Episode 803: A book becoming a TV series or movie in 2022

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries! Thank you for joining us on the 8th season of our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons and share more information with your library community.
And we’re adding an additional element this season: many of our topics are coming from the 2022 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge. We link to their challenge on our shownotes page. 

Pop Sugar says the goal of the challenge is to “is just to have fun, diversify your reading, and accomplish whatever goals you have set for yourself. There are no “rules”!”
So we’re incorporating some of their prompts into this season’s podcast topics. If you are participating in their challenge – great! And if you just want to get some fresh book ideas to share with your patrons/students/community, fantastic! You are in the right place! 

This week we are looking at books that are becoming a TV series or a movie this year.

Beverages:

Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages! We are admiring the article 7 Cocktails to Go Perfectly with Movie Night from liquor.com

The Rom Com & Champagne Cocktail
Champagne perfectly captures the feeling of new love. It’s fun, flirty, and must be enjoyed before it fizzles. (No one jaded here!) From “When Harry Met Sally” to “10 Things I Hate About You,” the best romantic comedies understand how to capture that effervescence, while playing around with the formula––just as this drink does. The simple addition of bitters and sugar turns bubbly into something more. It’s also light enough to keep you from falling, you know, head over heels.

Ingredients

  • 1 sugar cube
  • 2 to 4 dashes Angostura bitters
  • Champagne (or other sparkling wine), chilled, to top
  • Garnish: lemon twist

Steps

  1. Place a sugar cube on a bar spoon and douse with the bitters.
  2. Drop the cube into a chilled Champagne flute or similar glass.
  3. Fill the glass with Champagne or other sparkling wine.
  4. Garnish with a lemon twist.

The Heist Movie & 50/50
A good heist movie relies on planning, figuring out all the angles and, ideally, a montage scene assembling a crack team of experts with incredibly specific skill sets. Like the best heist films, the 50/50 is a drink aware of the devil being in the details. A standard Martini is obviously elegant and, when made right, a beautiful thing. It’s also strong. The 50/50 variation, with its even split of dry vermouth and gin, will keep you sharp through the twists and turns and inevitable double crossings.

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 ounces gin
  • 1 1/2 ounces dry vermouth
  • 1 dash orange bitters
  • Garnish: lemon twist

Steps

  1. Add the gin, dry vermouth and orange bitters to a mixing glass. Fill with ice and stir until well-chilled.
  2. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
  3. Garnish with a lemon twist.

The Adventure Movie & Mai Tai

Running across rickety bridges over alligator-infested rapids? Trying to build a fire from the debris of your plane crash? Being chased through a Moroccan bazaar during a case of mistaken identity? Sounds like you could use a drink. This Tiki classic was born of a desire to experience the faraway and adventurous from the safety and comfort of your local (or home) bar. Exciting, isn’t it?

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 ounces white rum
  • 3/4 ounce orange curaçao
  • 3/4 ounce lime juice, freshly squeezed
  • 1/2 ounce orgeat
  • 1/2 ounce dark rum
  • Garnish: lime wheel
  • Garnish: mint sprig

Steps

  1. Add the white rum, curaçao, lime juice and orgeat into a shaker with crushed ice and shake lightly (about 3 seconds).
  2. Pour into a double rocks glass.
  3. Float the dark rum over the top.
  4. Garnish with a lime wheel and mint sprig.

Genre Discussion:

As readers, we already know some of the best movies and TV shows are adaptations from books. And although it’s a common refrain to point out that the book was better – that’s not always true. Sometimes they are both good! So it’s worth finding out about the books that will be the basis of movies and TV shows this year. You can dive into the book first to get the full story, then compare it to the video version.

“The Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay is the Academy Award for the best screenplay adapted from previously established material. The most frequently adapted media are novels, but other adapted narrative formats include stage plays, musicals, short stories, TV series, and even other films and film characters.” Check out the Wikipedia page to get the full list of Oscar nominations in the category, and the books they are adapted from each year.

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney 

Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.

