From Murderbot to Sense and Sensiblity, what are our favourite adaptations from books that we love? Inspired by the recent Apple adaptation of Martha Wells’ sci-fi novels The Murderbot Diaries, this episode is a celebration of the world of books to film. From the joy of seeing a book that we love brought to the big screen, to the pitfalls when things don’t match up to our expectations, we’re considering the hits and misses, and passing on our recommendations. You’ll be hearing from pod regulars Laura Potter and Phil Chaffee, plus we meet Philippa Donovan, a literary scout to the film and TV world. Philippa founded her consultancy Smart Quill to bridge the gap between agents, publishers and authors around the world. She’s giving us the inside track on the world of book to film.
All that, plus a peek into the future and the upcoming projects we’ve earmarked as ones to watch.
Listen via the media player above or in your preferred podcast player with this Podfollow link.
Booklist
All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Book 1)
Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (Book 2)
Room by Emma Donoghue
Normal People by Sally Rooney
The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Sparks
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
Exhalations by Ted Chiang (the film Arrival is based on Story of Your Life)
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger
Rivals by Jilly Cooper
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
Children of Men by P. D. James
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda
Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami
Barn Burning by William Falkner
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke
Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn
Everything I Know About Love andGood Material by Dolly Alderton
Universality by Natasha Brown
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Transcript
Kate: Hello and welcome to the Book Club Review. I’m Kate, and this is the podcast about book clubs and the books that get people talking.
Regular pod listeners will know that we book club reviewers are big Murderbot fans. The first book in the seven volume sequence was published in 2017, and readers quickly took the series to their hearts. More recently, we’ve been counting down the days to the release of the Apple TV adaptation of book one, All Systems Red inspired by Murderbot.
In this episode, we are considering the joys and pitfalls of bringing a book to the screen. You’ll be hearing our recommendations, plus the projects coming out in the future that we can’t wait to watch. We’ll also be hearing from Philippa Donovan, a literary scout to the film and TV world. Philippa runs her consultancy Smart Quill, which she founded in 2011, to bridge the gap between agents, publishers, and authors around the world.
She’s giving us the inside track on the business she equates to being a literary spy.
Philippa: Information is the transaction for scouts. The more information you have, the more valuable you are to your clients. The more you are an interface between the book industry and the film and the TV industry. It’s part espionage and part translation.
Kate: How many books does a literary scout read in a day? Keep listening to find out. Joining me to bring you all that are my dear friend, co-host, and fellow book clubber Laura, who’s dialling in from the Book Club Review’s Vancouver bureau, and regular contributors of the pod, journalist and reader of readers, someone who easily cleared over 200 books last year, Phil Chaffee. Phil recently moved from New York back to London and would generally, he tells me rather be reading a book than watching a film. He had his homework for this episode, which was to watch an episode of Murderbot. Let’s find out how he got on. All that coming up here on the Book Club Review.
Kate: Great to have you both here. Laura, you’re on a flight. Your child is asleep. You don’t have to do anything. You have a book in your hand and the in-flight entertainment system in front of you. Which do you choose? Book or film?
Laura: Ooh, airplanes are different. Usually a film, but it would depend if I already had a book on the go.
Airplanes are a weird vortex, and actually just going straight into movies or into a really long film series for an eight hour flight is a good strategic move. I think you’re not gonna read for eight hours.
Kate: Phil, how about you?
Phil: Probably these days, the book, I did Game of Thrones once on these flights from New York to Korea, and I did literally read for 14 hours or something. With a good page turner it kills that flight time.
Kate: And generally, if you’ve loved a book, would you then be eager to see the film or are you wary?
Phil: I would say wary. I am not a visual reader, so for things that are very visual, like sci-fi, like fantasy, like some historical fiction, I love the idea of seeing it because I can see stuff that I have not imagined. If it’s a more literary thing, I am often nervous, I would say
Kate: Not a visual reader. That’s so interesting to me. Is it like you just hear the book?
Phil: I conceive of it, but I’ve never been the person who’s noticed the color of the character’s hair or has a mental picture of them in my head. So I’m never really upset by casting and has mystifies me when people are, because it’s just not how I process books.
Kate: ‘Cause this is a big problem that I have. I really am extremely wary of seeing an adaptation of something that I’ve loved because I like my own idea of those characters and I do see them quite clearly. I have quite a specific idea of what they look like. And also, yeah, the places they’re in, so it can be jarring to see something brought to life on the screen.
How about you, Laura?
Laura: I am generally eager, but with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Kate: Okay. Well, let’s talk about our focus book, this episode or series of books, but we’re going to concentrate on the first one, which is All Systems Red, the first in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. This novella was published by Tor in 2017 and went on to win the Nebula Award. The character quickly found a devoted fan base, and Wells went on to write six other books in the series.
All novellas, except for book five, which is a full length novel and a delight I might add, it’s my favorite of the series. The audio book of All Systems Red is narrated by Kevin R. Free and published by Tor. Here’s a clip in which we find Murderbot is dealing with the aftermath of an attack by a giant sand worm that has seriously injured one of the humans it is contracted to protect.
audiobook clip: ‘I clamped the weapon back into its harness so I could lift her with both arms. I had lost the armor on my left arm and a lot of the flesh underneath, but my non-organic parts were still working. Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them. Bharadwaj not having non-organic parts and not as easily repaired as me was definitely a priority here, and I was mainly interested in what the med system was trying to tell me on the emergency feed. But first I needed to get her out of the crater. During all this Volescou was huddled on the churned up rock, losing his shit.
Not that I was unsympathetic. I was far less vulnerable in this situation than he was, and I wasn’t exactly having a great time either. I said, Dr. Volescou, you need to come with me now. He didn’t respond. Med system was advising a tran shot and blah, blah, blah. But I was clamping one arm on Dr. Bharadwaj’s suit to keep her from bleeding out and supporting her head with the other.
And despite everything, I only have two hands. I told my helmet to retract so he could see my human face. If the hostile came back and bit me again, this would be a bad mistake because I did need the organic parts of my head. I made my voice firm and warm and gentle and said, Dr. Volescou, it’s gonna be fine, okay, but you need to get up and come help me. Get her out of here’
Kate: Laura it’s thanks to you that I discovered the Murderbot books but how did you come across them? I remember you flagged them up on the pod.
Laura: I think they were called out for a recommendation at Book Warehouse, which is a terrible name for a very nice, independent book chain in Vancouver. I. And I do always find the best sci-fi and fantasy from bookshop recommendations. That’s where I really trust the reviewers. It was very thin and it was hard back, but it just sounded like exactly what I needed.
