Books to Movies

Holy cow! I have twenty pages to go of Augie. Whooo Hooooo!!!

Family and I went from beautiful 60 degree weather here in the Cities last week to mid-thirties this weekend. Talk about depressing. The original forecast for today was actually for snow, which we didn't get, so by no means am I complaining. :)

As we wait for the spring thaw to arrive, I hit Blockbuster on Friday afternoon and picked up a couple of movies to watch this weekend. We've blown through four of them, two of which are books I have read (not for the Journeys list, though). The first was Angels and Demons. Truth be told, I was so grossed out by Brown's very graphic descriptions of the priests' murders that I skipped large portions of the book. I was surprisingly pleased by the movie, which did not show the actual murders but just the bodies afterwards (which was okay). Tom Hanks was great again as the stoic academic Robert Langdon, and Ewan McGregor completely satisfying as the seemingly pious, double dealing Camerlengo.

The second movie my daughter talked me into was Twilight. Many readers on Kris's site One Hundred Books have bashed this book into oblivion, and I have to admit I was a bit bewildered at all of the hullabaloo around this book when it first came out. I was probably the only 30-something woman here in town two years ago NOT walking around with a copy of this book. Everyone assured me I HAD to read it immediately, manically pressing their own dog-eared copies into my hands, like missionaries with Bibles, to take with me. I finally broke down and read Twilight about a year ago, and I don't even think I finished it. Too teeny-bopper for my taste, and the whole vampire thing didn't hit my radar. I watched the Twilight movie today with my obsessed 12 year-old daughter, and while the movie was marginally better than the book (and the mean vampire James was somewhat hot), it was still not (in my mind) worthy of all of the mania that is currently sweeping the nation.

Hopefully I will wrap up Augie and friends tonight or tomorrow and review.