Books on film

A quick roundup of newly announced book-to-film adaptations:

• A new adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is set to hit the screen after a long struggle with Huxley’s estate. Leonardo DiCaprio will star and Ridley Scott will direct. New editions of the book will be released in 33 countries, including a new Canadian edition with an introduction by Margaret Atwood.
• Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is being adapted (again) by BBC One. This time, though, there’ll be a Bond girl in the lead role.
• Frank Darabont, director of Stephen King adaptions such as The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, is trying to find funding to remake Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Farenheit 451. (Apparently the cheques autoignite as they approach the screenplay).
• Brampton, Ontario’s Michael Cera (Superbad) will play the lead role in an adaption of Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. The books are set in Toronto, featuring local landmarks like Honest Ed’s, Wychwood library, and Casa Loma. Maybe this time Toronto can be more than New York’s stunt double.

The mathematics of books

The Music Genome Project has been dissecting songs since 2000, reducing them to a set of basic characteristics, such as the gender of the singer, pitch, and tempo. The theory is that once you know these objective details about a song, you can find – and presumably enjoy – others that are just like it.

And now Booklamp is trying to do the same for books. Its software scans pages and calculates the density, pacing, and levels of action, dialogue, and description. You plug in a book you love, and it spits out other books that are just like it. You can also specify other desirable characteristics to fine-tune the recommendations.

Here are some of our requests:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with all of the characters living in my spare bedroom.
• It, but without the clown. That clown was too scary.
• A memoir, but true.

Writing Toronto

The latest issue of Open Book: Toronto has a couple of articles on writing about Toronto. The first piece describes the inspiration provided by the city, the second describes the perspiration involved.

Torontoist’s Kevin Plummer offers a summary:

First, poet Stephen Cain explores the Annex’s deep literary connections. For generations, the neighbourhood has been home to and inspiration for countless poets and authors. He expands on Greg Gatenby’s Toronto: A City Becoming (1999) to include more avant-garde writers and new writers who’ve emerged since that book’s publication.
…
Offering a different perspective in the second article, columnist and author James Grainger recounts the difficulties of capturing a sense of place for North York. He writes: “North York may occupy an impressive chunk of the map of Toronto, but it had failed to colonize a comparable space in the consciousness of the city.” Cut off from Toronto proper by the 401 but connected to downtown by subway, North York is neither its own city, nor a purely suburban appendage. In an age when the common culture of television and pop music has loosened the civic bonds of local references and region-specific slang, Grainger found North York difficult to write about in his own short stories.

Web fiction

Penguin has just launched We Tell Stories, a series of online digital fiction, in collaboration with alternate reality game designers Six to Start. They’ve asked six authors to try to harness the capabilities of the Internet in the name of storytelling.

From the Penguin website:

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.

The first story, Charles Cumming’s 21 Steps, is a thriller set in Google Maps. The text of the novel is gradually revealed in blurbs as you use Google Maps to track the footsteps of the protagonist, first through the streets of London, and then further afield.

Penguin offers sneak peeks

Penguin is now offering free downloads of the first chapter of many of its new releases, including titles such as Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans and Janet Evanovich’s Plum Lovin’.

Colin Brush, senior copywriter at Penguin, writes on the Penguin blog:

These days I will on no account buy a book unless I’ve read some of the writing within. No really. I don’t give a damn what the blurb writers – a pack of miserable, tricksy curs (I know, I live inside the head of one) – have written. Or what the FT thinks about it. Even what Martin Amis has penned on the matter. Sure, all those words – if they’re good – together with a decent cover have a great chance of getting the book off the 3-for-2 table and into my hands. But I want to get a taste of what’s within if I’m going to commit.

This is why you’ll find me at lunchtimes in bookshops, cracking open the covers and reading the first few pages of any old rubbish. If I’m going to devote some time to a book then I want to hear the author’s voice, I want an idea of what sort of story it is right from the start. Surprise me, thrill me, have me begging for more.

Which brings me to Penguin Tasters … New Tasters will be added as each title is published. Currently, we have 53 up there for you already.

This comes in the wake of just under 15,000 readers freeloading Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, and is perhaps precipitated by the recent revelation that people tend to pay attention when things are free.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency on TV

Fans of Alexander McCall Smith’s bestseller The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency are either rejoicing or wailing – it’s being made into a television series.

The good news is that it’s being co-produced by the BBC and HBO, two bastions of quality TV. The 90-minute pilot was directed by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient), and he also co-wrote it with Richard Curtis (Funny English Romantic Comedy ft. Hugh Grant, volumes I-XII). Actress and singer Jill Scott will play the lead character, Precious Ramotswe, and Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls) will play her secretary.

The pilot will air on BBC One this Easter, with 13 episodes to follow. HBO has the North American rights, and plans to put it to air in early 2009.

Buried treasure

Graphics.com is offering an excerpt of Charlotte Rivers’s Book-Art: Innovation in Design, a review of new and interesting book design. Highlights include a book whose entire print run (750 copies) was buried and then dug up before being sold.

From Book-Art, via Graphics.com:

Buried features a collection of photos by Stephen Gill that were buried by the photographer, near where they were taken. [Designer Melanie] Mues used this as her inspiration for the design of the book, and buried each copy before retrieving and presenting them in a clean, blind-embossed slipcase. The result is that each book has different degrees of smudging and deterioration on the cover.

The rest of the featured designs are less radical, but still excellent examples of a designer engaging with and enhancing a book’s text. Conventional book design is all very well, but sometimes a book just needs an ear growing out of its spine (see further down on the linked page).

Eco-lit lunch

Jamie Kennedy’s restaurant at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto played host to an eco-lit lunch this week. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, talked about the importance of responsible preparation, sourcing, and farming of food. To highlight the point, there was a presentation illustrating the journey of the meal being served, from field to table. The journey was a short one, as all the food was from Ontario, earning Kennedy 10 bonus ecopoints from Pollan.

From left to right: Michael Pollan, Jamie Kennedy, and Andrew Heintzman, President of Investeco Capital Corporation, the company which organised the event.

C is for Camus and cookies

Jane McGonigal, whom MIT’s Technology Review named one of the top 35 innovators changing the world, is currently traveling around the world using cookies to spell out Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus.

Her plan is to spell out each word of the essay in a different city, using locally-sourced cookies. She will also roll a cookie up an incline of some kind in each city, the idea being to re-imagine Sisyphus as being content with his boulder-rolling life, happy to have something to do, even though the task is repetitive and meaningless.

This is a fascinating project, but would it be churlish to point out that the difference between cookies and boulders is a significant one?

Lemony Snicket and the perils of stock photography

Here’s a cautionary tale about using stock photography. Grove Press loved the cover of the German edition of Sasa Stanisic’s first novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, so they used it for the U.S. edition, too. There was a surprise in store.

From New York Times reporter Dwight Garner’s blog, Papercuts:

Grove did all this without noticing that the man on the cover and the catalog is none other than Daniel Handler, the well-known novelist, musician and author of the Lemony Snicket books.

…

Handler – who says he found Stanisic’s novel charming – thinks he knows how this all happened in the first place.

“A friend of mine, Meredith, took a lot of photos of me at one point early in my career, and I was scarcely able to pay her. I said she could sell them wherever she wanted. And some of them ended up at Getty, filed not under my name but under ‘assorted’ or something.”

There’s a happy ending though, as Handler gave Grove permission to use the image, setting a new standard for least scandalous pre-career photos.