So I splurged bought it, and then I very quickly accumulated the rest of them, either by getting them out from the library or getting them on Kindle or when I couldn’t do that, getting them in print. So sadly, I don’t have a full set, but I would like to have a full set. What about you guys?
Kate: Yeah, ’cause they’re actually quite beautiful.
I was very struck by how much I love the covers, although I only had, ’cause I now have a copy of All Systems Red, the first one and Artificial Condition. But I think this is a new release that they’ve packaged up. But of the original series I only had book five, which is the one that’s more novella length and I love the cover of it so much.
One of the things I really adored was the way that I felt it tapped into this very beautiful convention of the way sci-fi covers are done. Everything about it just screamed genre in a way that I felt had been done with a very knowing sense of what the audience would want from these books.
And I think the covers are just great, but as I say, I didn’t actually have copies of them because I listened to them. I read one, the initial one, and then I listened to the rest on Spotify. Phil, how did you read them?
Phil: I have only read the first one, and I did that a couple years ago. My dad loved them all and read them all and I think it was on his recommendation, but then they flew round my family and everyone read through them and then it got to me and I only read the first one, but I think it was on a Kindle.
So I’m very unfamiliar with the cover.
Kate: We should take a moment, shouldn’t we, to say what is it that people are responding to in these books? What is it that’s so great about them? I mean, Phil I had sort of blithely assumed that you were a fan, but actually it sounds like you weren’t enough into them to want to read on.
Phil: Yeah, I thought it was a very clever book, I very much enjoyed it, but it was also not particularly a place I wanted to spend lots of time. So I’ve read it again, so I’ve now read it twice and I’ve been watching this series. I feel no drive to read further books.
Kate: I would feel bad about having made Phil read Murderbot for a second time, but it’s all of 115 pages in my edition.
So they’re short, aren’t they? And you’ve got this great central character, this robot, he’s a construct, isn’t he? Part human, with organic parts. And he’s part machine.
It’s not ‘he’. It’s ‘it’. And this is such an important fact of Murderbot’s, whole persona. The fact that it’s not gendered, right, it’s just neutral.
But because of the TV series and watching Alexander Skaarsgard in the role, it flipped a switch in my brain slightly. And I suddenly found myself thinking of Murderbot as a he. Whereas when I read the books, I didn’t, one of the things that I really enjoyed about the books was the way this main character is so un-gendered. It’s a non-thing. What is it, Laura, that you loved about them so much?
Laura: I love the Murderbot character, and it’s told in the first person, so you are inside its head as it is grappling with its newfound freedom to do whatever it wants. It has hacked its governor module. Previously it was created to serve human beings and to protect them, but also to do anything they asked, which could involve hurting other people or hurting themselves.
So it was a very bleak existence. Humans are very fearful of Sec units because they’re really killing machines. But of course, what’s so clever about this book is pushing back against fears of artificial intelligence. I think where we ascribe human emotions and instincts to machines, in this case, all it wants to do is chill, right?
It just wants to be alone. It wants to watch its shows. It wants to understand, for lack of a better word, its own humanity and what it means to be free. And so in the books themselves there are some existential ethical questions, but wrapped up in a very pacey action packed format.
Kate: I pulled out this paragraph.
‘It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bought half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discreet, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job, and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of there as opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity with no idea what I wanted to do, what I should do, what I needed to do.’
There’s this ongoing existential, philosophical thread of inquiry, and yet at the same time, there’s this incredibly relatable, it doesn’t really want to work. It just wants to do things that it enjoys and it finds it really tedious the way it keeps having to get drawn into these human problems and these situations that it thinks are ridiculous.
I think it’s an interesting question because so much of what’s going on with this character is internal, and even as I think one of the delights of the book is the way that Martha Wells is very good at using the body language of this construct to convey emotion. The classic thing it does is if it gets upset about something or overwhelmed, if someone says something nice to it, it has to go and stare at the wall for a bit just to calm down. In the books that’s a very delightful, understandable thing that it does, but when that translates to the screen, I just thought, how are they gonna handle this robot staring at walls? This is not gonna make for great television.
So let us come on to the recent Apple Adaptation of The Murderbot Diaries
Author, Martha Wells has been a science fiction and fantasy writer since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993. Her work includes the Books of the Raksura series, the Ile Rien series, the Murderbot Diaries series, and other fantasy novels most recently Witch King. She’s also written media tie and fiction for Star Wars, Stargate, Atlantis, and Magic The Gathering, as well as short fiction YA novels and nonfiction.
She has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Lotus Awards, and Alex Award and a Dragon Award. While her books regularly appear on bestseller lists, she’s a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and her books have been published in 30 languages. She’s also a consulting producer on the Murderbot TV series.
Murderbot is played by Alexander Skarsgard and is streaming now on Apple TV, here’s a clip.
Murderbot trailer: I am a security unit or SEC unit. I was built to protect and obey humans and humans are idiots. But now that I’ve hacked my programming, I can do whatever I want as long as they don’t find out.’
Kate: So as fans of the books, the big question is what did we make of the live action version of Murderbot?
Phil: I think I’m enjoying the series more than I enjoyed the book.
Laura: Ooh, controversial.
Phil: There are multiple episodes, but they’re also short. They’re short little half hour episodes. I feel like they get the humor, which was one of the things that is very compelling about the book.
I think one of the reasons I like it more, and I think one reason I like some adaptations of genre books is there’s a whole lot of other scientists here where reading the book, I was not really sure. I mean, you sort of know the character name, but they’re not really drawn out and just attaching an actor to a character and seeing their face and blah, blah, blah, it builds in some other character. This show also builds out those characters a bit more, so there’s a bit more for me to cling onto, but mainly I think it’s just the tone. I laughed a lot watching the series. I laughed reading the book too, but for whatever reason, maybe it’s also the visual thing, I can see the spaceship and see all that stuff.
I am looking forward to watching the series much more than I am looking forward to reading further books.
Kate: Yeah, it was my reaction too. I thought it had really honored the things that made the original books great. And I think it’s significant that Martha Wells is an executive producer on the show. I suspect she’s been quite closely involved with it because I feel like you can tell while it’s not the same, because obviously they’ve had to change a lot of things that on the page you just read them.
