As you have no doubt heard, the Academy Awards nominations were announced on Tuesday. For the benefit of film-loving book geeks I have put down my Walter Mosley to ridiculously overanalyze that most writerly of Oscar categories, Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), to try and determine this year’s champion based on the completely unscientific merits of the past winners.

Before we begin, this year’s nominees are as follows:

District 9 - Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
An Education - Screenplay by Nick Hornby
In the Loop - Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire - Screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher
Up in the Air - Screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner

—Michael Buening

Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less

Alexander Aciman and Emmett L. Rensin

(Penguin; US: Dec 2009)

 Amazon

Twitterature:  The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less is really funny. If you don’t think about it too much.

Twitterature is what you get when you combine great literature and the social networking program, Twitter. Authors and University of Chicago students Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin coined the term and provide a more formal definition: “amalgamation of ‘twitter’ and ‘literature’; humorous reworkings of literary classics for the 21st century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets of fewer”.

Aciman and Rensin turn over 70 classic texts along with Twilight and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” into twitterature. Most pieces are narrated (or tweeted) by the main character of the original text, but these characters have been adapted to the Twitter world. Gulliver’s Travels is narrated by @LittleBigMan and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is narrated by @NotoriousDOC. Romeo and Juliet has two narrators: @DefNotAHomeo and @JulieBaby.

Several of the entries are quite clever. Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, narrated by @bugged-out, is particularly well done with tweets like “Sorry no updates. Bug time is weird. Lose track” and “REPEAT: THERE IS AN APPLE LODGED IN MY ... BACK!” With lines like “I am a strange old man. Perhaps I will grow a beard” and “I have caught a fish, and he is grand”, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea also translates nicely into tweets.

My personal favorite, though, has to be On the Road. It contains only one tweet, which reads “For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac”.

Still, I can only enjoy the book Twitterature if I don’t think about it too much. If I start thinking about it too much, I start worrying: what if twitterature is the only way great literature can be understood by today’s high school and college students? What if, as the authors assert, no one has time to read “those big long books anymore”? What if, again as Aciman and Rensin claim, Twitterature gives “you everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world”? These thoughts bring about the usual clichéd responses: my heart races, my palms turn clammy, and I break into a light sweat.

Even worse, when I start thinking about Twitterature too much, I start analyzing the tweets, and I wonder if a modern day Pip (Great Expectations) would really curse that much or whether or not the twitterature version of King Lear would have been stronger if it would have included tweets from @fool.

In the end, I have to believe, if only to save my own sanity, that Twitterature was written as a satire and that Aciman and Rensin are this generation’s Jonathan Swift. If I believe this, I can believe that when they state “In brief—and we mean this literally—we have created our generation’s salvation, a new and revolutionary way of facing and understanding the greatest art of all arts: Literature”, they are really silently laughing at all the students in the world who will probably try to pass exams and write papers based off what they learned from Twitterature.

—Catherine Ramsdell

Matilda

Roald Dahl

(Puffin)

 Amazon

Over the weekend I was chatting with two friends over an evening cup of tea when I spotted a copy of Roald Dahl’s classic story Matilda atop a pile of other children’s materials. When I was a kid this was one of my favorite books. Scratch that, Matilda is still one of my favorite books.

Picking up the copy I found myself completely engrossed, tuned out the conversation, and was suddenly 70 pages into the story. It’s a quick read, and it was all so familiar, even though I haven’t read it for years.

Excusing myself, I headed back to my own place, where I looked around a little and found my own beloved copy, which I tend to take with me even when I make a temporary move away from home in New England, in this case to graduate school in Atlantic Canada.

My plan for the evening had been to prepare for Monday’s class, and possibly even to work on my ongoing job hunt, but I found that once I started in again with my old friend Matilda, I couldn’t put her down. An hour later I had a satisfied smile on my face. Dahl’s story is as good as ever. Quentin Blake’s many charming illustrations make Matilda an even faster read.

Do you have a classic childhood favorite that you return to every so often?

—Lara Killian

Garden Spells

Sarah Addison Allen

(Bantam; US: Dec 1969)

 Amazon

Some people have summer and winter shoes; some people have seasonal homes or drinks. I have seasonal books. Some books are simply best in the summer, and some are best in the winter.

When Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells was published in 2007, many reviewers noted that it was the perfect summer read: light, quick, fun.

