Meme: Top Ten Tuesday: Ten books I'd like to see made into movies

The Top Ten Tuesday meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Today's meme is about books we hope will be made into movies. To see more lists, visit the hosting blog and from there visit some of the other participating blogs.

Hearing that a beloved book has been optioned for a movie can be both cause for anticipation and anxiety. Anticipation because when Hollywood gets it just right, you can add another movie to your favourite-movies-based-on-books list, and anxiety because when they don’t get it right it can range from mediocrity to disaster and, worse yet, discourage people from reading the book. Here’s a list of 10 books I’d like see made into movies - books I think would make fantastic movies if only they’d get it right.

Since The Hobbit seems to finally be in production, it seems fairly certain that Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is going to be made into a TV mini-series, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is listed on IMdb as being in production, and Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is being filmed and the rest of her books have been optioned with a high probability of getting made into movies, I can strike those off the list.

Since there are authors whose whole oeuvre I’d like to see filmed, I have limited myself to only one book by any one author, so as to include more variety in the list. I have also avoided the temptation to include books that have already been filmed, be it for TV, as movies with less than satisfactory results, or so long ago that an update would be ideal. So no Dorothy L. Sayers, although I would have loved to include Strong Poison or Gaudy Night.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Actually, I don’t think anything under a three-hour movie would do it justice (there’s so much detail), so I would prefer this one to be made into a big-budget TV mini-series.
The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey. Of all the books in that series, I think this one and the three books in the Harper Hall trilogy are the most filmable.
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I’d love to see all that wonderful wackiness on the big screen.
The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. I don’t think I need to explain this one.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. I was only about a third into the story when I began thinking how cinematic it was, and I think it would make a great psyhhological thriller/horror movie.
These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer. In fact I would like to see just about all of her books made into movies, but apparently she put a note in her will that she didn’t want them to be filmed, so I will probably have to wait for them to pass into the public domain before I’ll see a Heyer movie adaptation.
Naked in Death by J.D. Robb. A wonderfully gritty futuristic police procedural combined with a scorching romance, I think this could look darkly wonderful on the big screen.
Grafarþögn (Silence of the Grave) by Arnaldur Indriðason. It’s time for another movie adaptation of Arnaldur’s books. Preferably made in Iceland, by Icelanders.
The Murder of the Maharajah by H.R.F. Keating. I think this would make a wonderful murder mystery with an ensemble cast, in the same vein as Death on the Nile or Gosford Park.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. This is so full of all kinds of wonderful literary references (starting with the title), and it’s just so funny. With David Tennant as Ned.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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