But somehow they’ve had to find a way of expressing these things through visual action and dialogue. But I think the spirit of it, to me, felt very true to the tone of these books. And what’s great I think in the TV series is actually the degree to which, as you were saying, like the other actors, apart from the main Murderbot character, are much stronger presences and stronger personalities.
And then you really get much more of a sense of how being around these humans and almost the disconnect between Murderbot’s, conception of itself and its existence and these messy, complicated emotional humans who just make these terrible decisions all the time. You really see how they start to affect it.
And change its perception of itself in a way that I’ve really been enjoying.
Laura: I have somewhat enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s that great. I feel like the tone is off. I was reading through some reviews and there’s some people who agree with me. There’s some who don’t. The tone feels a lot less sharp, and I don’t love the portrayal of the humans in quote marks who he’s with.
I feel like they’ve been turned into slightly foolish spoofs of who they really are in the books, you have this really sharp difference between the crew he’s with and the capitalist society that he lives within. I can’t quite get my terms right on this, but essentially sec units are owned by this capitalist organization who are totally mercenary, absolutely without values and own any number of worlds.
Everything’s about ownership. Now, the crew that he is with right now, they’re from a planet that is very much values based, where you can’t own a sec unit, although, let me correct that. You might still have to be a guardian to one. But anyway, it felt very, these are foolish people who don’t get it. Rather than that these are super smart humans that sec unit happens to be with, who are just maybe a bit out of their depth in this situation because of what it is.
I think that’s what I feel is missing is that they turn the humans and their approach to society into something naive rather than what is very clear in the books is that they are principled humans, just living in slightly different ways. Also the whole emphasis on the thruple just felt like a distraction and kind of a cheap laugh and I didn’t like it.
Kate: Yeah, of course that came across much more clearly in the TV series than it did in the book. And the other thing I was struck by rereading the book was the degree to which things are really not very clear in the book. She really throws you in at the deep end and she doesn’t explain all that much. So a lot of the time you’re scrambling a bit like, wait, what’s happening here?
And what is this thing going on over here? And I think another thing I really loved about these books was that normally that would really annoy me. But it really didn’t. With these, I feel like she handles that element of not over-explaining everything and allowing the reader to be a bit confused about what’s actually going on while still keeping enough of a through thread that, in my case, I felt totally kept me interested.
I liked trying to work it out, and I didn’t mind too much that I didn’t really understand all of the details because I love following this central character through it all. But in the TV series, they have to nail all that stuff down. You can’t have the same like vagaries and in a way that’s also a little bit, it makes it feel a little bit more basic than the books do.
I think that’s right, but it’s an interesting area because what I’m really saying is the books are a bit confusing and I miss that in the TV series, which isn’t, which is a strange criticism to have.
Laura: Here is Julian Grimm reviewing on Google, who’s a fan of the books and it’s quite a fair review. He gives it three stars, top level summary is other people probably will really like it if they haven’t read the books, but he concludes by saying the books were ‘biting and witty and really had a strong commentary on society and humanity’. And I agree. Like I think that is there. And maybe that’s me reading into the later books as well. But it just felt a bit goofy in the series.
I think my takeaway is it felt slick, but a bit heartless. It was clever. I like the books better.
Kate: I very rarely watch tv. Something had to go in my life when I started reading a lot more. And basically I just decided quite early on that the thing I would sacrifice would be TV and films. So I hardly ever go to the cinema and I don’t very often watch tv.
I just hear about stuff from my husband who basically watches it and tells me if it’s good. So if it was like Severance, right? Or that new Studio, which is the Apple TV show set in the Hollywood studio, which he tells me is great. I don’t need to watch it. I’ve got him to report back. But anyway, the point is, so then when I do sit down and watch something like this, I’m maybe it’s slightly overly blown away ’cause it’s just a bit of an exciting, novel experience to me.
I loved this so much. I thought it was so well done. I was so happy that they had caught the tone of the book so much. I really hope it does well because I want them to get on to the next book in the series, which is where Murderbot meets the best character of all of the entities that it encounters in these novels, which is this cargo transport ship intelligence called ART. It ends up hitching a ride on this ship. And first of all, they hate each other, very suspicious of each other. And then gradually this evolves into something like friendship, although that’s not really quite the right term for the relationship they have anyway, it’s one of the all-time, most joyful things to read and to watch that relationship evolve.
And I’m excited about how they might do that.
Laura: Aren’t you nervous
Kate: Yeah, it’s all gonna depend on the voice that they use. If it’s not right … it’s a worry.
All in all. What are we saying? Are we recommending the books? I would wholeheartedly recommend the books. I think you would too, Laura, wouldn’t you?
Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, you don’t have to read them all. Phil gave it a shot. If it’s not for you, that’s fine. You can try the TV series.
Phil: I liked the book, it just, I didn’t keep going. Yeah. But I have nothing against that book. It’s a great book.
Laura: You may have missed out. ’cause to Kate’s point it gets even better with ART.
Phil: I’ll try the second one. It’s a very small commitment trying these books
Kate: Because Book 5 is a proper novel and ART comes back, they’re back together again. And it’s so satisfying because it’s complicated. Even for Martha Wells, book five, there’s a lot going on. I loved it so much.
But yeah, you’ve gotta get there. And then TV series, I’m certainly a fan. I would highly recommend it to people if they fancy ponying up for an Apple TV subscription, right? Because it’s not actually free for everyone to watch.
Laura: I did get an Apple subscription just for this occasion, and there’s so much to watch. Like Kate, I’m very much outta the loop
***
Kate: Coming up my interview with Literary Scout Phillipa Donovan. But first, if you’ve noticed an advert or two in this episode and find them annoying, fear not. You can come and listen to the episode’s ad-free overall Patreon. Patreon is a nifty platform that allows people to support the shows that they love.
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Over Zoom, which I then make into a special catch up episode for anyone who couldn’t make the live discussion. This month we are reading Universality, the new novel from Natasha Brown. All this for the price of a couple of coffees a month. Head to patreon.com/the book club review for all the benefits and how to sign up.
Okay, and now let’s hear from Phillipa Donovan. I began our conversation by asking her to tell me about what a literary scout actually does.
Philippa: There’s actually two forms of literary scouting. There’s scouting for foreign publishers. And then there’s book to film and TV scouting. But what you find is a lot of the scouts do both because if you’re reading everything, whether you recommend onto publishing clients or producer clients, it makes no difference.
If you’re doing the work, you’re in a position to say yes, I’ve read it. And this is what I think quite a lot of the very big foreign scouts have really robust teams that do book to film and TV as well. But increasingly so the last 10 or 15 years or so, there’s been a bit of an offshoot movement where you find scouts specializing only in book to film and tv.
