CGHS Library

Books to Film: The Hobbit (FIC Tolkien)

The Hobbit is interesting from start to finish. There are distinct differences between the book and movie, mostly because Peter Jackson, the director of the movie, adds bits from notes Tolkien left after his death to make the movie stretch into a trilogy. From what I have heard, people who have seen the first movie in the trilogy fall into three distinct categories: Tolkien fans who love the book and the movie, Tolkien fans who love the book and despise the movie as a matter of principle, clueless people who stumble into the movie having never read the book and find the movie slow and confusing. The movie critics are in a class by themselves and did not appreciate the movie much, mostly because it was just so much fun to deflate Peter Jackson. My view is that if expectations had not been so high, everyone would have thought The Hobbit was a great movie. I liked it lots, and the book is without peer.

The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design, and Visual Effects.

Between (FIC Warman)

The Seven Series (FIC Seven)

Read one. Read them all. You choose the order.

 

Improve Your Vocabulary

 

 

Fictional Libraries

Take a look at Ellyssa Kroski's 10 Fictional Libraries I'd Love to Visit. The following YouTube video is a clip from The Mummy. (I am still made at the detention supervisor in The Breakfast Club who parked the kids in the library without supervision so they could mess up the card catalog. That was back in the day when library catalogs had actual cards.)

Books to Film: Anna Karenina (FIC Tolstoy)

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Keira Knightly as Anna Karenina -- the movie was nominated for Oscars in Cinematography, Costume Design, Music, and Production Design.

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The book is about love, betrayal, and despair. Anna Karenina is a Russian novel, after all, and weighs in at over 800 pages. I read it in my "Russian Novel Phase" and liked it then, but that was so long ago that I don't remember much about the book and probably need to read it again. Most people will opt for the 129 minute movie. From the Oscar nominations, it sounds as if it is a lush visual experience, at the very least, though I have not yet seen it. 

Two New Books About Cars

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I recently purchased two new books about cars for the library. 

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The Corvette in Literature and Culture: Symbolic Dimensions of America's Sports Car (629.222 PAS) is full of sentences like, "Although culture dictates much of what characters in film, novels, and songs do, we have an inclination to forget that we are part of the cultural--phallogocentric, heteronormative, masculine, and so on--environment." This book will be firmly rejected by every single person in Council Grove and possibly by everyone in the entire state and in at least three states around us. You will think it's silly, and I don't blame you. All I can say is, "Librarians make mistakes too."

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I hope that Mustang Genesis: The Creation of the Pony Car (629.222 FRIA) will be much more to your taste. It is a straightforward history and while very few will read it for fun, it could be the basis for an interesting research paper, speech, or essay.