Happy Memorial Day everyone and welcome to Armchair BEA! This is my first Armchair BEA, so I’m excited to join in, do some reading and some cheering, and get to know all of the wonderful bloggers involved. Here are my answers to the introduction questions so you can get to know me a bit too 🙂
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 »
The 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.
Title:Â Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Author:Â Jeff Lindsay
Source:Â paperbackbookswap.com
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Review Summary:Â This was a fun read, but just too creepy for me!
Dexter is generally a nice guy except for one small thing: he’s a serial killer. Fortunately he only kills bad guys – people he knows without a doubt did something terrible but who the police can’t catch. His job as a blood spatter analyst for the police makes it easy to find victims. It also puts him right in the middle of a police investigation of some murders with an MO very much like his own. Dexter’s strange connection to the murders soon begins to make him question himself. Did he do it? Read more »
Lord of the Rings Read-a-long
I’m excited to re-read this trilogy! Especially since I picked up this beautiful, surprisingly slim anthology that includes all three book. Sign-ups are going on here and are hosted by Pages Unbound and Chasm of Books. Read more »
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!
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Title:Â Divergent
Author:Â Veronica Roth
Narrators:Â Emma Galvin
Rating (Story): ★★☆☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★★
In the world of Divergent, society is divided into five factions, each of which prize a particular virtue (intelligence, bravery, etc.). At age 16, children must choose which faction to belong to and changing factions means leaving all friends and family behind. Tris’s choice to leave the selfless faction for Dauntless is brutally hard and she has a secret to hide which will make things even harder. Read more »
Today 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.
As 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.
Title:Â World War Z
Author:Â Max Brooks
Narrators:Â Full cast (includes author and Nathan Fillion)
Rating (Story): ★★★☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★★
World War ZÂ is the story of the zombie war, told in a series of interviews with the survivors. One of my favorite things about this book was that it starts with the first infections and covers all the details you might possibly want to know about how a zombie outbreak would go down. We start by learning about what the disease is like from a medical perspective. Then we see how different countries reacted politically and eventually militarily to the outbreak. And finally, we get little snippets of how individuals survived. I loved how realistic and believable all these details made the story. I also adored the full cast narration. It was just perfect for this book. The only downside for me was the narrative style and the length of the book. The interview style narrative seemed lazy to me, with the interview questions interrupting the flow of the story and serving as an artificial mechanism to transition between different topics. Due to this narrative style and the short length of the book, I never got particularly attached to any of the characters in the story and the whole thing lacked emotional impact.
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