company. It can't be watching it, not in that volume; we'd notice.'
I snorted. He underestimated me.
Ratthi said, 'The one where the colony's solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?'
Again, I couldn't help it. I said, 'She didn't kill him, that's a f**king lie.'
Ratthi turned Mensah. 'It's watching it.'"

We so often read about AI that is lofty and boringly, intellectually logical. Or out to dominate or extinguish all human life. But what about an AI who only wants to discover what it wants? And what if what it wants is sort of what we all want? I cannot wait to pick up book #2 in this series!

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
This beautiful novel, which explores every possible permutation of familial love, has no villains but plenty of tragedy. Beth and Frank are a young married couple who have seen the worst: loss of their 9 year old son to an accident on their farm. When Beth's first love, Gabriel, moves back into the family manor, freshly divorced and with his own young son in tow, the wheels are set in motion for life-changing events.
The story moves back and forth between Beth and Gabriel's youthful romance, Beth and Frank's current life together, and Before (life before the loss of Bobby). Oh, my heart! Clare Leslie Hall convincingly shows us that love will cause us plenty of pain but, in the end, it is the only thing that will save us. Perfect for a book club discussion!!!

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
I must admit, I haven't been reading many challenging books this fall. Instead, I've been going for the cozy, warm read. Remarkably Bright Creatures certainly fits that description as it features a tidy little woman in a tidy story with a very neat ending. Tova is an elderly woman, alone after the death of her husband from cancer, and mourning the disappearance of her son 30 years ago. She fills her extra time with a group of friends who call themselves the Knit-Wits and a job cleaning the local aquarium. Interspersed with Tova's story is a narrative by the aquarium's aging octopus, Marcellus. Marcellus is, of course, much cleverer than the humans give him credit for, and he is able to connect the dots on events unfolding around him much better than the oblivious and self-absorbed humans. The magical realism of Marcellus' voice is sweet and really helps pull Tova's story together. However, as I said, don't go looking for any revelatory concepts about life here, just be satisfied with getting to know some very endearing characters.

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
What does it mean to be an Expendable? It means that, when colonizing new planets, ships can only carry so many humans. They need biologists, doctors, botanists, security, pilots, etc. But, there are some dangerous jobs in space and when landing on unknown worlds, so each crew needs some...redundancy. A crew member that they don't mind losing. In Mickey's case, he is that redundancy. He has no usable job skills and so joins a crew as an Expendable-talk about dirty jobs! In case of death, his body has been mapped and his memory uploaded so that they can just print out a new Mickey and carry on. And the law is ironclad: there can only be one copy of each Expendable at one time, or they all get chucked down the corpse hole and a new copy is made.
You'd think he'd be used to dying by the time he wakes up as Mickey7, but you would be quite wrong. Even worse, when Mickey7 finds out that his death has been reported prematurely and there's already a Mickey8, that's when the trouble starts. Not to mention that the cause of his latest death are the inhabitants of the planet they're trying to colonize, and they don't play well with others. Fantastic book, soon to be a loosely adapted movie .

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Truly one of the best books I've read in a while, a lyrical chronicle of the life of Count Alexander Rostov after he is sentenced to house arrest at the Metropol Hotel by the new Soviet government following the Revolution of 1917.
Erudite and gentlemanly, Count Rostov "masters his circumstances so that they don't master him", showing an elegant adaptability that saves his life as well as his soul. Alexander is reprieved from a death sentence by a pro-Revolution poem he had published in his youth, but he is declared a non-person and is never again to leave the doors of the Metropol, a hotel that has always catered to the rich, powerful, and aristocratic. In his new situation, Rostov lives in the attic and leaves behind the perks of his earlier life, while retaining his decency, charm, and joie de vive. A wonderful and uplifting example of how to survive and even thrive under terrible circumstances, and also a beautiful story of how the love we share with others in any iteration-romantic, paternal, fraternal,etc-is our saving grace. 