And so that’s what I ended up doing. Book to film and TV is extremely competitive, so you have to read fast, you have to speak to everyone. You have to know what’s selling. You have to know who’s in competition. For auctions, it’s effectively an information service. When I first started doing it, I often used to think of myself as a spy.
Your role is to get as much information about all the books that are out there being sold to publishers. So at the point of the publishing deal, before that deal is done, you wanna know who’s interested. You wanna know why they’re interested. Ideally, you have some sense of the money because obviously the more money that’s involved, the more publisher will feel like it’s potentially a lead title.
That’s really enticing for producers to know. They plan to launch it with a massive amount of hype. That’s useful information for a producer who’s deciding whether to buy film and TV rights. Being able to articulate plots is another part of the job and articulate it in a way that doesn’t make your reader go cross-eyed.
What actually happens, why it’s successful, possibly, why it’s not successful, and therefore why you are recommending or not recommending. Ultimately, do I think this is a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ for film and tv?
Kate: So what does success look like? Do you know when you found something that you think is gonna be great?
Philippa: It is such a subjective industry on every level. You know, what some literary agents love other literary agents don’t love what some sell to publishers ends up being enormously successful in the hands of a readership. And for others less. There’s very little correlation. I don’t always know what will work, but I know what won’t work and I feel like that’s pretty powerful because there are certain things that producers will always look for and certain things that they will shy away from.
In terms of the role of scouting, like I say, it’s part espionage. Information is the transaction for scouts. The more information you have, the more valuable you are to your clients, the more you are an interface between the book industry and the film and the TV industry. It’s part espionage and part translation.
The book industry speaks in a certain way, and film and TV speaks in a certain way. Often we use the same words with completely different meanings. So part of my job is that translation, it’s this is what the book industry is saying about this title, or about this agency, or about this movement, this trend.
And I translate that into what that actually breaks down to film and TV and vice versa.
Kate: We’ve been talking about Murderbot, which is the adaptation of Martha Wells fantasy book series. Martha Wells was exec. producer on that show. She had involvement with the development of that script. And I’m curious to know, do you think it’s good when an author is closely involved, or can that lead to problems?
Philippa: Sometimes it has changed so much. It’s so interesting to me. In the ’80s and ’90s and the early ’00’s when the industry really was booked to film, there was a kind of consensus, certainly in LA, in Hollywood, that you didn’t want the authors too heavily involved. And you saw a lot of authors come out publicly and say, I found the process of watching my book adapted for film, it was like watching them kill a child. Big-name authors with a huge amount of leverage and power in publishing would unable to do anything, or have any input at all. I feel like it was Emma Donoghue’s book Room. She’s one of the first writers that I heard of that was able to be involved in the adaptation of her book, and it was successful and then it was backed up by people like Sally Rooney who worked on the adaptation of Normal People.
And that was such a massive hit that all of a sudden I feel like the producers were like, oh, actually this can be incredibly enriching as an experience, as a way for us to connect with a viewership. So it is tricky because the act of writing a book is singular. It’s one person in a room with a laptop or a typewriter or a pen if you wanna go, really old school analog.
The act of bringing a TV series to fruition or producing a film is hundreds of people. The idea of one person having decision making power is such an anathema to them, and I feel like authors find that transition very awkward for them to navigate. But I do feel like the scenario is changing and there’s an increased willingness from producers to have the authors involved.
Kate: It seemed to me that with the need to generate material for the streaming services, the entertainment companies have really started to mine books as a resource. Do you think there’s any danger of film and TV companies running out of books?
Philippa: No. Thankfully. It has always been a robust industry, that book to film trajectory was pretty well trodden for a long time.
I’m trying to think of early examples from like the eighties and nineties, but The Horse Whisperer or The Bridges of Madison County, The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks). There was a real sense of if the book was enough of a hit or if the book deal had enough momentum behind it, then film rights was something that the producers should be looking to.
It was mainly studios back then, but of course with the advent of streaming, the whole industry dispersed open, and I feel like that’s where it brought in the capacity for really successful book to TV adaptations, because what had traditionally been the case was you only really had the money to do big budget films as adaptations.
All of a sudden, Netflix and Disney and Hulu had a lot of money and HBO really at the forefront of this movement. Game of Thrones was epically expensive to make. But they had the money to do it for TV all of a sudden, and so there was a kind of recalibration, I think, of what adaptations could look like.
I think that was such a wonderful moment because you often, and I’m sure all of your listeners will remember this, your favourite books being shoved into two hours. It’s so painful watching a book that you love reduced and almost brutalized trying to get it to meet the format. Whereas TV, you want it eight episodes, you want it 10 episodes, you want it two seasons, you want it seven seasons.
It can be as long as you want. You don’t have to make the book fit 120 minutes.
Kate: Mm-hmm. That is one of the delights of this Murderbot series actually, is that they’re novellas, right? I actually dunno how many episodes there are gonna be, but it feels like it’s gonna be 12 or something. And as a result, it’s almost line by line, it’s all in there, which is incredibly pleasing for fans.
Philippa: So pleasing, and in fact, that raises the point that my personal opinion is that the most robust adaptations are from either short stories or novellas. Certainly for film, like I say, tv, you have a bit more space to work with. So if you’ve got seven books in the series and they’re all 500 pages long, you can adapt whatever the end material is to that amount of material.
Personally, I feel like short stories and novellas are incredibly appealing to producers because they leave space for the hundreds of other decision makers that are all of a sudden in the room discussing how to make this happen.
Philippa: And how to make it happen in a way that honours the fans and honours, the readers and honours the originator, the writer, the creator.
It feels like there’s so much lovely space for them to work with. You get really gorgeous adaptations from that original format. For example, Arrival. That film, it’s quite old now, but I think it’s one of the best adaptations I’ve ever seen. It was based on a short story by Ted Chiang, and then you’ve got things like Brokeback Mountain, obviously, which based on a short story, there’s a lot of evidence to show that the really successful transitions come from scarcer, more limited in word count and page count ip.
It’s a fun job because you get to read and I tell people what I do. They’re like, that is just the dream. You get to read for work.
Kate: Are you still able to read for pleasure? How do you manage to balance the sense of reading, being work and reading being a joy?
Philippa: I’m very strict about it, so if I’m reading for work, I’m reading on my laptop, and if I’m reading for me, it’s an actual physically published book.
