{"id":6893,"date":"2017-11-14T07:22:38","date_gmt":"2017-11-14T12:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6893"},"modified":"2017-12-06T08:40:42","modified_gmt":"2017-12-06T13:40:42","slug":"a-fresh-crop-of-movies-based-on-2017-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6893","title":{"rendered":"A Fresh Crop of Movies Based on 2017 Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Los<\/a>

photo: James Gubera, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

I wish a bang-up movie would be made from James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, so I could watch it and no longer feel guilty I\u2019ve never read this nearly 700-page classic. OK, I\u2019m a heretic.<\/p>\n

As for lesser works, this same time-saving compulsion makes me glad Paula Hawkins\u2019s new book, Into the Water<\/em>, is among the 2017 novels being prepped for the tv or the movies. Having seen the film of her so-so debut, The Girl on the Train<\/a><\/em>, I don\u2019t want to spend more than two hours on the new story, if that.<\/p>\n

Shayna Murphy<\/a> in the BookBub Blog has compiled a list of 22 recent books en route to screens large and small. No surprise that Stephen King\u2019s 700+ page Sleeping Beauties<\/em>, written with his younger son Owen, is on the list, despite tepid reviews<\/a>. Ditto James Patterson and David Ellis\u2019s Black Book<\/em>, whose protagonists and plot Kirkus Reviews<\/a> deemed \u201cmore memorable than Patterson\u2019s managed in quite a while.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m delighted that Reese Witherspoon\u2019s production company snapped up Celeste Ng\u2019s Little Fires Everywhere<\/em> for television. Like her remarkable earlier mystery, Everything I Never Told You<\/a><\/em>, it\u2019s about family secrets under the deceptively placid surface of suburbia. I\u2019m also excited about plans for a movie of Artemis<\/em>\u2014another futuristic tale by Andy Weir, whose book The Martian<\/a><\/em> translated so effectively to film in 2015\u2014and George Saunders\u2019s Lincoln in the Bardo<\/em>, set in our Civil War past, which won this year\u2019s Man Booker Prize. I hope Hollywood doesn\u2019t make a hash of them.<\/p>\n

Some critics considered Don Winslow\u2019s disappointing book The Force<\/a><\/em> to have been a victim of early interest in making a movie out of it. The characters turned to cardboard and the complexity of his much better The Cartel<\/em> went out the window. In his story, Manhattan reveals itself to be top-to-bottom corrupt, unbelievably so. And, yes, that movie is<\/em> coming 3\/1\/19. Maybe playwright David Mamet can save it.<\/p>\n

Two fine literary authors are in the movie mix: Alice McDermott for The Ninth Hour<\/em> and Jennifer Egan for Manhattan Beach. <\/em>About this book, Alexandra Schwartz<\/a> writes that, to Egan, 9\/11 felt \u201clike the end of something\u2014the United States\u2019 sense of itself as king of the world\u201d and the new book, set in Brooklyn in the 1930s and 40s, was a backwards look to \u201cwhat was the beginning of that something.\u201d My book group loved Fredrik Backman\u2019s A Man called Ove<\/em>, which I didn\u2019t have a chance to read (or see on film), and now a television series is planned for his book, Beartown<\/em>.<\/p>\n

All in all, some tantalizing screen-time coming up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wish a bang-up movie would be made from James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses, so I could watch it and no longer feel guilty I\u2019ve never read this nearly 700-page classic. OK, I\u2019m a heretic. As for lesser works, this same time-saving … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Fresh Crop of Movies Based on 2017 Books - From Jennifer Egan to Celeste Ng to Andy Weir to George Saunders. Get the popcorn ready!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,57,104],"tags":[218,137],"class_list":["post-6893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-movies","category-the-morgue","tag-hollywood","tag-man-booker-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Nb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6895,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893\/revisions\/6895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}