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By Adam Krause

Now that we’re in the thick of the holiday season, many of us are going the distance to see family, whether on a plane, Amtrak or Greyhound. Long, boring trips are the ideal time to make a dent in your reading list. Here are ten books, each under 250 pages, perfect for one day of travel in each direction. Just don’t read them while driving on the interstate.

1) Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Orwell is best known for his allegories of political paranoia, 1984 and Animal Farm. This is his first published book. Though he called it fiction, it is an account of his experiences working as a low-wage dishwasher in Paris and being homeless in England. It is written with wit and keenly observational prose that keeps it fresh today, and provides such advice as how to keep customers from detecting rats in a poorly run restaurant and how to use a taut rope as a pillow while sleeping on the street.

2) St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This short story collection, published when its author was only 25, is absolutely crazy. Russell’s subjects range from the title story, about a school run by kindly nuns whose mission is converting the children of werewolves into real human girls, to a story about a family of minotaurs heading west on a covered wagon. No matter how bizarre the situations, Russell never loses sight of her characters’ human side.

3) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

This first novel by Indian journalist Aravind Adiga is narrated by a chauffeur in New Delhi who murders his rich employer. The chauffeur, who comes from a remote village that he refers to only as “the Darkness,” ruled by greedy landlords that resemble storks and wild boars, makes clear that India’s recent economic rise is only for a few, and that most Indians still have to seize whatever they can get. The novel has been criticized by Indian intellectuals who doubt Adiga’s authority to write in the voice of India’s poorest citizens, but the wicked intelligence of the narrator as he maneuvers through one tricky situation after another makes the novel a fast, gripping read, whatever you think of its message.

4) Sula by Toni Morrison

Though the epic Beloved is better-known, many critics consider this slim novel Morrison’s best book. It chronicles the lives of two girls who grew up in the Bottoms, a rural black community: one who stayed behind to raise a family and the other, Sula, who left for the cities and returns to wreak havoc among the menfolk. The novel reminded me of a compressed One Hundred Years of Solitude; Morrison’s story moves so swiftly across three generations that it seems almost magical.

5) Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Funnier than Pale Fire and less scandalous than Lolita, Nabokov again satirizes America and academia in this comic novel about a bumbling Russian professor in New England. Pnin’s adventures are small-scale (getting on the wrong train while trying to be clever with the timetables, and thinking a prized punch bowl has been smashed during a faculty dinner party) but his awkward charm eventually wins over even the narrator, who has spent most of the novel mocking him. He may even make you reconsider that nerdy professor who you gave a 0 to on RateMyProfessors.com.

6) An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir of having gone to France to have her child, then losing the pregnancy, deals with harrowing and personal subject matter in a way that is never sentimental or simplified. There is room for witty observations about the French (who, at the public pool, “could gossip while doing the backstroke”) and yet the reader can’t help but feel the magnitude of the author’s grief through McCracken’s clear-eyed essayistic detail.

7) The Quiet American by Graham Greene

This is the story of the friendship between a jaded British war correspondent and a young, idealistic American who thinks his country should come to the aid of the French in Vietnam. The Brit, however, thinks that the American’s high hopes will only lead to bloodshed, and his private prayer is, “God save us always from the innocent and the good.” The book was written in 1955 but perfectly predicted the Vietnam War, and may come back into relevance with President Obama’s recent troop increase in Afghanistan.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

If you have seen the movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett, don’t think you know the story of The Virgin Suicides. The novel is notable for having been written in the first person plural, in which a Greek chorus of suburban boys tells the story of their longstanding obsession with the five enigmatic sisters who killed themselves. The boys hardly appear in the movie, but the beauty and originality with which Eugenides depicts their intense speculation about the doomed Lisbon family makes the novel a completely different experience.

9) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro has movingly captured the voice of an aging English butler who has given every part of his soul to a level of service that has come, in the modern world, to seem increasingly meaningless. The best demonstration of this comes during a scene in which the butler does his best to cater to a chaotic dinner party while his father dies in the upstairs bedroom; Ishiguro makes this unbelievable character choice seem absolutely plausible and sad. If you think you would never be interested in reading about a repressed butler, this novel might prove you wrong.

10) Embers by Sandor Marai

Finally, this novel by Hungarian anti-fascist, anti-communist (so not very popular in Hungary until recently) author Sandor Marai is a brilliant, sustained duel between a retired general and the childhood friend who betrayed him on a hunting expedition long ago. The dramatic confrontation takes place at the general’s castle, in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just before, for many Hungarians, the era when their whole world turned upside down.

By Julia H. Jackson

A 16-year-old African American girl stands atop a staircase, looking down as her mother hurls insults and frying pans up at her.  A South African rugby team seeks to unite whites and blacks with one anticlimactic game. A middle-aged man makes his life out of the skies, reinventing himself every time his plane lands.  The ghost of a murdered girl peers down on the world below, wondering how to protect her family. And perhaps most fantastically, a family of foxes and their woodland friends fight back against a tyrannical trio of farmers.

Where do these stories come from? And why do they seem so familiar?

