Tag Archives: Looking for Alaska

Books to Read Before the Movie Comes Out

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9781594633669_p0_v4_s192x300 After a fun discussion of Paula Hawkins’ wild mystery The Girl on the Train today at one of my book clubs, we all wondered how Emily Blunt would portray the voyeur Rachel as an ex-pat in New York City riding the train in her old neighborhood.  Many of us agreed this Hitchcockian thriller was a book made for playing on the big screen. The movie comes out in October.  If you haven’t yet read the book, the surprise ending will really be a treat for you.

Other books to movies to watch for:

JoJo Moyes’ tear jerker Me Before You comes to life in June.

Roald Dahl’s The BFG (as in the big friendly giant who eats leftover oatmeal from your dirty dishes) is in theaters on July 1st.

M.L. Stedman’s  Light Between Oceans  emerges in September.

Tom Hanks is back in another Dan Brown book to movie – The Inferno – in October.

If you can’t bear to muddle through Philip Roth, you can catch his 1998 Pulitzer prize winning American Pastoral on the screen in October.

9781594746031_p0_v2_s192x300   Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a spooky gift on Christmas.

And look for two more with 2016 release dates but no months yet:

  • Diane Ackerman’s true story of saving the animals in Warsaw – The Zookeeper’s Wife.
  • John Green’s Looking for Alaska

Click on the red titles to read my reviews.

 

John Green, Jane Austen and Famous Last Words

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The recent controversy over a John Green book in Florida piqued my interest, so when I found another of his books -“Looking for Alaska” – for $4.99 on my iPad, I bought and read it on my next flight. Green uses his own experiences as fodder for an inside glimpse of high schoolers at boarding school. This young adult book was entertaining, thoughtful, and – yes – it made me cry. Probably more appropriate for high schoolers than middle school grade, yet these days fourth graders seem to know more about sex than most of us did as college freshman.

Pudge, the hero of the story, collects the dying words of the famous, and Green sprinkles the story with quotes – two define the characters and their futures:

“I go to seek the Great Perhaps”…Francois Rabelais

“How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”…Simon Bolivar

With famous last words on my mind, I attended the matinee of “Sense and Sensibility” at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. In the opening scene, father Dashwood responds to his insensitive son’s query about his health with “I’m dying…” and soon after nods off. Good last lines are hard to come by.

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