I’ll just about go to a bound proof if I have to. But ideally I want a finished copy. Really a hardback is the dream. I won’t read on screen if it’s something for me, something that I want to read, as long as I demarcate quite strictly, it helps my brain know what I’m doing.
Kate: I love that you flagged up Arrival and the Ted Chiang short story, which is a gem, an absolute gem.
I totally agree, isn’t it? Are there any other things like that that come to mind? We wanted to recommend some things to people that we thought were particularly successful adaptations of books that we had loved.
Philippa: This is an old one. It’s one I always go back to, which I think is definitive: Friday Night Lights.
It’s old. It was originally a book and then it was a film. It was a film in I think maybe the ’80s or the ’90s. And the film was very successful. And then it was spun out to a TV series from that. And the TV series was a huge success. And it was the first of its kind in a way.
And I tell you the reason why I love it so much. ’cause I feel like this is when adaptations are at their most glorious is when they use the book as a starting point for the conversation. Feeling so beholden to the content, to the author, gotta get it right and gotta include that scene and gotta make sure that character has that exact hair that can be so dulling for creativity.
And the people who work in film and TV are highly creative. Literally definition of visual. Like they see everything. So visually. This is why I think actually author contribution is so useful going forwards ’cause it means that you can use the book as a starting off point for what the end result might be.
Because you have their input, they’re not feeling alienated, like you’re taking this way out of the realm of the book of what I originally envisaged. It’s like this is now something new. It exists in a different space. It is not literally text taken and plonked on screen. Taking the best bits of the book, understanding what made it resonate, what made it powerful, and I feel like Friday Night Lights, the TV series did that so well. It was an evolution.
I tell you another one that I think was extremely successful for precisely the same reason, it was One Day on Netflix. Alright, we loved the book, but he film just didn’t sing. You could tell that the real love was the book and the producers were like, we did not do that book justice, but that book deserved more so they circled back to it and they do as a TV series, a bit more space, very different casting.
David Nicholls involved as he was not involved at all in the film because you didn’t back then, and it’s an entirely different entity. I got the feeling from watching it, that I had reading the book. I got to a certain episode and I actually stopped. I was so bruised by reading the book. I was like. I will go no further.
This is where I end my journey with One Day. And it was so nice, like feeling that power, like taking my power back
Kate: Because you know where it’s going and you don’t want to go there.
Philippa: Exactly. But that adaptation really was gorgeous, and I love that they came back around to it. It was another interpretation.
The film was actually good, but it was just, it was one version of it. And I feel like books can give rise to many lives, not just one life. They’re the adaptations that I love. When you think creatively about, okay, this is the original material, but where can we spin it out to?
Kate: You’ve just reminded me of the TV series of Jilly Cooper’s book Rivals. I grew up reading Rivals. And it was done with such love and they so exactly nailed the humour, the tone of it. I thought they did it all so adroitly and I just loved every frame of it. But actually I think there were eight episodes and I didn’t watch the last episode ’cause I didn’t want it to end. Yeah. And I actually have not watched the final episode of Rivals ’cause the whole thing made me so happy. I was just like, yeah, I just gonna stop it here so that I will always have this little last bit.
Philippa: Knowing it’s there. I understand that completely. And I do feel the best adaptations give you that. I loved these characters when I read the books, and now I’m watching them in a different format and these characters are my friends and I don’t wanna leave them.
Kate: Mm, exactly. I left them once and I won’t leave them again.
Philippa: Then the producers have done something right with the adaptation. You get that magic when you have a lot of people making decisions.
It can go either way. When you bring in a lot of people who are, like I say, incredibly creative and intelligent and visual and lots of them, you can make absolute magic.
Kate: How much time a day do you spend reading?
Philippa: Around the book fairs is when scouts are the most active and all year round. If there’s something that’s super time sensitive, I can generally get through about two books in a day, but I can’t sustain that. So I can’t be reading two books a day every day. Generally speaking, I can read as fast as I need to, but I try not to read it full speed all the time. ’cause it makes your brain go a bit fuzzy.
I remember an agent once describing it to me as blinking at pages. There are a few tricks, like scouts do have a few tricks about how to get through material fast, but I won’t bust them open.
Kate: Philippa, I could talk to you all day. It has been such a delight finding out about your world and just so inspiring to hear about you and your obviously deep love of all these different mediums, writing and film and tv.
Philippa: It’s, it’s a pleasure. It’s a real pleasure.
***
Kate: I loved meeting Philippa, and if you want to hear more, there’s a longer version of our conversation over on the Patreon feed, which I’ve made available to all, you don’t have to be a paid subscriber to listen. You’ll find the link in the show notes. Philippa recommended a bit of a Backlist classic in Friday Night Lights.
Now it’s back to Laura and Phil for some more recommendations of our favorite film and TV adaptations of books that we’ve loved.
The Reddit thread Suggest Me A Book I’ve been known to haunt, has a lively discussion on book to movie adaptations. Redditer Queen Red, launched it with:
‘I finished reading The Girl on the Train in three days. I loved it. Now I’m watching the movie and think it’s terrible.
I was so excited to give the movie a try after enjoying the book so much.
What are your favourite books that were made into actual good movies?
The responses came thick and fast. Among the suggestions were The Shawshank Redemption, based on a short story by Stephen King, Coraline and Stardust by Neil Gaman, The Martian by Andy Weir, the recent film version of Frank Herbert’s Dune, About a Boy by Nick Hornby, Room by Emma Donahoe, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.
So there are a few to get us started, Laura and Phil, over to you. What are your favorite adaptations that to your mind actually live up to your enjoyment of the original book, or perhaps you think the film version was even better?
Laura: I was gonna say, Call Me By Your Name, which I wonder if that would be slightly, not controversial, but you guys are gonna have opinions on that one. For me, the adaptation took everything that was in the book and then just made it, sensorial is not a word, but it brought it to life across all the senses.
You got to be in Italy, you got to see these beautiful men. You got to feel the sexual chemistry at another level because it was on film, and yet I really felt that it nailed the emotions, the drama, the longing that was in the book. Thoughts?
Phil: I have many. I wanna first say that the first episode I came on the show to discuss was Call Me By Your Name.
Kate: Oh, I do remember very fondly. I’ll link in the show notes to that episode ’cause it was such a fun one.
