Lately, I have been reading a lot of movie tie-in... • The Automaton

Lately, I have been reading a lot of movie tie-in books, or as I fondly call them, ‘Now a Major Motion Picture’ books.

Just last night I finished Jean Dominique-Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt. If you thought the film was amazing, wait until you read Bauby’s memoir; it is doubly and breezily so.

Last month I received Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with Kodi Smit-McPhee’s arm around an enervated Viggo Mortensen on the cover, as a gift from a colleague. It didn’t take long for me to be blown away by McCarthy’s quietly arresting prose. It was at once both bleak and beautiful, which the film adaptation also turned out to be, albeit to a lesser but still admirable degree.

A couple of months before that was Robert Kaplow’s Me and Orson Welles, probably the only YA book I read in the last couple of years. I am not wont to buy a book for young adults unless it’s by Louis Sachar or Lois Lowry, or unless it’s the basis for a film by Richard Linklater. You know, the guy responsible for such awesome movies as Before Sunset and School of Rock (and Dazed and Confused, if you’re cool like that).

In the interim I finally got to read Ian McEwan’s Atonement, or at least the first of three parts of it. I stopped just before the pages that ultimately became the long tracking shot of the Dunkirk evacuation that was my favorite scene in the movie by Joe Wright. I intend on resuming reading it as soon as I finish another movie tie-in book that I previously had to put on hold on account of my then less than cooperative work schedule…

The Children of Men by P. D. James, judging by the first few chapters I managed to read, is evocative and triumphant, not unlike the criminally underrated adaptation by Alfonso Cuarón, which was included in Pelikula Tumblr’s best films of the noughties list. (Follow us!)

Very recently now (just last weekend), I was grounded in my room yet airborne reading Up in the Air, the novel by Walter Kirn. To be sure, there’s nothing spectacular about the book, but I have this thing for loose stream-of-consciousness narratives, so it worked for me. And apparently it worked for Jason Reitman too. In case you couldn’t tell from the above photo, the novel was the inspiration for the acclaimed director’s latest film of the same name, starring George Clooney as a frequent flyer who fires people for a living. It also stars the undeniably gorgeous Vera Farmiga as Alex, a character with a much more expanded role in the film than in the book, and the surprisingly wonderful Anna Kendrick as Natalie, a character not at all in the book. You may remember Kendrick as that annoying girl from that most glorious of ‘Now a Major Motion Picture’ books…

Twilight. ‘Nuff said.