Fiction books to report: Turns out half of these I've seen as movies before I read the book. Usually I do it the other way around. Also oddly, most of these are technically novellas.
1) About a Boy by Nick Hornby - Not as good as High Fidelity, but enjoyable.
2) Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote - Quite a bit different than the movie. I remember in a TV-movie about Audrey Hepburn the Truman Capote character, while watching filming, said, "Well, she was a whore in my novel". Or something to that effect. Pretty accurate assessment.
2a) The Truman Capote collection I read also had A Christmas Memory as one of the short stories - and I wanted to make special mention. Read it if you haven't - it is so beautifully written, and so vivid, and funny, and touching, and sweet. Not counting for list.
3) The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum - One of the rare books I liked less than the movie. Though that is probably an unfair comparison, since the movie is almost nothing like the book. That said, I still don't think it was a very good book. It had flashes of brilliance, but I thought it was too slow-paced for a spy novel.
4, 5, 6) Three novels by James M. Cain - Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce - All three were pretty good noir tales. And for the first two I thought the movies tracked closely. Recommended to see both of them if you like film noir. Double Indemnity might be second only to The Maltese Falcon in that genre. I'll see Mildred the movie at some point since Joan Crawford won an Oscar for the title role.
7) Kiss of The Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. Wow! I did not know what to expect when I picked this up on a whim at the library. I was falling behind on #92 - Read Non-English novels. And I'm so glad I was. This is a very, very good novel. Interesting construction - there is no narration or scenic descriptions. It is 90% dialogue, with just dashes indicating change of speaker. It paints an intimate portrait of two men in an Argentinian prison, the revolutionary Valentin and the homosexual Molina. To pass the time Molina recounts old movies he has seen to Valentin. The rest of the time they talk, fight, argue, and bitch about themselves, each other, politics, etc. I know it sounds very "buddy movie" to say at the end they grow to respect one another and appreciate their differences, but it is true, and it comes across in the novel in a surprisingly deep and affecting way.
The 1986 movie (William Hurt - Oscar), which I saw later, was good but not as good as the novel was.
8) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka - Guy turns into a bug, no one really seems to care, other than how it effects them. Counts for #92 since the original is German. Even Gregor (the bug) is curiously indifferent to why or even how he became a monstrous bug. I wonder what it would be like to know a foreign language well enough to be able to read something without translating it in your head. I can imagine it would be a powerful experience.
9) Rant by Chuck Palahniuk - Another weird novel by the author of Fight Club. Told as an oral history by multiple characters, it is definitely worth the read. Might be worth a second read too since (as in most oral histories), characters conflict on timeline and perceptions. So, going back and trying to figure out what - if anything - is the truth could be worthwhile.
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