If Books were TV and TV was Books…
Hi everyone!
I love the fall, don’t you? I love it when it starts to get cooler (but isn’t freezing yet) and the leaves start to change and it feels like I should be going back to school (I still want to buy new notebooks every year around this time).
I’m very sorry I didn’t post a blog last week; I swear I had an excellent and fascinating reason, which I’ll talk about in a later blog (whee! it’s like foreshadowing! see, I have learned something from TV!). 😉
Instead, this week I thought I’d do my annual blah-di-blah about the new fall season and which shows I’m most excited about! Hooray! (Side note: I promise that "watching TV" was not my "excellent and fascinating reason" for the lack of blog. I mean, that’s not even possible; most of these shows haven’t even started yet!)
But I thought I’d give it a twist this year, since there aren’t that many thrilling new shows on my list, and since my conscience seems to think I should be promoting reading even more than TV. (Funny how my conscience sounds eerily like my mom…) :-)
So I decided to try and come up with books to match the TV shows I’m looking forward to, either in tone or content or in some very made-up inside-my-head kind of way. Fun game! This way, if you liked the book, you might want to check out the show, or, hopefully, vice versa. Ready? OK, in more or less the order of probable awesomeness:
(1) Glee!
I’m guessing some of you have already seen the first episode or two of this show, now airing on FOX Wednesdays after So You Think You Can Dance. It’s about the misfits in the high school glee club, the enthusiastic new glee club coach, the popular football quarterback who just wants to sing, and a bunch of hilarious love triangles.
Sounds like familiar territory, right? SURELY there is a book that brings misfits and popular kids together for some kind of performing arts thing that results in hilarity and romance and new understandings, but I’m having the hardest time coming up with one. How has Meg Cabot not written this book yet? (Unless she has and it’s one of the few I haven’t gotten to…)
Personally, I see Glee as Freaks and Geeks meets High School Musical, without the sharply awesome realistic characters of the former or the bubbly Disney-ness of the latter. But it’s very funny and unexpected and a little twisted, plus there’s all this SINGING! And OK, I’m a sucker for musicals, so I’m totally in.
My book matches for this are a bit of a stretch, but let me know if you think of a better suggestion!
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I haven’t read The View from Saturday in a long time, but I remember loving it, and that it’s about an odd group of four kids who are brought together to be the Academic Bowl team. Teen Idol is just one of Meg Cabot’s many hilarious high school books; really any of them could work for this comparison. 🙂
Or, of course, there’s:
Tada! Football jocks and smart theatre types put on a show together! Romance and hilarity ensue! Plus it’s by ME! :-) Although it’s not as twisty or satirical as Glee, so it’s not a perfect match either. Hmmmmm…
(2) Community
I’ve only seen the trailer for this so far, but it looks hilarious. (And it starts this Thursday on NBC!) Joel McHale (love him) plays a lawyer who has to go back to community college when it turns out his degree is fake. He tries to hit on a girl he meets there by offering to tutor her in Spanish (which he doesn’t actually speak), and then is totally busted when a whole group of people show up for the tutoring…including CHEVY CHASE! Hee!
The previews speak for themselves!
This one is about misfits, too, and about a newcomer in an unusual world, so I picked:
Bloomability is about a thirteen-year-old girl trying to fit in as the new kid at an international boarding school in Switzerland, and like all of Sharon Creech’s books, it is awesome. And Holes, of course, is about young Stanley Yelnats serving time at a really dreadful and odd juvenile detention center, and it’s one of the best books ever. I’m not sure this comparison totally works either, but maybe if you squint a little and imagine a lot… 😉
(3) Flash Forward
This show premieres on ABC next week, so again, I’m working from trailers and critical reviews. But here’s the premise: All at once, for two minutes, everyone in the world blacks out and gets a vision of their own future. Um…AWESOME. This is a GREAT IDEA, the kind authors like me wish they’d thought of first! :-) And then they cast JOSEPH FIENNES, who as you all should know is Shakespeare (in Shakespeare in Love), so therefore YAY.
This show is actually based on a book:
which I haven’t read yet, but I probably will, because it sounds fascinating. The difference, though, is that in the book the vision is of twenty years in the future, whereas on the show it’ll be six months into the future, so that they can get to that point in time for the season finale in May (woo hoo!).
My comparative pick for this is:
A very trippy graphic novel series (written by the genius author of Runaways, who is now a writer on Lost) about an apocalypse where every man in the world suddenly dies at once, except for one…Yorick, the Last Man. And then all the women have to figure out what happened and rebuild the world, while Yorick runs around trying to get back to his long-distance girlfriend without being captured by modern-day Amazons. It’s hilarious and dark at the same time (but very adult, just to warn you!). Similarities: genius premise, apocalypse survivors. And hopefully FlashForward will be awesome, too!
(4) V
This show doesn’t start until November, but it has Morena Baccarin in it (from Firefly/Serenity!) and it’s about aliens, so I’m hoping it’ll be cool. I’ve never seen the original V series, but I have read plenty of books about untrustworthy aliens:
so I know how much fun they are! 🙂
And finally, (5) The Vampire Diaries
The tale of a mortal girl torn between two hot vampire brothers, one good and one evil (of course). Did you all watch this last Thursday? It’s no Buffy the Vampire Slayer (DEEP. SIGH.), not by a long shot, but then, nothing is. And I actually liked the Degrassi gal and some of the supporting characters (especially her younger brother), so I think it’s worth checking out for a while. Besides, I need a couple of shows I can watch without Adam, for the nights when he’s working late (and something tells me he won’t mind missing this one…). 😉
As you probably know, this was originally a book as well (in fact, multiple books!):
and there’s no shortage of other vampire books out there right now that you can read if you’re looking for more fangtastic fiction. But I figure this is a good opportunity to plug MY new vampire book! Hooray!
Never Bite a Boy on the First Date will be available in just two weeks! I’m so excited! Shiny new vampire book! The difference here is that the girl is the one who’s the vampire, but there are still plenty of hot boys for her to be torn between. ;-) And hopefully it’s funny…and hopefully you’ll like it! 🙂
So there you go: exciting new TV, plus some thrilling book recommendations for all those long hours in between new episodes. ;-) I hope you’re all doing fabulously, especially those of you who are going back to school right now! More next week…
Quote of the Day: "It is my strong recommendation that both of these students be hobbled." — Sue, Glee