This year’s Academy Award season features a whole cache of films based on popular novels. These adaptations take risks by modifying subtleties in plot or character, and, sometimes, adding entirely new meaning. These changes reflect the transition from one media to another, which means that the director, screenwriter, and producer make creative decisions. The implied risk when adapting a book to a movie is that the director might anger fans of the original by changing the story or character to make it more appropriate for cinema. Just what is that line between adaptation and revision? We’ve compiled a list of 5 Films Adapted From Books that you can see during the winter holidays. Judge for yourself how closely each film mirrors the original book, and let us know what you think.

5. Precious

Inspired by the novel Push: A Novel by Sapphire (1996)

Claireece Precious Jones is a 16-year-old African-American girl growing up in Harlem during the 1980s whose journey begins from the darkest of places. Impregnated by her father for the second time, Precious endures the verbal and emotional abuse of her mother while struggling through school, all the while harboring a secret: she is illiterate. Her story begins to turn around when she discovers the Each One / Teach One alternative school, where she meets a classroom full of young women who, like her, are creating resources for themselves where there were none. The 1996 novel was adapted by screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher and directed and produced by Lee Daniels, who discovered Gabourey Sidibe, the New York native whose performance as Precious has already earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

4. Invictus

Inspired by the book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation by John Carlin (2008)

Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years in South African prison in 1990. His work to end apartheid earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and in 1995, he decided to link South African unity to its most popular sport: rugby. Carlin’s book examined Mandela’s efforts to bring blacks and whites together in the critical 1995 Rugby World Cup against the New Zealand All Blacks. The film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, weaves the traditional sports story with the themes of racial integration and social movement.

3. Up in the Air

based on a book of the same title by Walter Kirn (2001)
Walter Kirn met a passenger on an airplane who reportedly traveled 300 days out of the year, and spent more time with flight crews on planes than he did with his own family. This later inspired the character Ryan Bingham, a 35-year-old man whose job it is to fire people for large companies. Bingham (played by Oscar winner George Clooney) lives a seemingly relationship-free life, until he falls for a fellow traveler, and his employer’s efficiency expert (played by Anna Kendrick) starts questioning him about his lifestyle. The film is directed and produced by Jason Reitman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sheldon Turner. Given the current economic climate and the film’s central theme, Reitman and his crew decided to cast non-actors who had recently lost their jobs for 22 of the extra roles.

2. The Lovely Bones

adapted from the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold (2002)

Susie Salmon is this story’s chilling heroine, a teenage girl who is murdered by her next-door neighbor. She finds herself in a Heaven-like limbo where she peers into the lives of her grieving family and the killer as he prepares to kill again. Director Peter Jackson is best known for his blockbuster book-to-film hits, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. The cast includes Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, Rachel Weisz as her mother Abigail, Mark Wahlberg as her father Jack, and Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, the killer. Jackson is known for his visual effects, and so it will be i

nteresting to see how he interprets Sebold’s vision of “heaven.”

1. The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Adapted from the story of the same name by Roald Dahl (1970)

Roald Dahl was famous for creating magical worlds for children to lose themselves in, many of which were transformed into movies (Charlie Chocolate and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, to name a few). In this most recent Dahl adaptation, director Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited) employed a team to recreate the family foxhole using stop-motion animation. Jason Schwartzman, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray were among the actors to embody the voices of foxes, badgers, rats, and, yes, people.  Anderson reportedly added a first and third act the original story.

This list reflects a tiny percentage of the amount of books-to-movies in Hollywood. Think Harry Potter, Twilight, The Chronicles of Narnia…and that’s just fiction. The argument could be made that there are only so many stories to tell, but many ways to tell them. What do you think? Does a book lose something when it becomes a movie? And what about the conversation that happens between an author and a screenwriter? How might that affect which direction a film goes?

Let us know what your favorite film adaptations are before the awards season starts!

by Adam Krause

With his recent acceptance in Oslo, President Barack Obama becomes one of a few individuals, along with Al Gore and Jimmy Carter, to have won both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Grammy. (Watch out, gentlemen: Bono is on your tail.) However, what he does not yet have, and the following five writers do, is the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature. These writers are not necessarily strange choices for the prize, since each of them received it after a long and distinguished contribution to the literature of their country. But their work itself, which combines the macabre and the sublime, black comedy and original philosophy, pulses with all the vital strangeness of writing that deserves to be read decades later. Genius breaks all the rules.

1) Heinrich Boll (1972)

German critics have called his work “Trummerliteratur”: the literature of the rubble. It deals with the traumatic, bombed-out aftermath of World War II in Germany. He was strongly rooted in his working-class Catholic town of Cologne, and was horrified to see it taken over by the Nazis and then nearly destroyed in Allied bombing raids. His distaste for anyone who misused their power, from fascist governments to hypocritical religious leaders, manifested itself in the acid wit of his books.

Sample work: The Clown

The Clown surely has one of the most depressing covers of all time, and in this case you can judge a book by its cover. The hero is a failed traveling clown who has real artistic ambitions but is often too drunk to attend his own performances, and hardly has the money for cigarettes. He is trying to win back his old lover, Maria, who has married a pious Catholic businessman. But the clown can see with more clarity from the gutter than from the church window: as he tells us, “The children of this world are not only smarter, they are also more humane and more generous than the children of light.”

