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We had a little bit of a Jaclyn Moriarty lovefest on Twitter yesterday (starting here, I think), which led to @rockinlibrarian sharing this link with me which led to me now sharing it with you:
First, my name. It is Jaclyn Moriarty. It’s a good name. You can remember it by thinking of Sherlock Holmes. I can't tell you how happy I am to have an arch-villain’s name. I wake up each morning and remember my name and a slow smile forms on my face. Then I get up and have breakfast.
Kneejerk reaction: suspicion and vague displeasure.
I feel like turning that book into a movie would be like turning, I dunno, the computer game Myst into a movie. Half of the fun of Griffin and Sabine is the active reader involvement.
Or, anyway, that's how I remember feeling when I read it one zillion years ago.
Los Angeles based independent production house, Renegade Films, announced today that they have acquired the rights to the epistolary novels, Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. The 1991, best-selling series, written and illustrated by Nick Bantock, will be adapted into a feature film that travels through the three novels: Griffin & Sabine, Sabine’s Notebook and The Golden Mean. It is the first time the Griffin & Sabine trilogy has been optioned for film.
Bantock is in favor of the project, and judging from this old interview, it sounds like he'd have had to be super-confident in Renegade to let the rights out of his hands.
As previously stated, I adored this book. Among its other perfections it has caused "You'd best tone that shit
down, son" to become a regular line in the Household of Doom, as
well as inspiring an uptick in quoting the nihilists from The Big Lebowski*.
I loved it for Greg, who—unlike many a boy in books about cancer—is not wise, thoughtful, mature, sweet, generous, or even all that nice, but is real, relatable, slappable**, and hilarious. I loved it for Earl, who is just plain wonderful—and who, even though Greg is so self-absorbed that he hardly even knows him, comes off as a real, believable person. A real, believable, hilarious person.
And I loved it for being a YA book about cancer that, in Greg's words:
So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don't feel like lying to you. She didn't have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn't fall in love.
Which isn't to say, of course, that life can't or doesn't ever go the other way (dying and falling in love and deep thoughts and so on), but books that tell stories like that are much more common than books that tell stories like this. At least, I can't think of another one along these lines. Then again, I do tend to avoid the Crying Books.
This one wasn't, by the way. A Crying Book. For me, at any rate.
As Greg is hugely interested in film—and hugely disinterested in
writing the book—he tends to switch up the format on a regular basis, so
it goes from prose to screenplay (the back and forths between Greg and
his mother KILLED ME) to lists (his Failed Girl Tactics are wonderful)
to pages of pure dialogue. I laughed all the way through it. Laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.
It's not going to work for everyone: as I said previously, Greg and Earl are remarkably profane and dirty-minded. But wait, there's more! Throughout the book, Greg complains about writing, about how bad his book is, about how much he'd rather be doing something other than writing, and calls the readers dumb for continuing to read... which, I'd imagine, would go over not-so-well with some readers. And, of course, again, he's self-absorbed and decidedly not empathetic or thoughtful. Some people will HATE him.
But some, like me, will love him.
____________________________________________
*It was this passage, about Greg and Earl's obsession with Klaus Kinski's Aguirre, the Wrath of God that did it. (Keep in mind that they were ten years old at the time):
"The young nihilists," Dad called us. "What are nihilists?" "Nihilists believe that nothing has any meaning. They believe in nothing." "Yeah," Earl said. "I'm a nihilist." "Me, too," I said. "Good for you," Dad said, grinning. Then he stopped grinning and said, "Don't tell your mom."
That, combined with the fact that they are later obsessed with the movie Withnail and I, that there's a chapter called "I Put the "Ass" in "Casanova"", and that Chapter One begins, "So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks" might serve as a good barometer for the tone of this book.
It occurs to me that this has become a ridonkulusly long footnote, so I'm going to head back up to the top of the page.
**I don't know what you're talking about. That's totally a word.
How to write the Great American Novel: The best novel to come out of Williamsburg was obviously A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That was The Pre-ironic Brooklyn Age. And while Brooklyn might be a great place for other artists, poets and painters to live and interact and steal from each other, all your sad little Brooklyn novels end up sounding about the same. Novelists in packs are like Smurfs, except drunk and bitter. Oh, he keeps going. And it's hilarious.
Holy crow, I had no idea there were so many YA/children's book bloggers out there. Most on the list are new to me, but the second I saw Adam Schweiss of Hitting on Girls in Bookstores on the list, I knew where my vote was going.
Chief Inspector George Suttle is abruptly disturbed from yet another night of not sleeping by an intruder in his house.
One of the Restless has gained entry, and while the majority of his household survives, sadly, his housekeeper does not. Even worse—well, depending on your perspective—one of the maids, the adorable Louisa, has been bitten.
But the Chief Inspector, as one of the Young—Sunlight is not a problem, provided one uses zinc paste and wears a hat. And the latter is only good breeding, after all.—is able to arrange for her to take the cure.
Such is life in the Deadwardian age.
Now, CI George Suttle, the last of London's homicide detectives, has a new case: one of the Young has been murdered. Meaning that someone has managed to murder that which was not alive...
Artwork?: Eh. It's clear and totally serviceable, but not faintworthy.
Storyline?: Well, it's the first in a miniseries, so even though not a whole lot happens, it introduces the world and the characters and the basic plot. AND HOO BOY I LOVE THE WORLD, what with the zombies and the vampires and the Edwardian era. And I'm always a sucker for a murder mystery.
Read the next one?: OH MY GOD YES. Now, granted, this is ridiculously Up My Alley, but still. FUN FUN FUN.
Judy Blume interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation.
Sam's ClubpulledThe Brick Bible from shelves, hilariously, because it was a little too faithful to the original source material. Heh. Anyway, obviously, it all came about when some people made the faulty assumption that Legos = Children's Book, and then complained about it when they discovered the sex and violence and whatnot. There also seems to also be some confusion about whether or not Sam's Club (it seems to be a they-said/they-said situation) had a hand in a dozen or so of the original images from the author's website being excised from the print version to begin with...
After all, I don't think there's really an argument about whether or not Tintin in the Congo is racist or not -- the argument is about how to deal with it.
Twenty-five years after its original publication, “Maus” continues to provoke. Mr. Spiegelman recalls an incident in Germany in 1987, when a reporter barked at him, “Don’t you think that a comic book about the Holocaust is in bad taste?”
The author responded, “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”
I get that Darin Strauss was totally upfront about his snobbery and that yes, all of this is a revelation to him, but articles like thisdo get a tad stale.
Any other recommendations? (Besides Preacher. Amazingly profane and shockingly violent, it stars an ex-preacher named Jesse Custer (note the initials) who is tracking down God, his crack-shot girlfriend, Tulip, and a seemingly happy-go-lucky Irish vampire named Cassidy who adores getting into barfights. Obviously, I've read THAT.)
I've been posting super brief reviews -- books that don't inspire me to blather about at length (or that have been languishing in my To Be Reviewed pile) -- at my tumblr.
"The breast size and cleavage factor of Betty and Veronica changed through the years," Yoe says. "I wasn't able to precisely correlate the rising and the falling of these matters to the stock market or I'd be a wealthy man instead of a cartoonist and comics historian.
