LISTING AWAY: From Page to Screen

Here. I am offering up this beautifully long post in the hopes that it will compensate appropriately for the morbid lack of activity in this space. Believe me, it was not intentional. And for some reason, this list took longer than I’d imagined and I ended up falling asleep on the keyboard and jerked awake in the wee hours of morning with half the letters imprinted on my face.

I hope you find the punishment the bloggerverse conspired to inflict upon me, suitable for my grievous crimes.

Adaptations that broke my heart because they were the consummate apotheosis of their literary parent

1. The Help
2. The Secret Life Of Bees
3. The Book Thief
4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. The Boy in Striped Pajamas
6. The Perks of Being A Wallflower
7. To Kill A Mockingbird
8. The Outsiders
9. The Hunger Games
10. The Lord of the Rings (I’m not so hot about The Hobbit trilogy, though)
11. The Kite Runner

 Adaptations that surprisingly surpassed their literary parent

1. The Princess Diaries
2. P.S. I Love You (The book’s still a DNF)
3. The Sisterhood of Travelling Pants
4. A Walk To Remember
5. The Time-Traveller’s Wife (I despised the book)
6. Stardust

 Adaptations that made me add the literary parent to my TBR pile

1. Everything is Illuminated (Lord, I need to read this real quick.)
2. Les Miserables (GOD, yes)
3. Memoirs of a Geisha (Why, why haven’t I still read it?)
4. A Series Of Unfortunate Events
5. True Grit
6. The Maze Runner
7. War Horse
8. Bend it like Beckham

 Adaptations that made their literary parent proud

1. Warm Bodies
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid (only #1 and #2 - Let’s face it, Dog Days sucked)
3. Harry Potter (#1 - #3)
4. I Am Number Four
5. The Golden Compass
6. Speak
7. If I Stay
8. Gone Girl
9. Ender’s Game
10. My Sister’s Keeper (There’s that thing with alternative ending though)
11. Pride and Prejudice (UK version, 2005)
12. Sense and Sensibility (1995)
13. Divergent
14. Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (well, sort of – I’m kinda partial to Magnus Bane)
15. Life Of Pi
16. One Day
17. The Da Vinci Code
18. Angels and Demons

 Adaptations that I am literally dying to see but haven’t already

1. Looking For Alibrandi (please god please)
2. Pride and Prejudice (BBC version)
3. Insurgent
4. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (and the reason why I haven’t seen it yet is probably because it’s R-rated and banned, but I’ve heard rave reviews)
5. Never Let Me Go
6. The Scarlet Letter (1934)
7. Gone with the Wind (maybe I should read the book first?)
8. Paper Towns
9. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
10. Notes on a Scandal
11. The Namesake
12. Jane Eyre

 Adaptations that make me want to fling it on the screen playwright’s/director’s face

1. Will whoever wrote the screenplay and directed the Percy Jackson movies please stand up?
2. Harry Potter (#4 through #8 – I have some unresolved screenplay issues)
3. The Host
4. Eragon
5. The Fault in our Stars (sorry, not sorry – but they slathered cheese all over it)
6. Dear John (For some reason, I was mostly insulted by how much I didn’t like the movie – even though with the Tatum/Seyfried pair I should have, by all rights)

If you think I have missed a book or two, or classified a book/movie under an undeserving list, please do let me know. And do recommend! Most probably, I would be labouring under the delusion that my favourite book still hasn’t been turned into a movie yet and if that’s the case, I demand to know ASAP.

A Promise Made To Ghosts

Fingers traced the words of,

The blood song etched on the walls.

The grandfather clock’s face was a thousand splinters,

Yet it hushed out a lullaby of “tick-tock”.

A memory –

Strong hands winding the gears.

A man whose back was,

Straighter than the pendulum,

Always bending, never breaking.

The night sand laboriously,

Of broken bones, broken hearts, broken dreams.

Weary eyes leaked out stories,

Into brine-stained pillows, always soaking.

A memory –

“Shut your eyes, child.”

A tender caress, softer than kisses.

Stories of the past, stories of the future,

Never of the present.

Four faces smiled out at me,

Jailed behind a broken glass.

Their ghosts rose up, as if to mock me,

“We’re full of life, how can we die?”

A memory –

One. Two. Three.

The bed rocked gently to the rhythm of the guns.

Pinkie curled around pinkie,

As two little hearts beat as one.

Death left behind souvenirs,

Token of a past life littered,

A doll here, a ball there.

Dust-caked and abandoned.

A memory –

A little boy sat on his father’s lap,

Proud and unafraid.

The woman weaved jasmine into,

Her little girl’s thick hair.

The sky groaned under the weight of,

Prayers it had received,

The rain scribbled consolation on my window,

Too little, too late?

A promise –

The guilt of the survivor,

Shall not wreck me,

Only the hope lives,

Of dreams about to take flight.