Part of your New Year's Eve resolution should be to read more books. Books are awesome. Some of the best movies came from books, and you know how annoying it is when people say "the book was so much better". You could be one of those people! Reading a book is sort of like getting to see a movie years before it's in the theater. Imagine that! You could see the Oscar-winning movie that comes out three years from now in the comfort of your own home.
Plus, you get to do all the casting decisions in your brain when you read a book. Hell, you can cast yourself as the lead and surround yourself with Ryan Gosling and Jennifer Lawrence. How many movies have been ruined by poor casting decisions? Hundreds? Millions? Trillions? That will never happen again if you read books.
Now, the downside to reading books. The time. It takes way longer to read a book than it does to watch a movie. There is no getting around that. Sure you could try and read it really fast but that's never going to work. And that's why movies were invented in the first place, by lazy non book-reading people. But not everyone has the time to invest in a book, where it is infinitely easier to find 90 minutes to watch a movie. We aren't going to lie to you, movies are great for that very reason, well that, and the popcorn.
And the last part of this post on why you should read books. Some books never get made into movies. They never get to see their full potential up there on the screen, with subpar actors, huge subplots cut from the story, entire endings changed. Those books just have to remain happy just the way they are, and sometimes that's a good thing.
NOW READ THIS, is going to be a weekly...maybe, but probably every other week, spotlight on a book worth reading. This week's noteworthy book is:
THE STORY OF "S"
S., conceived by filmmaker J.J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand. Remember Abrams did the tv show Lost and is directing the new StarWars-VII, so you know he knows how to tell a story. Here is the outline of the book lifted from Amazon.com:
One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.
A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.
The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.
The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.
The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.
What they don't tell you is all the crazy stuff that comes with this book...postcards, clues, decoders. It's a mystery story, wrapped in a conundrum, crammed into a book jacket. It will blow your mind. They may make a movie about this book, or maybe about you reading this book and having it take over every minute of your life. You'll stop eating, quit sleeping, all you can do is read and then read some more until you solve the mystery. J.J. Abrams you have done it again, now don't mess up StarWars.
