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and our new RSS feed:  http://shelfrenewal.booklistonline.com/feed/

See ya there!

In her nonfiction bestseller Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo uses her journalistic talents to bring India’s poorest outposts to life. Readers driven to learn more about similar situations worldwide may enjoy:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
• Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof
• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
• The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

You can now find us at our new home, as part of the fabulous blog suite at Booklist Online.

Here’s our new addy:  http://shelfrenewal.booklistonline.com/

and our new RSS feed:  http://shelfrenewal.booklistonline.com/feed/

and even a shiny new take on the logo:

Won’t you come join us and keep the party going?

• Leopold Bloom.Introvert.Did not mind his own company.
• Nick Carraway. Definite introvert tendencies. Small group of friends, but did seek them out and feel energized by social interaction.
• Howard Roark. Total Introvert. People? What other people?
• Tom Sawyer. Extrovert. Sawyer liked socializing. (A little too much, if you know what I mean.)
• Gregor Samsa. Introvert inclinations predate insect-related isolation.
• Clarissa Dalloway. Tricky. Someone should write a thesis on this. Still, I think she goes in the introvert column.

Hmmmm. Lots of “I”s on the list. Who are some of the canon’s more gregarious inhabitants?

Many of them are well-known, but I thought I’d share the list here.  Enjoy!
The Question:  Your favorite book made into a movie. The less obvious, the better (ie, no Harry Potter, etc). Go!

The replies:

Lord of the Rings - I actually like the movies a lot better. After that Starship Troopers.

The Age of Innocence!

I have a few: All the President’s Men, Sarah Plain and Tall, Julie and Julia/My Life in France.

Dune was the worst.

Hugo!

The Color Purple. Great music, too.

The Namesake

Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate)

The Good Earth

Enchanted April

In the Time of Butterflies. Loved the book quite some time ago and just rewatched the movie. Powerful.

The Outsiders, The Secret Life of Bees

Prince of Tides

Revolutionary Road was pretty good. The Third Man, and Mother Night.

Pride & Prejudice

Memoirs of a Geisha was a great movie. Oh and The Devil Wears Prada- I know I don’t sound very deep with that one

John Dies at the End by David Wong

The Lovely Bones (loved the book, the movie didn’t do it justice at all…)

Sense & Sensibility, He’s Just not that Into You, Jaws

Although it is rare for me to enjoy the film version more than the book, In Her Shoes the film was better than In Her Shoes the book.

The best movie adaptation of a novel hands down is To Kill a Mockingbird

Master and Commander. Well cast, gorgeous to look at, captured the adventure and language and intellectual spirit of the books.

All the King’s Men

I liked The Help, but it wasn’t as good as the book (acting was great, script needed some improvement).

Or, This is obvious but I think the scriptwriters did a great job with The Help and universally it seems those who loved the book also loved the movie.

Responded to with, I loved both the book and the movie version of The Help, but thought that the movie lacked some of the depth of the book (hence my comment about the script). I’m thrilled to pieces that it swept the female feature and ensemble categories at the SAG Awards.

 Remains of the Day. Forgot it was a book first. Fabulous movie.

Babette’s Feast

 M*A*S*H, or Six (3) Days of the Condor.

Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, two of the best adaptations of Stephen King stories-mostly they tend to fall flat.

Blade Runner (from the story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

Jacob’s Ladder (adapted from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge) was freaky cool

Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram made into Gods and Monsters.

Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn  

White Oleander

Naked Lunch

Holes

Smila’s Sense of Snow

The Princess Bride

Gone with the Wind

1993 version of The Secret Garden based on Frances Hogdson Burnett’s book.

Stephen King’s The Body made into Stand By Me.

Persuasion

Blindness, by Jose Saramago. Couldn’t bring myself to see it. (Sorry – pun fully intended.)

 The Commitments

No Country For Old Men

Mary Poppins

Oddly, Hotel New Hampshire

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I think they did a great job with that one. Conversely, I think one of the WORST movies from a book was The Other Boleyn Girl. So bad!.

I really liked Scrooged, but the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol was the made for tv movie with George C. Scott – would that count? Other people seemed to like The Polar Express, I found the movie just creepy.

Ordinary People. Great book, great movie. That’s rare.

• Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey into Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman
• The Washington Story by Adam Langer
• Talking to Girls about Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield
• Back to our Future: How the 1980s Explains the World we Live in Now–Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything by David Sirota
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Ruth over at Artifact Collectors has posted a great interview with Holly Hibner of ALB, and there is some useful information about the weeding process and collection development in general.  Take a look at it!

 
As a side note, I am absolutely dying over this recent book posted on ALB.  Really??  The most shocking thing is the copyright date of 1991. Ai yi yi.  I’ve seen some pretty awful books myself in my day…this one ranks pretty high.

How to qualify the best of the backlist?  The folks at Better World Books  (who do GREAT things with library discards – I mention them in all of my weeding workshops), who sell mostly used books, have provided their Top 25 Best-Selling Books of 2011. A list like this tends to reveal the kind of titles that have “staying power” rather than those that are currently topping mainstream lists. Take a look:

Better World Book’s Top 25 Books of 2011

1. The Shack
2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
3. The Kite Runner
4. To Kill a Mockingbird
5. Lord of the Flies
6. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
7. A Child Called “It”: One Child’s Courage to Survives
8. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
9. The Secret Life of Bees
10. StrengthsFinder 2.0
11. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2)
12. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism
13. Love You Forever
14. The Help
15. Holes
16. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens
17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
18. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
19. Animal Farm
20. Into the Wild
21. Number the Stars
22. Of Mice and Men
23. The Pillars of the Earth
24. The Hobbit
25. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

I’m sure that library circulation records would also be interesting to view,  just to see the most checked-out books of the year.  No surprises, of course, these titles all hit the “best of” lists in their respective years, I’m sure.  But interesting all the same.