TitleTales

Adult Beach Reads: by Kim Stack

Adult—02/19/10
Every year I get asked to assemble a list of “Beach Reads.” I’d love to, but I haven’t got a clue what a beach read is. I know what I like to consider a beach read—gooey, lighter than air, doesn’t require a thought in my head, pure entertainment in the form of a personally owned book that I can destroy in a public place by being silly enough to lay down in the condensation from my tall glass of iced tea or (yes, I’ve honestly done this) drop the contents of a taco in between the pages. What I really want is the literary equivalent of a toasted marshmallow. Find me reading next to a pool? I’ve got Mary Kay Andrews, Sophie Kinsella, Jennifer Weiner, or (ecstatically) the newest Janet Evanovich in my hands. (This summer, look for The Fixer Upper, Twenties Girl, Best Friends Forever, or Sizzling Sixteen.)

If you check the words beach reads on the Internet, there are lists and lists from folks like Oprah, Obama and even NPR’s 100 best beach reads ever. This is (for me) a scary list—it includes thought provoking titles like Anna Karenina and The Old Man and the Sea—and yet, I know that I have suggested that the bleak, cold titles by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are best read in the warmth of a summer day. When it comes to beach reads, like all types of adult fiction reading, the best read is the one that engages the reader.

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Movies from Juvenile/Teen Books 2010: by Lori Fennel

Juvenile & YA—02/05/10
When Ramona was a pest, I did not exist—I was born the year she was brave. I was six when she turned eight and had graduated college before she entered the fourth grade, but I still read every book (except the last) multiple times, and know their incidents so well that once in the telling of a personal memory, I halted in confusion, until a friend helped by howling, “That wasn’t you – that was Ramona!!!” (In my defense, I’d had a girl with springy curls in my class too, and I had always wanted to pull them, so does it really matter who first named the compulsion??)

So, I’m thrilled to know Ramona is finally hitting the big screen in a major motion picture, Beezus and Ramona (July). What would be really neat is if the new movie were directed by the Ramona of the 80s Canadian TV series, Sarah Polley—now critically-acclaimed writer and director of Away From Her—but it looks like it’s Elizabeth Allen, director of Aquamarine. Oh well, at least I know that even if the movie is disappointing, nothing can diminish the timelessness of that singular character, Ramona Quimby. (And hopefully, I’m good for a few more decades before I start “remembering” the time I squeezed an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink just to see what it felt like, or cracked a raw egg I thought was hard-boiled into my hair.)

For 2010, we also have movie adaptations of Alex Flinn’s Beastly (July), Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (March), Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon (March), another Chronicle of Narnia — The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (December), and of course, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (November), and Twilight #3: Eclipse(June).

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