movies of books
Catching Fire
Novel Ideas returns with Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy. Not to mention the second movie, which you may have heard, was released recently. We apologize for missing last week, illness and a new work schedule have been conspiring against us. In this episode, we discuss masculine and feminine character traits, PTSD, overly silent conspiracies, and inaction in the face of evil. We also talk about classic dick moves, Peeta as a potential creeper, whether President Snow is a vampire, and many, many prequel possibilities.
Ben’s holiday work schedule is fairly likely to result in more delays with editing and posting episodes, so the schedule may look a little jagged through the end of the year. Posts are most likely to occur on Mondays rather than Tuesdays for the duration. We’ll try not to miss any more weeks without putting it on the schedule in advance, but bear with us.
The music bump this week is “Fire in the Hole” by Steely Dan.
Catching Fire – Scalene Love Triangle
Recommendations:
A very good read, as long as it isn’t the first book you ever read, with markedly more sophistication than the first book.
Gabs: 8.5/10 with the extra half point awarded for going beyond typical YA fare.
Ben: 9/10 I think I may have liked this one better than the first one, mainly due to the added political elements.
World War Z
Welcome back to the zombie apocalypse. Or almost apocalypse. This week on Novel Ideas, we read World War Z by Max Brooks. This book is a little bit different from other books that we’ve read in that it doesn’t really have characters or a plot, but is instead written in the style of an oral history. Because of that, we changed our format slightly for this week’s episode. We talked about the movie, the breakdown of society, the nature of celebrity, and gender balance. We also discussed zombie tropes, the fact that dogs hate zombies, historical zombie fiction, and zombie war psychology. Basically, we discussed everything zombie related we could think of.
The music bump is “The Trooper” by Iron Maiden, used to bait zombies at the Battle of Hope.
Recommendations:
An interesting and compelling book about 80-90% of the time. It drags just a little at the end, but not enough to put a damper on the experience of reading it. The book includes some excellent world building in telling a well covered genre story in a different way.
Ben: 8.5/10
Gabs: 8/10
The Fellowship of the Ring
Welcome to Middle Earth (or possibly New Zealand), as we discuss The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien this week on Novel Ideas. This is an obscure fantasy tale with an even more obscure feature length movie that no one has seen. Also, the Peter Jackson movie that everyone in the world has seen. In this episode, we cover the big issues, such as: world building, the logical way to divide an epic story in three parts, and the lack of female characters. We also cover more philosophical questions, like whether elves bang, if Gandalf is shy, and Tom Bombadil’s ADHD. I also attempted a tweak with my audio processing, so if it sounds weird on your listening device of preference, please leave a comment.
The music bumps are from Howard Shore’s excellent score to the movie version of Fellowship, specifically the theme that probably comes to mind when you think of that soundtrack.
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