September Books into Movies

Many of us love movies as well as books. So when a book is made into a movie, we want to make sure we read the book first because it is ALWAYS better!

Films from books for September 2008 (Be sure to reserve your copy by clicking on the title.) Some of the films may be released to a limited audience first. Let's hope the Boston area is one of them.

Appaloosa by Robert Parker. 2005. (This title isn't being released until Oct. 3 but I thought you might want to get a head start.) Setting is the untamed territories of the West during the 1800s. When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary-one who raises the stakes by playing not with the rules, but with emotions. This is Robert B. Parker at his storytelling best.

Blindness by Jose Saramago. 1997. (1998 Nobel Prize Winner)
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century


Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. 2001.
(Author of Fight Club) Palahniuk gives readers a vision of life and love and sex and mortality that is both chillingly brilliant and teeth-rattlingly funny. Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's elder care: Pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves you" will feel responsible for the rest of his life. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of checks, week in, week out.


Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman. 1999. (Movie Title is The Duchess) (Whitbread Award, Costa Award)
This biography offers a rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth-century British aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who for a time was its undisputed leader. Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day.Foreman's descriptions of Georgiana's uncontrollable gambling, all- night drinking, drug taking, and love affairs with the leading politicians of the day give us fascinating insight into the lives of the British aristocracy in the era of the madness of King George III, the American and French revolutions, and the defeat of Napoleon.


Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride. 2002. (Author of The Color of Water) Based on the historical incident of an unspeakable massacre at the site of St. Anna Di Stazzema, a small village in Tuscany, and on the experiences of the famed Buffalo soldiers from the 92nd Division in Italy during World War II, Miracle of St. Annais a singular evocation of war, cruelty, passion, and heroism. It is the story of four American Negro soldiers, a band of partisans, and an Italian boy who encounter a miracle-though perhaps the true miracle lies in themselves.



Nights in Rodanthe by Nicholas Sparks. 2002.
A tender story of hope and joy, of sacrifice and forgiveness, a reminder that love is possible at any age and at any time, often when we least expect it


A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li. 2005.
(Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award , Guardian First Book Award, Kiriyama Prize)
In “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.


Towelhead by Alicia Erian. 2005.
(NY Times Notable Book of the Year) Erian's story of an impressionable yet resilient girl who must grow up against the backdrop of the Gulf War is mesmerizing--a coming-of-age tale that is at once brutally honest and unexpectedly hilarious.