Phil: I love the book, as you will find out if you go and listen to that episode. I love the movie. I thought there were issues. My biggest issue with that movie is I feel like Armie Hammer was miscast. I feel like he was five years, at least, too old for the Oliver role. And that age differential between 17 and 25 feels very different when it’s 17 and 30. It just felt slightly wrong,
Kate: But the atmosphere, right?
Phil: Yeah, that was so amazing.
Kate: That was so successfully translated from the book, ’cause one of the great pleasures of the book was not so much reading this incredibly intense relationship as the lovely European wealthy family house and all the books and the music and the culture and the conversations around the table at dinner.
Phil: And the father’s speech, they nail it in the movie. That speech at the end that makes you cry or it makes me cry.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. That is a good one. I feel like that’s a very solid recommendation. Okay. Phil, how about you? What would you flag up?
Phil: My first one is one of my favorite movies ever, which is Children of Men.
Have you guys seen it?
Kate: Ooh, good one. Good one. Good one. Yeah.
Phil: The Alfonso Cuarón one. Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s a 2006 movie. This goes to the broad point as I’ve been thinking over adaptation. I think my favorite adaptations are the one that are almost transpositions, that take the source material and don’t try to just fill in the colours, but do their own thing with it.
This started as a PD James novel from 1992, which I actually just read because I was curious about it. It’s great. Oh, it’s very different. The premise of Children of Men is, I’ll give the premise from the novel. So it’s written in 1992, set in 2021, and in 1995. People stopped having babies. So the last human born was in 1995.
Therefore, the world’s getting older. Civilization is broken down because when there’s no hope left of further generations, PD James thinks through what that means. She uses it as this exploration of power of fascism. There’s this fascist leader who’s the warden of England. It’s set in England, and the protagonist is his cousin.
And that is key to the plot. But then she also uses it as this exploration of mortality and death, and it becomes this sort of on the nose religious parable. Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican director, took the same material – I actually don’t know the screenwriter – in 2006, and used that premise to then explore those themes, but also the themes of the war on terror and climate change and all of these things that make the film, if you watch it today, it feels just as vital and current as it did in 2006, but it also feels very.
Different than the initial book. They are both just astonishing artifacts. I highly recommend the book and if you have not watched the movie, Laura, it is really good. It’s a thriller too.
Kate: Oh, it’s so tense. Yeah. I wonder, I do know this about her [Laura]. I just wonder if she could get through it? But the performances are so incredible and there is something so beautiful about it. It really captures something so profound and meaningful about human existence, it’s all in there.
Phil: And Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, it’s a good cast.
Kate: And you get Clive Owen! Who is just gorgeous. That’s a great one. I love that you flagged that up. I’d forgotten about that one.
Okay. I have something very different. It is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and what a nice way to turn our thoughts to the miracle that is Emma Thompson’s film of Sense and Sensibility, which is one of my all-time favorites. It’s a fantastic cast. You’ve got Emma Thompson, you’ve got Hugh Grant, you’ve got Kate Winslet, a young gorgeous Kate Winslet.
You’ve got Greg Wise, you’ve got, oh my goodness, there’s so many … Hugh Laurie’s in there. The sort of great and good of the British acting pool. And it’s directed by Ang Lee.
Phil: I think he’d just done the ice storm maybe? The point was he was at his peak.
Kate: Yeah. We all knew about Ang Lee at that point.
We’re like, oh my God, he’s amazing. This film is such a treat. Emma Thompson did the adaptation herself, and so you’ve got this wonderful script that was written by someone who you feel Jane Austen herself would’ve liked and respected. There’s such a sense of this intelligence behind it in the way it has been done, and it so beautifully brings out the emotional beats of it, these interrelationships between these families and the concern about finding the right person and marriage and, but all of it with this surprising political edge, which I think is what Emma Thompson is bringing to it, and Ang Lee as well, which is this thread about property and money and the way that that was what dictated happiness in these times. People weren’t able to marry for love. They married because they had to marry the right people to secure their future. That’s really at the forefront of this film, and so I think it holds up really well. It feels like you are watching this beautiful novel, so exquisitely brought to life, but also it feels like it speaks to the society of today in a way that I think is just wonderful. And it’s so funny.
And I think the interesting thing about Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars is at the time, it was almost like everyone was a bit disappointed by this performance because we all loved him so much in all the Richard Curtis films, and that was what he was known for, was this posh sort of idiot romantic character that we all loved. And in this, he plays the role in a way that is so reserved and so buttoned up. It’s almost like a non-performance, but it really isn’t, if you watch it carefully. He is doing so much as is Emma Thompson –you can tell it’s very fresh in my mind, I just had the greatest pleasure watching it again yesterday – but it’s one of the ones that I turn to as a bit of a comfort watch.
Phil: I think that’s a great suggestion. Another great thing about it is how being Ang Lee, how cinematic it is. And he gets away from one of the perils of Austen adaptations, which is just like you’re stuck in these drawing rooms and these pokey houses.
Laura: I love that film. I’m gonna say something controversial, but it is better than Sense and Sensibility. If you have not read Sense and Sensibility recently, it is her weakest novel. There is a lot in the film that actually fills in and makes the book more sophisticated and nuanced. Pride and Prejudice is a perfect novel, Sense and Sensibility is gappy.
Kate: It’s interesting ’cause I love the film and then I went back and I read the book and I really enjoyed the book. But it’s interesting actually, it was very overlaid by this film that I had loved and so yeah, perhaps I wasn’t as alive to maybe its flaws as you. I think the other thing I think is quite funny about the film is that there’s this whole thing about that being sent off to live in poverty because they haven’t inherited the beautiful Norland Park because it passes to the brother. So they’re dispatched to live in this quote unquote cottage in Devon. And when they get there, it’s just the most beautiful Landmark Trust sort of property. And when they go in to this supposedly terribly shabby house, it’s all like Eau de nil and beautiful. It’s … I don’t know, it just makes me laugh how aspirational this house is to contemporary eyes.
So that’s quite a funny thing about it. We must move on. But yeah, I think that’s a wholehearted recommend. I feel like you can’t say that the book is bad.
Laura: No, the book’s not bad, actually. What is most, maybe not one of her best? Maybe what shocked me most in the book, and this picks up on what you were saying about how people have to marry for money, is I think the book is bleaker than the film. In the book Marianne is not marrying for love whatsoever. At the end of the film, you feel like Marianne has come to care for Colonel Brandon.
Kate: She’s with Alan Rickman. And who would mind about that?
Laura: Yeah, exactly. Who would mind about that? And in the film that she’s grown up a little bit and she isn’t sacrificing anything. I think the book is a bit bleaker, that she has had the great heartbreak of her life and is now going to have to settle for Colonel Brandon.