2) Par Lagerkvist (1951)

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist, by contrast, said that he “had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns.” Religious parables are a prominent part of his work, and his restrained prose style has been compared by one Swedish critic to John the Evangelist: they are “both masters at expressing profound things with a highly restricted choice of words.”

Sample work: Barabbas

This short novel follows Barabbas, the thief who was pardoned by Jesus on the day of the crucifixion. He goes back to his thieves’ lair and wanders about in a sort of daze. His friends worry that he has lost interest in crime (though he does sneak up behind a man in a crowd who has called for the stoning of an innocent woman, and stabs him in the back.) Eventually he becomes a slave working in a mine, and is interrogated by a powerful Roman who learns that he personally met Jesus. Barabbas, who has not become a Christian from the experience but still has a dim inkling that there is something more to life, can only answer: “I want to believe.”

3) Yasunari Kawabata (1968)

Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize. He was orphaned at four and was raised by his grandparents, who both passed away by the time he was fifteen. Without any family to return to, he threw himself into boarding-school life and soon gained fame for both his literary writing and his reporting for the Mainichi Shinbun, still Japan’s biggest newspaper. The public suicide of his friend and fellow writer Yukio Mishima, who did not want to live in a Japan humbled by its World War II defeat (see the film Mishima for a terrific rendering of Mishima’s life and his death by seppuku, which involved plunging a dagger into his own heart while a friend beheaded him) affected Kawabata greatly. He had recurring dreams of Mishima for nearly a year before committing suicide himself, through gas, in 1972.

Sample work: The Master of Go

This was Kawabata’s favorite of his novels, based on his reporting experience as a young man. The aging Go master, Honinbo Shusai, is playing a last match with his reputation at stake against the young challenger Otake. The match, which takes six months due to various stalling techniques by Shusai as he sees with dismay that the younger man has what it takes to defeat him, is a media event that transfixes the nation. Some critics have read it as an allegory of the contest between Japan and America in World War II.

4) Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)

Sartre was one of the last philosophers to be considered a celebrity in his own time: when he was arrested at a student protest in 1968, the French president intervened, telling the police, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” In his most famous work, Being and Nothingness, he put forth the existentialist philosophy that the possibilities of consciousness are infinite, but the practical constraints that life puts on us due to the need to be physical actors in the world are limiting, causing a constant dichotomy and anguish. He is the first Nobel Prize recipient to turn down the prize: he was, by that time, dismissive of literature, which he saw as a way to avoid real political commitment. However, multiple accounts claim that he tried to ask for just the cash part of the prize.

Sample work: No Exit

This play about purgatory, written shortly after Sartre’s experience being confined in a German prisoner-of-war camp, is a demonstration of one of his key ideas: that the gaze of others is what keeps us confined in our societal roles. Three sinners end up in a room together, and instead of the torments of fire and brimstone, they torture each other with probing conversation that exposes their worst anxieties. When the door is finally opened at the end of the play, none of the characters will leave for fear of what the others will think of them. Sartre’s most quotable aphorism appeared in this play: “Hell is other people.”

5) William Faulkner (1949)

This most distinguished of Southern writers was not widely read in America until he won the prize, owing perhaps to the difficulty of his novels, which employ stream of consciousness, radical shifts in point of view and sometimes-obscure regional dialect. His acceptance speech, which can be listened to on YouTube though it is nearly unintelligible, is regarded as the best Nobel Prize acceptance speech ever given in any category. He called upon writers to concern themselves with “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

Sample work: As I Lay Dying

This unusual novel, with most chapters just a page or two long and one as short as five words – “My mother is a fish” – concerns the odyssey of the Bundren family through rural Mississippi to bury their mother in her home town. Fifteen characters, including the corpse, narrate the novel.  Faulkner wrote this book in a period of four weeks while working the night shift at a powerhouse, so don’t complain that you have no time to write!

Reaching the end of a semester of school should bring on a thrill of excitement for anyone. No more books! No more studying! No more schedules! The winter break should be used as a time to let your brains relax and recharge for the new year of classes. However, there are some students who have a hard time getting back in the swing of things after they have had several weeks of doing absolutely nothing. Sleeping in and staying up late is a hard habit to break when you go back to school. For those who have a hard time restarting their brains for the new school year, here are some activities suggested to help you feel relaxed while keeping your minds from completely shutting down during the whole winter break.

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It sounds like a simple enough task to do. Read over instructions and follow what the words on the page tell you to do. Unfortunately, there are plenty of students who struggle with following directions accurately. Telling your teacher, “I missed that part in the directions,” or, “I didn’t completely understand the directions,” will not fix your grade or create any empathy from your instructor. When it comes to assignments, it is not merely a case of reading the instructions once and starting on your project. Many students fail to complete some step in the prompt that can greatly impact the grade on the project. There is hope, though. With a few simple steps to follow, you can greatly improve your ability to follow directions with great success.

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