• Book Reviews

    Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

    Yes, the TV show came before the book! Which explains why I kept thinking “this feels like an adaptation.” I have a love-hate relationship with book adaptations of movies; mostly they always feel derivative and pointless, and not even Neil Gaiman can make one great. The Neverwhere novelization is better than most, but it still can’t top the TV show. The problem might be because when you’re writing an adaptation, you have to stick pretty close to the original source. You can expand things a little (like internal dialogue or whatever), but basically you’ve got a paint-by-numbers kind of thing. It ends up feeling very stale and forced, and it’s…

  • Book Reviews

    REVIEW: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

    This was the fifth book we read for my Virginia Woolf class, and it’s the second one I’ve completely read instead of just pretending to. I loved it! I think I loved it even more than I love To the Lighthouse, though they really are two different beasts. (Note: I’m not sure if I have to write a paper or not about Orlando, so I don’t want to get too deep into an analysis (just in case I need it later), but I’ll talk a bit about the book as if I wasn’t preparing to write an essay.) Orlando is, like I said, a completely different sort of thing from…