Category: Book To Movie Challenge

2014 Book to Movie Challenge Wrap-Up

December 29, 2014 Blogger Events, Book To Movie Challenge 6

poster32014 is coming to a close and with it, the Book to Movie Challenge. This year we had 87 reviews entered with the most reviews coming from my co-host, Sergio at Tipping My Fedora , including the most recent review added of The Midwich Cuckoos. Although I didn’t do a very good job of reviewing the book to movie books I read, one  I particularly enjoyed was All You Need Is Kill (adapted as The Edge of Tomorrow). I also liked the movie adaptations of Divergent (even better than the book, I thought) and The Book Thief (not as good as the book, but still a good movie). For those of you who are interested in continuing with the challenge next year, I’d like to invite you to consider hosting the challenge. Personally, I’m too busy writing the first paper of my thesis in January to want to be starting hosting a challenge right now and it sounds like Sergio will be scaling back next year as well. We both had a lot of fun hosting this year and appreciate you all participating!

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All You Need Is Kill Read-Along

April 19, 2014 Blogger Events, Book To Movie Challenge 2

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I’m super excited to announce this read-along! This will be the first read-along I’ve hosted and I think All You Need Is Kill has a lot of great things going for it. It’s a work of translated fiction (originally written in Japanese), which is something I’d love to read more of to experience a diversity of writing styles and to get a feel for different cultures. It’s part of a manga genre targeted at young men, so I’m excited to bring some diversity to the readership of this book. It’s also being made into a movie, so it’s the perfect book for participants in my Book to Movie challenge to pick up. And it’s a short book, clocking in at just 200 pages with large text, so it shouldn’t be too hard to fit in even for those of us with full reading schedules. Speaking of schedules, here’s the schedule for the read-along: Read more »

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Book To Movie Challenge: First Quarter Check-In

April 2, 2014 Blogger Events, Book To Movie Challenge 18

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Hi all and welcome to the first Book to Movie Challenge Check-In! I hope you’re all having a great time reading and watching so far this year. As always, my co-host Sergio of Tipping My Fedora is rocking this challenge, with 15 book to movie adaptations reviewed already! Since I love Agatha Christie, one of his reviews which I enjoyed the most was Marple: Endless Night. This first review not from the two of us hosting the challenge was a review of Gone Girl from Wendy at Wensend. Similarly, the latest non-host review was All Quiet on the Western Front from Bettina at Impressions Notebook. Personally, I’ve made it through two book/movie pairs: Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Monuments Men. I’ve also read Sharp Objects for my book club, but it was so dark, I might be too nervous to watch the movie! Below is the link-up for continuing to add your reviews in 2014. Thanks so much for joining in on this fun challenge! Read more »

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The Monuments Men – A Bookish Movie Review

February 27, 2014 Book To Movie Challenge, History, Narrative Non-Fiction, non-fiction 12

Monuments Men I liked the book of The Monuments Men enough to go see this in theaters, which is not something I often do. I ended up enjoying it pretty well, but was a bit disappointed in the changes made from the book. I liked seeing the story brought to life. Even the helpful cast list the author had is no match for seeing living, breathing people when it came to engaging my sympathy for a large number of characters. In both the book and the movie, the humorous and the serious mixed  in sometimes jarring ways. Saving art is important! And oh by the way, here’s a sad story about people dying to make you question the value of art. I found the juxtaposition stranger in the movie than in the book though, perhaps because the trailers I watched made me expect a light-hearted story. Read more »

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Darkly Dreaming Dexter – A Bookish TV Show Review

February 9, 2014 Book To Movie Challenge, Fiction, Thriller 12

Dexter-Season-2-1024x762The TV show version of Dexter does a great job capturing the feel of the book, especially Dexter’s personality. As in the book, he comes across as both both creepily likeable and morally ambiguous. From watching the first two episodes and googling a bit, it seems as though the first season of this show is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter.   There were plenty of direct quotes and so far I didn’t notice any major plot changes. However, Dexter’s relationship is played up a bit, becoming more complicated and more romantic. Another change is that the pace of his vigilante murders is increased to keep each episode interesting. The whole season is the plot of just one short book after all! Even though the show becomes completely separate from the plot of the books after the first season, I would guess that most fans of the books will like the show and vice versa.