Kate: As indeed Jane Austen. Did she not? I think she was not able to pursue the attachment that she had formed.
Laura: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But then of course she didn’t settle. She never married.
Kate: Obvious other epic Austen adaptation is the completely incomparable, Jennifer Ely, Colin Firth BBC series of Pride and Prejudice, which also is just, I think perfection. Again, the casting, the way it’s done, it’s so great, but the film of Sense and Sensibility feels quite self-contained, whereas that series of Pride and Prejudice is quite an epic watch.
Laura: We could have a whole series on Jane Austen adaptations, couldn’t we?
Phil: Absolutely.
Kate: What else came to mind for you then, when you’re thinking about films or TV shows of books that you loved?
Laura: I love a book called Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda, which is written in French, and I’ve read the translation in English.
It’s about three oddball characters in their twenties coming together in this beautiful Parisian flat. One of the young men is an aristocrat alienated from his family, and he’s taking care of this huge palatial Parisian flat that his grandmother has left to the family before they decide what to do with it.
But he’s at sea. He has very poor social skills and he’s selling postcards down at a tourist shop. His roommate is a very fiery working class chef who’s listening to music and drinking a ton, and he’s got his own personal challenges that come out. And then there’s a young woman who’s living up in the garret, which doesn’t have any heating, and she is working as a cleaner.
And again, what’s her backstory? How has she ended up here? She’s very isolated, very alone. And the young aristocratic gentleman rescues her one night when it’s freezing cold. He’s worried about her and brings her down, and then she lives in the flat and they really begin to form a family. I loved this book so much and it took me forever to figure out how I could find the film adaptation because it wasn’t available.
Kate:Is it French?
Laura: Yeah, it’s a French adaptation. And it took me forever to figure out how I could get it because it wasn’t available on Apple Canada or Apple US. And then when I was living in the UK, I was finally able to get it. And Audrey Tatou is the main female character Camille.
She’s so good. And Guillaume Canet is Frank, the fiery chef. And then Laurent Stocker is Philbert, Marquis de blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is such a feel good book. I don’t know if you guys have read it. I feel like Kate, maybe you’ve read it at my insistence.
Kate: I’m slightly scared to admit, I think I might have started it and I didn’t feel the same.
Laura: It happens. I loved the book so much that for me, the film just gave me more. I don’t know that it’s the best adaptation of all time, but I was like, yes, just give me more. I just want more of this feel-good story about people coming together and creating a new family.
Kate: Yeah. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Phil, how about you?
Phil: I’m going to do another, going the opposite direction, Laura, A movie I absolutely loved that. I then tracked back to the source material. This was a 2018 South Korean film called Burning by Lee Chang-dong. Have either of you seen it?
Laura: No. No, we certainly have not.
Phil: It was released and it was, it had, I’ll give you the brief premise, which is this young twenty-something guy who is poor named Jong-su.
This is in contemporary South Korea. He meets this woman named Hae-mi. They hook up once she goes on. She was traveling in Africa and when she comes to pick her up at the airport, they’re not fully a couple or anything. They’re not a couple. She has this new boyfriend who’s in the film. This guy named Ben, who’s super rich, lives in Gangnam.
Then the three of them hang out a bit and while they’re all drinking at the poor guy’s house this one time, Ben tells him, while it’s just the two of them together, sometimes Ben goes out into the countryside, finds a greenhouse or a barn, and burns it down. And then the film progresses from there.
It becomes this astonishing exploration of class in hyper-capitalist Korea, but it’s all very … it’s high art house. You have to be there, pay attention. It’s slow moving, but also really astonishing. Anyways, so the source material for this is partially Barn Burning, this Haruki Murakami short story, which was written in 1992, which uses that premise, but is set in Japan, talking about this separate hyper-capitalist era.
But then, that story itself is an adaptation of a William Faulkner short story called Barn Burning from 1939 that was published in Harper’s, and that one actually flipped it where it’s the poor guy who’s accused of barn burning, and it’s a slightly different thing. The director Lee Chang-dong, I think references both stories, but if you enjoy the film, it’s really fun going backwards and finding the source material and seeing how each of these amazing artists transpose this source material and uses it to explore different things.
That’s my recommend.
Kate: Not sure I’ll be racing to watch that one, but listeners, you may feel differently and I love that you brought it up. I love knowing that it’s there for me.
Laura: That’s why we bring you on the show, Phil, to make us to raise the bar,
Kate: My tastes run very much more towards the mainstream. I quickly would flag up the couple of TV adaptations that I thought were really wonderful.
One is, again, going back to the 18th century, the television version of Susanna Clarke’s, Jonathan Strange, and Mr. Norell, this is one of my all-time favourite books. And to say that I was wary of watching the TV version, is putting it mildly. I was really nervous because once you’ve seen a TV version of something, then that superimposes your idea of the characters and yeah, we talked about this earlier.
So I was worried, and I thought it was done so perfectly and I loved the casting. For me, the casting really worked. I can’t remember the name of the actors, but they really embodied my own mind’s eye version of what I thought these two eccentric practising magicians – ’cause this is the idea. If you don’t know the story of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, it’s set in 18th-century England, London, there’s a magical society, which is a sort of group of people who are enthusiasts about magic, but they can’t actually do magic. It’s not that they’re magical in any way. And then it turns out that there are two individuals in England who actually are able to perform spells.
They really can do magic, and one of them, Mr. Norrell, is hoarding all the magical texts and literature and material about practical magic that he can get his hands on and guarding it very jealously. And the other, Jonathan Strange wants magic to be discussed and almost … enlightenment scientists. He wants it to be explored and to be accessible.
So it’s this great clash between these two opposing philosophies and then many adventures ensue. One of the joys of the book is these footnotes. If you’re a person who likes footnotes, you’ll be in heaven because they are very rich and discursive, and they take you off in all these little different directions from what’s going on in the text.
But that’s a great delight. Obviously you don’t get that in the TV series, but I didn’t mind because the TV series felt very rich and beautifully done, and I love the arc of it. I thought they ended it in a way that to me, felt just right. And then the other one very quickly is the TV series of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble.
Laura: Ooh.
Kate: Which starred Claire Danes. And who’s that guy? Jesse Eisenberg. Yeah. And again, I thought the casting was just right. It felt like they really nailed it, and I think that was an interesting one because they played around with almost the form of it more. I thought they took the source material and the TV adaptation was quite different from that in some ways.