I can see how Garden Spells works as a summer book. The horticultural references alone could make it a summer book. However, I picked it up again last week and found that it is the perfect book to chase away winter’s grayness. 

In Allen’s own words: “[Garden Spells] was supposed to be a simple story about two sisters reconnecting after many years. But then the apple tree started throwing apples and the story took on a life of its own ...”  In many ways, Garden Spells is still a simple story just with the added bonus of some magical realism. In the book, two sisters, Claire and Sydney, whose lives took them on very different paths, reunite in their hometown of Bascom, North Carolina to form a family, create a home, and learn to trust and love. Two other characters, Evanelle, a wonderfully quirky cousin, and Bay, Sydney’s delightful daughter, complete the family and round out the cast of characters. 

Garden Spells mixes eccentric, but not stereotyped, southern characters with very believable magical realism to produce a wonderfully stress-free story. For better or for worse, you aren’t going to worry about how the story ends—you simply know it is going to end well. There is something of a fairy tale element to this book, which is probably one of the reasons many people classify Garden Spells as a summer (or beach) read.

The plot may not offer many surprises, but the characters keep the pages turning. They are crafted with care and creativity, and they are what makes the book so special. Each main character has a magical gift, and these gifts are both practical and whimsical. For example, Evanelle’s gift is giving gifts. She always gives people the exact gift they need. A cigarette letter, a brooch, a mango splitter—she just knows what people need (although she doesn’t always know why) and gives it to them. What reader wouldn’t be just a little envious of Evanelle’s gift, particularly after reflecting back over the holiday shopping season? Or perhaps we wish our friends and relatives might have just a little more of Evanelle’s magic.

Garden Spells is not just about magic; this book is also a type of magic. It can make people forget. It made me forget the cold, the ice, and the snow. It could just as easily make people forget about holiday weight gain, the latest bit of annoying (and overly reported) celebrity gossip, or an irritating boss/spouse/child, etc. And to me this is, ultimately, what makes it an outstanding winter read. Garden Spells, a cup of tea, and a big cozy chair. It’s the perfect way to spend a cold and dreary afternoon.

On the other hand, if you happen to be someplace where it is warm and sunny, think about picking up Allen’s second novel The Sugar Queen. It’s a great summer read.

And, since winter is still far from over for many of us, if anyone can recommend another good winter read, I’d appreciate it.

—Catherine Ramsdell

I’m comfortable being a cliché. It suits me. I realize I’m one of a zillion dumb hipster-types living in Brooklyn, blogging about ultimately meaningless nonsense, and I’m okay with that. I like record shops and coffee shops and book shops. I like irony and sarcasm and even more irony and sarcasm. I eat hummus (occasionally). I think Joe Strummer died for our sins.

Given my personal pedigree, it should come as no surprise that two of my all-time favorite books are Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I’m no more bothered what their popularity says about me than I am about what the books themselves say about me, or what you or anyone else says about me for that matter. I’m gonna like what I’m gonna like, whether it’s good, bad or ugly. Or overrated, overwrought or overcooked. And that goes for books, though I wouldn’t consider either Salinger or Zinn’s accepted masterpieces as any of those descriptives. I’m not going to get into all that.

—Crispin Kott

How I Live Now

Meg Rosoff

(Wendy Lamb Books)

 Amazon

Before the holiday crush of travel and gift giving, and possibly as a respite from the preceding crush of academic obligations and end-of-term gatherings, I read Meg Rosoff’s 2004 Printz award-winning How I Live Now.

Rosoff’s tale of a small group of teens in the English countryside, separated from the head of household by a fluke chance of timing as a hazily-described world war breaks out, is a superb story. Written as a young adult piece, Rosoff’s story focuses on the relationships between the kids, and the human ability to survive in the midst of a stranger-than-fiction situation.

Daisy is a 15 year-old New Yorker who flees her awful relationship with her stepmother to visit her quirky English cousins; when international borders suddenly close, she’s stuck. The book is written in a diary style from Daisy’s point of view, and records her observations about the new world she’s stuck in, and how everything she expects adults to do is turned on its head, while she and her cousins are left to fend completely for themselves.

Daisy is not afraid to describe the world, ridiculous as it is, exactly as she sees it. Each of her quirky cousins are forced to invent their own survival strategies as the group is torn apart, their home occupied, and the uncertainty of war makes the world new again.

—Lara Killian