Best Fiction of the Millennium (so far)

The Millions is unveiling their choices for the best fiction of 2000s. Looks like a fine way to ramp up your reading list (not that most of us need any assistance on that front).

Meanwhile, if you’d like to vote for your own favorite books of the decade, you can head on over to Paste Magazine, where they’re asking for your selections.

My choices (in alphabetical order):

Atonement – Ian McEwan
Black Swan Green – David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Darkmans – Nicola Barker
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngogi Adichie
Heir to the Glimmering World – Cynthia Ozick
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Let Me In – John Ajvide Lindqvist
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name – Vendela Vida
One Good Turn – Kate Atkinson
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri

Closing tabs on a Sunday morning

Aleksandar Hemon, whose book The Lazarus Project I reviewed earlier, is interviewed at Deutsche Welle.

Prospect interviews Nick Hornby, whose Juliet, Naked
is only nine days from hitting bookstands.

Joe Hill’s awesome Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft
was awarded Best Comic Book/Graphic Novel by the British Fantasy Society. We’re big fans of Joe around these parts, and wish our heartiest congratulations to him.

Paste looks at eight books that will be translated to the big screen before the end of 2009.

Saturday night stuff

The Telegraph lists The Lost Symbol author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences.

Also from The Telegraph is a list of the 25 best book to film adaptations.

In the Guardian, author Kim Stanley Robinson criticizes the Man Booker judges for omitting science fiction.

In follow up news on the library front, legislation has been passed to keep Philadelphia’s public libraries open. Good on ya, mates!

Also from Philadelphia, The Complete Persepolis was announced as the official 2009 selection for One Book, One Philadelphia. I point this out because Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is one of the finest graphic novels I’ve ever read.

Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers

I really enjoyed Richard Powers’ National Book Award winning novel The Echo Maker, so I was interested to see what he’d do next. His newest novel, Generosity: An Enhancement, begins when Russell Stone sets out to teach his first writing class at a small Chicago college. One of the students in his class, an Algerian named Thassa, is constantly happy. She tells the story of the deaths of her parents, and has the class full of rapt attention because she radiates some kind of exuberance that is nothing short of irresistible. Her classmates call her Miss Generosity, and people naturally take to her because of her magnetic optimism.

She’s so happy that Russell begins to wonder if she isn’t afflicted with some kind of personality disorder. After she meets with a school counselor, it’s determined that she does seem to have hyperthymia, but is that such a bad thing? Soon, a scientist learns about her condition, and determines that it may be genetic. After his company releases its findings, she becomes a celebrity of sorts, and her natural sunny disposition is challenged again and again. People begin to discuss whether instilling future generations with the “happiness” gene means a positive change in humanity or if it just indicates man has gone too far in playing God.

I was extremely engaged by Generosity, as the ethical questions it posed were consistently interesting. There’s something relatable in each character, and even though I could tell where the story was headed with regard to Thassa, I still wanted to know how it would get to that point. In the end, Generosity is really a story about writing and the creative process, and I’m always a sucker for those anyway.

While I think The Echo Maker is probably the better book, Generosity was more for me. If you don’t mind a bit of science in your fiction (I’m not talking about science fiction, though), both are very worthwhile reads.

Odds and Ends

According to The Telegraph, JRR Tolkien trained as a spy for the British government in the years leading up to World War II.

Mariel Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, has obtained the rights to his memoir A Moveable Feast and will produce a film adaptation, per Variety.

Oprah Winfrey has announced her latest book club selection. It’s the debut short story collection from Uwem Akpan, titled Say You’re One of Them
.

Book to Film: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Here’s a case where screenwriters have taken extreme liberty with source material, but if reviews and buzz are any indication, the 3-D animated Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs appears to have succeeded.

Originally published in 1978, the children’s book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs featured a grandfather telling his grandchildren a story about a town where there is weather three times a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner. As you might imagine, all of this weather comes in the form of food. Weather can be a tricky thing, though, and just like in the real world, the inhabitants of the town experience some “severe” weather that causes havoc – particularly since the massive events have food items at their center (i.e. a tomato sauce tornado).

The movie takes things a step further. At the center of the story is an inventor named Flint Lockwood, a guy who creates stuff that is either unwanted or simply doesn’t work. When his town begins to struggle, with the denizens eating nothing but sardines, he invents a machine that converts water into food – and effectively changes the weather so that it produces, well, produce. Hunger is eliminated, but soon Lockwood’s machine goes rogue and starts to create similar severe weather events to those seen in the book. Flint must stop the machine, and save the world in the process.

In both cases, the story is simple. A lot of people who remember loving the book as children have expressed dismay that the film is stretching the premise, but there’s reason for hope. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. You may not know the names. Actually, you probably don’t know their masterpiece of a TV series, either. Clone High was an animated show that aired on MTV for one short season in 2002-2003. The show was genius. Famous historical figures have been cloned, and we pop in on the high school versions of characters like Abe Lincoln, Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra and John F. Kennedy. It was subversive and hilarious, and sadly is out of print.

Because I loved that show so well, I’m pretty excited about Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. As I write this, it’s 87% Fresh at RottenTomatoes, which means that it is the beneficiary of plenty of positive reviews. One critics comment that it’s “Laughing-my-ass-off, it’s-raining-steak-and-gumballs, I-want-Steve-the-monkey-for-my-very-own fun” has me totally excited to see the film.

Sure, it might be an adaptation in concept only, but someone out there had to come up with the concept that set things in motion.

The Lost Code breaks sales records

Reuters reports that Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, sold more than one million copies in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on its first day of sales.

On snobbery

I’m a book snob. I admit it. It’s a failing of mine, because honestly, who am I to dictate what books should give people pleasure? I can go out and enjoy a big dumb movie blockbuster like Transformers (but not Transformers 2; that was just boring) even though my mind might crave an arty Wes Anderson film. Similarly, I have to think that it’s not so bad to kick back with a mass market best seller from time to time. A lot of book blogs I read are a touch derisive of books they think are undeserving of their attention, and I promise to try to keep the “judginess” in check here (unless I’m specifically reviewing the new hot thing).

This topic came to mind after I read this little piece in Time Magazine by a writer from The Simpsons, one of my favorite – and most frequently quoted – television shows. It’s a good reminder of why we might consider holding the snootiness in check.

More Bookcase Love

The LA Times has a look at some flexible, modern and unique bookcases. I’m partial to the “Self Shelf”, but “Obo” is the kind of thing I could see in my home, as well.

Miscellany of the day

The Huffington Post has an excerpt from Nick Hornby’s upcoming novel Juliet, Naked.

Science fiction writers talk about the books that introduced them to the genre at SF Signal.

Author John Curran lists the Top Ten Agatha Christie Mysteries for The Guardian.

Novel-T has some literary T-shirts (the best kind!).

A Harry Potter theme park will open in Orlando, Florida next spring.