But Taffy Brodesser-Akner was involved in producing the series and I think you could really tell, and it was very true to the spirit and the humor and the political points That book was making. All of that was in there. And I thought it was a joyful watch. I really enjoyed it. It was a good one for me.
Laura: I actually watched one episode of that and thought I might like it better than I even liked the book.
Kate: Yes, it was one of those
Laura: Good actors, right? That can really help.
Phil: Yeah.
Kate: Alright. I’ve loved feeling inspired about watching all those. Thank you very much for bringing them up. Just to finish, is there anything on your radar that you know is coming up? Films take a long time to make and quite often we hear about things way before they come out.
I know. I’m excited about the film version of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, which I saw a trailer for the other day and I thought, oh, that looks good. ’cause that novel is very cinematic. And I thought, yeah, I wanna see that translated onto screen. And again, amazing casting with Fiona Shaw playing the memorable hypochondriac mother, if you’ve read that book.
And the other one, which actually is just out in cinemas, but I missed it and now I’m waiting for it to come to streaming. But that is the adaptation of The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, which has Bill Murray and Naomi Watts and again, watching the trailer, it just seemed to me like it was going to be a really good adaptation.
And I love The Friend. I thought The Friend was a wonderful book, about a woman who inherits, a dear friend of hers dies. She’s grieving him, but she’s also inherited this dog of his. And this dog is a Great Dane, so it’s a very significant presence in her life. And she lives in an apartment where she’s not allowed to have a dog.
So causes all these complications. And so the novel is a wonderful mix of this frustration and the difficulties of caring for this dog. And the dog is also grieving, it’s missing its master. And so this is a very beautiful exploration of loss and how we move on and how we heal. And all of that’s in there.
It’s one of those funny, poignant, perfect books and I think the film looks like it would be good. So yeah, I’m keen to see that. How about you
Laura: Kate, you’re gonna be horrified, but I am looking forward to Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, which I’m sure is just gonna be the first of many adaptations of Emily Henry novels …
Kate: Could only be better than the books, if you ask me.
Laura: It probably will be a controversial view, I know. No, but I still read them. I bet they do the casting well
Kate: and I’ve only read Book Lovers and it’s possible that the others are better than that.
Laura: No, probably not. What about you, Phil?
Phil: I am looking forward to – mainly ’cause I’m very curious how they might approach it – the adaptation that Stephen Frears has signed up to direct of a TV show of The Anarchy that William Dalrymple book from several years ago, which is a history book about the British East Company that spans several centuries and they’re now gonna make a dramatized TV show of this, not a documentary or anything.
And Steven Frears is a great director, so I’m very curious what this might look like.
Kate: Yeah. I’m also intrigued by that. I actually started that book and it was amazing, but also just such a doorstep. It defeated me.
Phil: Fair
Kate: But I felt bad because it was really, it’s really well-written. Oh, and there’s one more I’ve just spotted in my notes, which is there’s an adaptation of The Salt Path, which is that book by Raynor Wynn.
It’s a memoir about the couple who are in this desperate situation. The husband has got this terminal illness and they lose their home and with nothing else to do. They set off on this walk around [00:58:00] the coastal path of southwest England, and I was just intrigued by the casting of that one because Gillian Anderson is going to play Raynor Wynn and I thought, Ooh, I could see that. I think that would be good.
Phil: It’s also Jason Isaacs, who was the dad in the last season of The White Lotus.
Kate: Love him. Great.
Phil: They are both so good. I want to see it just for the cast. I’ve not heard the book.
Kate: I was really surprised by how much I liked and got from the book, which is not, it was a massive hit and a bestseller and it obviously meant a lot to a lot of people.
But normally those sorts of books, perversely, I tend not to like that much, but I really did like The Salt Path. I thought it was really great. I got a lot from it.
Laura: I have news coming to you fresh from my own research, which is that there’s gonna be a new Pride and Prejudice coming out on Netflix, either towards the end of this year or next year.
It’s gonna star Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden. I don’t know them, but Olivia Coleman will be Mrs. Bennett, which is very exciting. And then perhaps slightly surprisingly, but intriguingly, Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love and Good Material has been involved in the adaptation.
Kate: Oh wow. Interesting. That should be good then because she’s great. It almost feels like it’s one of those texts where every generation deserves to get their own version of it. And that’s fair. I see that the Colin Firth one, for me, that’s always gonna be the Source, but I could see that people coming up now, they deserve their own version.
Laura: I agree. And we deserve more and more versions every decade.
Kate: So lovely to have all these things to look forward to because like Murderbot basically, I may not watch that much TV, but I always want to be watching TV, so I’m happy that all these things exist.
Laura: And what’s better than bookish television?
Nothing really, other than books. To be clear. If you’re gonna watch television, let’s bring it back to books
Kate: The best of both worlds. Alright. Thank you guys so much for joining me. This has been a delight.
Kate: That’s nearly it for this episode. You’ll find all the books mentioned plus links to trailers of the films we talked about in the show notes. This episode of the Book Club Review was made by me, Kate Slotover. You can support me in making the podcast over on Patreon where subscribers get ad free episodes and most weeks there’s an extra episode for subscribers. Next up I’m exploring Australia’s Stella Prize with a review of the winner Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser and some recommendations of Australian authors to watch out for from a friend with her ear to the ground of the Australian book world. At the higher tier, you can join me to talk books in person at our monthly book club, held over Zoom with a recording posted later to listen back to, for anyone unable to make the live session.
In June we are reading Universality by Natasha Brown and are about to vote on our upcoming reads for July, August and September. Next up on the main show is Explicitly Literary. I’m joined by author Alex Allison and writer and critic Elizabeth Morris to consider the current trend for ‘spicy’ books, particularly where dragons are involved.
But what do readers want or need from sex in books? We are going to attempt to figure it out with some recommendations for our own favourites from the steamier end of the bookshelf. If you want to keep in touch, you can find the pod on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email us anytime at thebookclubreview[at]gmail.com.
Drop us a line. No one emails! It’s nice to get letters. If you head to our website, thebookclubreview.co.uk, you’ll find full shownotes and a transcript plus our episode archive where you can have a browse through and listen to any one of over 170 other episodes, each one, in my view, a gem. And if you enjoy our shows and want to do a nice and completely free thing to support us in return, please do leave a quick star rating and review by your podcast app reviews and ratings really help other listeners find us.
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But for now, thanks for listening and happy book clubbing.
