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 🙂
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 »
 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 »
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.
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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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.
Hi all! I can’t believe it’s October already and we’re three-quarters of the way through the Book to Movie Challenge! I’m finally starting to get caught up, having read eight books and watched six movies (review of The Count of Monte Cristo movie to come). So far, I think my favorite movie was The King’s Speech and my favorite book was Sense and Sensibility. And now on to how everyone else is doing!
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