We’ve had a dusting of snow here in Prague, which makes everything look very pretty. But it’s a reminder that winter is here to stay, at least for a while. Christmas is over, it’s cold outside and there’s a general feeling of deflation. The long wait for springtime starts now and it can be the most miserable time of year. However, there are some advantages, such as grabbing a blanket and a hot drink and curling up with a good book for hours on end (preferably by a crackling fire). So put on your woolly socks and take a look at some of my favourite winter reads…
david copperfield
Top Ten Tuesday – Characters I Wish Had Their Own Book
This Tuesday The Broke and the Bookish would like to talk about characters that they wish had their own book. There is often a side character with an interesting back story that I would like to learn more about. Here are just a few of them…
Top 5 Favourites from the Classics Section
Summer is a busy time for the classics section at Oxfam. We receive piles and piles of donations at the end of July from GCSE, A Level and university students who have finally come to the end of the year. They struggle in with heavy bags, eager to rid themselves of any course material that will remind them of long evenings spent at the library, scrutinising old texts. It’s a time of year when we get a huge increase in Shakespeare study guides, poetry and tattered old penguin classics.
Top 5 Book to Film Adaptations
There has been a big media frenzy this last couple of weeks with the last Harry Potter film being released, which I for one am excited about. I’m looking forward to the film, even though I can’t help but complain about all of them. The films can’t begin to live up to the book and they have turned Harry Potter into something else, a franchise, rather than books to spark the imagination of children all of the world. Children no longer have to conjure up their own personal ideas of the characters, they simply have to picture Daniel Radcliffe.
There have been some terrible film to book adaptations. And I don’t actually think Harry Potter is that bad compared to some of them. It must be extremely difficult to take a good book and turn it into a decent film. Even if you manage to cast the film with brilliant actors and have budget high enough to fill the sets with the perfect props and clothes, there is still so much to think about. So much of the dialogue must be cut down and many scenes scrapped. In fact I think it must be such a daunting task, I’m not sure why anyone would even attempt it!
Here are a few examples of films that I think have been adapted excellently.
Top 5 Desert Island Books
I have been listening to a lot of BBC’s Desert Islands Discs recently as I have found that the website has years of episodes archived. If you are interested, have a listen http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs . It must be really difficult to choose only eight songs to have on a Desert Island, but imagine how difficult it would be to choose only 5 books! According to the BBC’s rules, each castaway automatically gets a Bible and the full works of Shakespeare. Along with these, I would choose…
Bundle of Books 