Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Greatest Generation- Tom Brokaw
Revolutionary Road- Richard Yates
The Host: A Novel- Stephenie Meyer
Thanks to Jeff for picking the books last minute for us!
February Book choices
January's book, February lateness and Members.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
January's book: Join the discussion for The Last Lecture in our Forum. Tell us what you thought of the book. Did you write about the book in your blog? Send me the link and I'll feature it here. I wrote a list of my own childhood dreams on my blog.
February lateness: We're having some trouble getting February's book choices, but we'll have the poll up as soon as possible. Sorry for the delay.
Members: We need more members! Our little club is sorely lacking in the discussion department. Please tell your friends about The Mixed Bag, and help us get this thing up and running.
Book vs. Movie - A discussion
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Taking stories out of books and making them into movies seems to be a popular trend in Hollywood. Here are some of the more recent cases:
Inkheart - by Cornelia Funke
Slumdog Millionaire (book title: Q&A) - Vikas Swarup
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - Rachel Cohn
Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks
Tales of Despereaux - Kate Dicamillo
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
Have you seen any of them, or read the books that they were based on? How do you think they compare? What are your thoughts on the general practice of translating books into movie form? Do you have any favorite movies that were once books, or vice versa? I want to know your thoughts. For a more extensive (though probably not comprehensive) list, check out http://www.ocl.net/bookinfo/if/movies.shtml
The Last Lecture
Saturday, January 3, 2009
The winner of the poll for January is Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture. I can't tell you how excited I am to read this and discuss it with all of you in the book club.
Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. He passed away on July 25th of 2008 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was an amazing and inspirational person. Pausch wrote The Last Lecture, a book about achieving your dreams, specifically for the three children that he left behind. It expands on the things that he spoke about in his ''Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams' lecture at Carnegie Mellon. You can find the hour long lecture on YouTube. If you haven't seen the interview that he did with Diane Sawyer, I suggest that you watch it, also. You can watch it in five parts on YouTube. The first part is here.
Also: You can still join the discussion about December's book, Extremely loud and Incredibly Close, by visiting our forum. We would love to hear your thoughts.