 
American Animals: A True Crime Memoir by Eric Borsuk
A cautionary tale about the perils of being young, male, bored, and lacking a moral compass. Eric recounts his part in the heist of some rare books from the Transylvania College Library in Lexington Kentucky in 2004, and it's shocking how close they come to pulling off a relatively sophisticated crime. The four college students commit a fatal error in the execution, which is nothing compared with the errors in judgment they make in coming up with the plan in the first place. The deeper question is how and why a group of boys with promising futures and stable home lives took such a dark turn into felonious behavior.
Check out the excellent docudrama, now showing on Netflix: American Animals . 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
The Richardsons are a family living in Shaker Heights, OH in the '90s. The suburb was originally built in the early 1900s to attain a black and white kind of perfectionism, based on rigid rules. Although life is fairly good here, it is also pedantic and predictable. Elena Richardson, the matriarch, is the living embodiment of everything that Shaker Heights stands for, which works out okay with her first three kids, but sets her at odds with her youngest, the impetuous and fiery Izzy.
A catalyst enters the picture when Elena rents an apartment to an artist named Mia, a tumbleweed of a person who brings with her a teenaged daughter, Pearl, and a past loaded with secrets. Pearl finds the Richardsons' lifestyle intoxicating after the ragtag existence she's accustomed to. Lexie, Moody, and Trip Richardson all become entangled with Pearl, Izzy is fascinated with Mia, Elena struggles to control everyone and everything, and the swirling mass of churned up emotion will result in huge life changes for all of them.
Desire, envy, and jealousy are well-expressed in this story, but there is very little true warmth or love between characters. A side story about a white couple attempting to adopt a Chinese baby who was abandoned by her mother is difficult to empathize with because the adoptive mother is cold and entitled and the biological mother seems unable to take care of herself, let alone an infant.
The point of the book seems to be to highlight the difficulties experienced in the mother-daughter relationship, and how sometimes those we are closest to are the ones we know the least. Perhaps a little of 'love conquers all' thrown in there, too. However, the story left me despairing for women everywhere, because if these are typical relationships for females, then we have a lot of work to do.
 

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys 
When the U.S.S.R. took control over Lithuania, many thousands of 'political insurgents' were sentenced to imprisonment in Siberian Gulags.  Less well-known is that over 100,00 Lithuanian women and children were exiled to remote work camps under horrendous conditions.  This is the story of Lina, a girl whose father is arrested by the Soviets right before she, her mother, and brother are themselves deported to a work camp. Despairing of ever having a normal life again, Lina uses her unique artistic style to  creates pictures that she hopes will reach her father, wherever he is.  The descriptions of life in the camps is an eye-opener -there really seems to be no limits on what people will do to others who they perceive to be different than themselves.  More than that, this is a story about hope and love, and how very important they are, even when they are the hardest things to come by. The tragic cruelties dealt out behind the Iron Curtain by the Soviets in post-WWII  are starting to fade from memory, which is an excellent reason to read this book -lest such a horrible part of history be forgotten and repeated.
  "Ashes in the Snow"


 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
In the past, I have found Donna Tartt to be an uneven writer. The characters who inhabited "The Secret History" were so vile, pompous and self-important that I would not have picked up "The Goldfinch" if it weren't for the Pulitzer. According to critics who matter, for a novel to be deemed high literature, it must be authentic on all levels -emotional, intellectual, etc. While "The Goldfinch" is a fascinating story, venerated voices at, among others, The New Yorker, find it to be 'unconvincing'. This sentiment puzzles me greatly. Tartt's style of writing appears childish to them -but the story follows a boy from the age of 13 through young adulthood, so...of course it reeks of adolescent mindset. If a story captures something about another's life experience and can impart it in such a way that the reader inhabits that life, then that is great literature.

Having spouted off about THAT, let me say that Tartt allowed me to inhabit the life of a boy named Theo Decker. Theo lives with his mother in New York City when a fateful trip to the Museum to see a particular favorite painting of his mother's results in her death and his life being torn and reassembled in such a way as to make it unrecognizable. This event sets Theo off on a dissolute path as he mourns the loss of his mother. Where previously Theo was a boy who teetered on the edge of delinquency (he and his mother actually are stopping at the museum on their way to his school to discuss his imminent suspension), he evolves into a man who lives without moral absolutes, numbly swimming along in a sea of gray. Theo spends time looking for something good and true, but only finds it in a painting, the eponymous "Goldfinch".

Boris, a friend that Theo makes along the way, keenly discerns the edge between black and white -and invariably chooses the darker way. Fate seems to dictate that Theo's way will not be a smooth one, more so because he doesn't seem to understand the link between action and outcome. But Theo does understand love and beauty. In the end, is this enough? Also, the question: if you are true to yourself and follow your heart, as all the best axioms of the modern age urge us to do, what if your heart's desire leads you to dishonorable, self-destructive behavior? (Vanity Fair's review: It’s Tartt—But Is It Art?)

Coming in October 2019

FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury     
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
Now Streaming

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. When Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win—and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.

Released March 2018

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: if he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing, will be compromised.

Released March 2018 (as Love Simon)