The Sky is Everywhere, by Jandy Nelson 

Adrift after her sister Bailey’s sudden death, Lennie finds herself torn between quiet, seductive Toby—Bailey’s boyfriend who shares Lennie’s grief—and Joe, the new boy in town who bursts with life and musical genius. Each offers Lennie something she desperately needs. One boy helps her remember. The other lets her forget. And she knows if the two of them collide, her whole world will explode.

As much a laugh-out-loud celebration of love as a nuanced and poignant portrait of loss, Len­nie’s struggle to sort her own melody out out the noise around her makes for an always honest, often uproarious, and absolutely unforgettable read.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. 

White Bird: A Wonder Story (A Graphic Novel), R. J. Palacio

In R. J. Palacio’s bestselling collection of stories Auggie & Me, which expands on characters in Wonder, readers were introduced to Julian’s grandmother, Grandmère. Here, Palacio makes her graphic novel debut with Grandmère’s heartrending story: how she, a young Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II; how the boy she and her classmates once shunned became her savior and best friend.

Sara’s harrowing experience movingly demonstrates the power of kindness to change hearts, build bridges, and even save lives. As Grandmère tells Julian, “It always takes courage to be kind, but in those days, such kindness could cost you everything.” With poignant symbolism and gorgeous artwork that brings Sara’s story out of the past and cements it firmly in this moment in history, White Bird is sure to captivate anyone who was moved by the book Wonder or the blockbuster movie adaptation and its message.

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

Andrew Yancy-late of the Miami Police and soon-to-be-late of the Monroe County sheriff’s office-has a human arm in his freezer. There’s a logical (Hiaasenian) explanation for that, but not for how and why it parted from its shadowy owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, the sheriff might rescue him from his grisly Health Inspector gig (it’s not called the roach patrol for nothing).

But first-this being Hiaasen country-Yancy must negotiate an obstacle course of wildly unpredictable events with a crew of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including his just-ex lover, a hot-blooded fugitive from Kansas; the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; two avariciously optimistic real-estate speculators; the Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen, whose suitors are blinded unto death by her peculiar charms; Yancy’s new true love, a kinky coroner; and the eponymous bad monkey-who just may be one of Carl Hiaasen’s greatest characters. 

Deep Water, by Patricia Highsmith

Vic and Melinda Van Allen’s loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder―one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.

Devil in Ohio by Daria Polatin

When fifteen-year-old Jules Mathis comes home from school to find a strange girl sitting in her kitchen, her psychiatrist mother reveals that Mae is one of her patients at the hospital and will be staying with their family for a few days. But soon Mae is wearing Jules’s clothes, sleeping in her bedroom, edging her out of her position on the school paper, and flirting with Jules’s crush. And Mae has no intention of leaving.

Then things get weird.

Jules walks in on a half-dressed Mae, startled to see: a pentagram carved into Mae’s back. Jules pieces together clues and discovers that Mae is a survivor of the strange cult that’s embedded in a nearby town.

And the cult will stop at nothing to get Mae back.

Exciting Times, by Naoise Dolan

An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer

Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children.

Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than “I like you a great deal.”

Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her. 

And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong… Should Ava return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith?

Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.

The Girl Before by JP Delaney

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

The request seems odd, even intrusive—and for the two women who answer, the consequences are devastating.

EMMA

Reeling from a traumatic break-in, Emma wants a new place to live. But none of the apartments she sees are affordable or feel safe. Until One Folgate Street. The house is an architectural masterpiece: a minimalist design of pale stone, plate glass, and soaring ceilings. But there are rules. The enigmatic architect who designed the house retains full control: no books, no throw pillows, no photos or clutter or personal effects of any kind. The space is intended to transform its occupant—and it does.

JANE

After a personal tragedy, Jane needs a fresh start. When she finds One Folgate Street she is instantly drawn to the space—and to its aloof but seductive creator. Moving in, Jane soon learns about the untimely death of the home’s previous tenant, a woman similar to Jane in age and appearance. As Jane tries to untangle truth from lies, she unwittingly follows the same patterns, makes the same choices, crosses paths with the same people, and experiences the same terror, as the girl before.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries!

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!