Episode 10-14: A book becoming a TV series or movie in 2023

Reading With Libraries season ten logo

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

We are here to talk about books and share library ideas!

This season we are exploring all new ideas for books and book suggestions, so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at prompts from the 2023 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This is a week of fun books, because the idea of starting a new TV series or a new movie is always exciting! It might be great, it might be terrible – but the possibility is real and there are so many opportunities to enjoy new things.

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so 

you really get the feel for your reading! 

This week, we are enjoying beverages from the article Drinking with the Stars: 8 Famous Movie Cocktails and How to Make Them.

Margarita

Before spiraling into a bevy of other substances in the film’s second and third acts, Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler lives a life of Southern California pool parties and blended margs in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights.

Ingredients

  • Coarse salt, to rim glass
  • Lime wedge
  • 2 ounces blanco Tequila
  • 1 ounce orange liqueur
  • 1 ounce lime juice

Directions

Place salt in a dish. Moisten the rim of a rocks glass with the lime wedge. Roll rim of the glass in the salt to coat.

In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, combine remaining ingredients. Shake well, and strain into the prepared glass over fresh ice.

The Ultimate Bloody Mary

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarentino’s ode to Golden Age filmmaking, features plenty of cocktails. But maximum throwback impact may go to Brad Pitt’s aging stuntman, Cliff Booth, cautiously sipping a neon-red Bloody Mary in a wood-paneled fern lounge while navigating the drink’s celery stalk.

Ingredients

  • 2 scallion stems
  • ½ jalapeño
  • 1 (11.5-ounce) can tomato juice
  • 1 heaping teaspoon jarred grated horseradish, like Gold’s
  • 1 ounce lemon juice
  • 1 ounce pickle or caper brine
  • 5 dashes Maggi Seasoning sauce
  • 5 dashes hot sauce
  • ½ teaspoon onion powder
  • ½ teaspoon garlic powder
  • ½ teaspoon black pepper
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 3 ounces vodka
  • Preferred garnish, as desired

Directions

Using tongs, hold scallions and jalapeño over open flame for 30–45 seconds to char. You can also fry in pan over high heat for 1–2 minutes, or until browned. Remove from heat, and allow to cool. Dice each finely.

Combine all ingredients except vodka and garnish in Mason jar or other large container. Stir until well combined, or mix in blender for smoother drink. Let rest in refrigerator at least 30 minutes to allow flavors to combine.

In two pint glasses filled with ice, with salted or spiced rim, if preferred, add 1½ ounce vodka each. Top with Bloody Mary mix. Garnish with vegetables, lemon wedges, olives, capers, bacon, beef jerky or any other visually impressive ingredients you desire. Serves 2.

Genre Discussion:

There is nothing like the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. When you add in the excitement of a new TV show, or a new movie to try, it all gets more interesting. Of course, it’s always a trope that the book is better than the movie – and sometimes it’s true! But it can be fun to see stories you have enjoyed coming to life! Maybe you read a book a while ago, or maybe it just came out this year and everything is new to you. Either way, there will be fun new things to enjoy – and hopefully there will be some good cinematic adventures to be had this 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. In this week’s show notes, you can click on any title to get more information; the link will take you to one of Minnesota’s favorite independent bookstores: Drury Lane. Browse around while you are there, and maybe you will find something else you enjoy!  

The Witching Hour (Lives of Mayfair Witches #1), Anne Rice

On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour begins.

It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery–aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches–finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.  He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.

As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and–in passionate alliance–set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV.  An intricate tale of evil unfolds–an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.

From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien–the clan’s only male to be endowed with occult powers–provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.  And always–through peril and escape, tension and release–there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan’s increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax. 

Daisy Jones & the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice. 

Wolf Pack, by Edo van Belkom

Nothing gets between a wolf and its pack…

Most of the time, Noble, Argus, Harlan and Tora are like any other teenagers. Prowling the halls of their high school in search of new crushes and true friendships, all while trying to keep up their grades. Except these teens are anything but ordinary…

Discovered as wolf cubs in the wilderness of Redstone Forest, the pack knows their adoptive parents are the only humans they can trust with their shape-shifting secret. So whenever the siblings want to wolf around, they race to the forest to run—and relish their special bond. Until the terrible day a TV crew films their shocking transformation—and Tora is captured by a scientist determined to reveal her supernatural abilities to the world.

Now the brothers will do anything to get their sister back. Even if it means taking their powers to a whole new level by becoming werewolves for the very first time–something their parents warned them never to attempt. But once the teens go to the dark side, will they ever make it back to the only life they’ve ever known?

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., by Judy Blume

Margaret shares her secrets and her spirituality in this iconic Judy Blume novel, beloved by millions.

Margaret Simon, almost twelve, likes long hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain, and things that are pink. She’s just moved from New York City to Farbook, New Jersey, and is anxious to fit in with her new friends—Nancy, Gretchen, and Janie. When they form a secret club to talk about private subjects like boys, bras, and getting their first periods, Margaret is happy to belong.

But none of them can believe Margaret doesn’t have religion, and that she isn’t going to the Y or the Jewish Community Center. What they don’t know is Margaret has her own very special relationship with God. She can talk to God about everything—family, friends, even Moose Freed, her secret crush.

Margaret is funny and real, and her thoughts and feelings are oh-so-relatable—you’ll feel like she’s talking right to you, sharing her secrets with a friend. 

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE UPCOMING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER

In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. This is biography and history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative.

“A masterful account of Oppenheimer’s rise and fall, set in the context of the turbulent decades of America’s own transformation. It is a tour de force.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature…. It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times

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.

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre

Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time. 

Every word uttered in confidence to Philby made its way to Moscow, sinking almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years and costing hundreds of lives. So how was this cunning double-agent finally exposed? In A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre expertly weaves the heart-pounding tale of how Philby almost got away with it all—and what happened when he was finally unmasked.

Based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files and told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, A Spy Among Friends is a fascinating portrait of a Cold War spy and the countrymen who remained willfully blind to his treachery.

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! Right now that is dropping short episodes with a few book suggestions; so subscribe to get that every Tuesday.

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