If you have ever held disdain for a book with no pictures or no interesting characters and conversations, you will understand Alice’s terrible plight at the beginning of her Adventures in Wonderland.
Up above the clouds and down to the fiery center of the earth. Deep in the ocean’s dark depths to distant, mysterious islands. The fifty-four adventure novels of Jules Verne--known as the Extraordinary Voyages--take readers to all these places and more, weaving science with wonder, exploration, and excitement.
The Iliad. Don Quixote. The Scarlet Letter. Great Expectations. Many high school students have groaned in despair seeing these titles on their class syllabi.
Ever since he was young, Carroll reached into his imagination to create poems and short stories, reaching publication success in magazine and at publishing houses over the years. But his famous tales of Wonderland did not come into being until 1856 when Henry Liddell became dean of Christ Church, bringing along with him his three children: Harry, Lorina, Edith…and Alice.
Sparkling sunrises over white-capped peaks. Warm, rosy alpenglow sunsets. Deep blue rivers carved between mountains, and rich green trees dotting the surrounding slopes. This is a place of great beauty, engulfing peace, and invitations to adventure.
In the preface of the timeless classic A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens greets his readers: “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”
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For nearly a century, 221B Baker Street referred to a small flat in Victorian London, land of gas street lamps, long skirts, and a thick layer of murder and scandal behind the thin veil of classical Victorian “properness.”
Just moments into the first installment of The Hobbit film, Bilbo Baggins recites the timeless words that kick off Tolkien’s beloved novel: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole…it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
The first Hunger Games film is unique in that it was directly adapted by its original author. Other screenwriters took over for the subsequent films, but Collins had a heavy hand in guiding plot and dialogue choices, as well as other details. As such, the films remain mostly faithful to the stories of the books.
A film adaptation is one interpretation of a book, but there are as many other interpretations as there are readers. We see this in the continued retellings of classic books in films.