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The Book to Movie Challenge Begins!

January 4, 2014 Book To Movie Challenge 15

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Hello all and welcome to the 2014 Book to Movie Challenge! And a special welcome to my new co-host this year, Sergio of Tipping my Fedora 🙂 If you haven’t signed up yet and would like to get in on all this book to movie goodness, you can join any time here. If you’ve already joined and want to add your reviews, the linky is below. If you’re looking for a first book to read, I’d like to invite you to join a Monuments Men read-a-long I’m co-hosting with Jennifer at Book-alicious Mama. Sign-ups are here. Thanks for joining in and remember… the only real rule of this challenge is to have fun!

[inlinkz_linkup id=357541]

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Orange is the New Black – A Bookish TV Show Review

December 26, 2013 Book To Movie Challenge, Memoir, non-fiction 14

Orange is the New BlackThe TV adaptation of Orange is the New Black was both better and worse than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised by the perfection of the casting. Not all of the characters were exactly as I imagined them, but they were all instantly identifiable. I was even more surprised and impressed by how much more relatable Piper was in the TV show. As much as I adore books, I often find movies more emotionally moving. Sorrow, love, violence… intense situations and emotions almost always affect me more viscerally on the screen. Orange is the New Black  was no exception. Seeing Piper and her husband react to the beginning of her jail sentence made me even more empathetic than reading about it. In the book, Piper often seemed like a dispassionate observer of her situation. Despite an internal monologue shared with the viewer, Piper seemed more immersed in her situation in the show. Read more »

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Book to Movie Challenge Update

December 12, 2013 Blogger Events, Book To Movie Challenge 11

poster3Today I have a couple of exciting updates for this year’s Book to Movie Challenge. This year for the challenge, Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed over 20 books and their movie adaptations while I’ve been working pretty hard to meet my goal of 12. So I thought, you know who should be co-hosting this challenge? Sergio. So I asked if he’d be interested and he said yes! That means that for two of the quarterly round-ups, Sergio will be doing posts updating you on how the challenge is going while I do the other two. Once the linky for adding reviews goes live next year, you’ll also be able to add reviews at a post on his blog as well as here at Doing Dewey.

Read more »

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World War Z – A Bookish Movie Review

December 10, 2013 Book To Movie Challenge, Fiction 6

world-war-z-posterAs many of you could probably tell just from the trailers, the movie version of World War Z is nothing like the book. Instead of a series of interviews detailing the scientific, political, and social details of a zombie plague, this is an action-packed continuous narrative starring stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt. I was very pleased that the ethnic diversity of the original story made it into the movie. I was equally disappointed by the fact that we no longer got much of the big picture of how the world slowly reacted to the plague. Instead, Brad Pitt and his family are caught almost completely unawares by an attack of fast moving zombies that convert victims into zombies in seconds to minutes. In addition to turning almost immediately, zombies are also identifiable by their creepy white eyes. I think this eliminated a rather interesting complication from the book. Most of the changes, however, seemed like the right choice to me. Following one character throughout made me much more invested in the story and the solution to the zombie plague, while implausible, was also more clever than the brute force approach adopted in the book. Overall, this is not the book and I’m almost not sure they should have kept the name, but it was a great movie that was at least as good as the book, possibly better.

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Book to Movie Challenge: The Sequel

December 6, 2013 Book To Movie Challenge 56

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Although there will be a wrap-up post for the 2013 challenge later, I’d like to thank everyone who participated for making this challenge such fun that I can’t wait to host it again next year. Plus, can you believe all of the movies based on books that came out this year?! Doing this challenge, I’ve been amazed at the number of book to movie adaptations there are and I’ve loved seeing some great books brought to life on screen.

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