A.V. Club Blog

The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth (1955)

(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 36.)

The best I can tell, I don’t come from a long line of readers. In fact, I know of only one book passed on from my grandmother’s house to my mom, None Dare Call It Treason by John Stormer. In case you haven’t taken the time to pull this once-ubiquitous paperback first published in 1964 off the shelf of your nearest thrift store—if there’s not a copy there, just wait for the nearest old Republican to die—let me sum it up for you: We’re all doomed because of communism. Truman, Ike, Kennedy: All soft on communism. Every American institution: Crumbling because of communism. Your neighbors: Probably communists and if not they will be soon. A member of the John... read more

SPOILER WARNING: Book Vs. Film is a column comparing books to the film adaptations they spawn, often discussing them on a plot-point-by-plot-point basis. This column is meant largely for people who’ve already been through one version, and want to know how the other compares. As a result, major, specific spoilers for both versions abound, often including dissection of how they end. Proceed with appropriate caution.

 

 

• Book: The Ruins, Scott Smith, 2006

• Film: The Ruins, adapted by Scott Smith, directed by Carter Smith, 2008

Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first: No, first-time director Carter Smith is not related to author/screenwriter Scott Smith.

More answers to obvious questions: Yes, The Ruins the horror movie is a relatively faithful adaptation of The Ruins the novel. Nonetheless, the...

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I know a lot of you out there in A.V. Club land hate American Idol with a fire-hot passion otherwise reserved only for hipsters, Fall Out Boy, hipster douchebags, and late-period Simpsons. (Screw you, late-period Simpsons is great, you moron!) But I’ve long had a soft spot for the nation’s most popular talent contest. If you can get past the actual music being performed, Idol has a lot to offer: unintentionally incisive commentary on our culture’s celebrity entitlement, scorching hot homoerotic sexual tension between Simon and Ryan Seacrest, hilariously awful Ford commercials, and a peek inside the pop star sausage factory, where most good (even great) amateur singers get slaughtered by the pressure of performing for millions every week. Also, if local and national government elections haven’t clued you in already, American Idol reminds us that democracy is a horrible failure whose time has passed.... read more

One of the dozens of things that sucked about Paul Haggis’ 2005 Best Picture winner, Crash, is the fact that it instantly and forever overshadowed a smaller, odder, more intriguingly flawed picture of the same name—that is, David Cronenberg’s Crash, his 1996 adaptation of the infamous J.G. Ballard novel. But Cronenberg’s Crash isn’t the only film to have been so usurped. For the past 12 years, I’ve had to tiredly explain myself when recommending the movie Twister to friends. No, I don’t mean the 1996 tornado thriller starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. Yes, I do mean the 1989 surreal comedy starring—zoinks—Suzy “Mrs. James Cameron” Amis as the sister of Crispin Glover. And Harry Dean Stanton as their dad. Plus a cameo by Tim Robbins. And one by William fucking Burroughs.

Twister director Michael Almereyda, to my undying admiration, assembled a nightmare cast that even my own sick mind has trouble wrapping...

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I have a confession to make. I hate a dead woman I’ve never met. Actually “hate” doesn’t do justice to the sheer volume of my contempt for her. That might seem harsh or even unreasonable but rest assured, dear reader, that I did not come about my hatred of Julia Phillips casually. Between her notorious 1991 memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again and today’s entry in Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club, Driving Under The Affluence, I have spent countless hours and something like a thousand agonizing pages trawling through the ugly morass of ego, hubris, self-aggrandizement, self-hatred, self-indulgence, labored puns and smug self-satisfaction that constitutes Phillips’ psyche, a dark, gothic haunted house, not unlike Grey Gardens, cluttered with ghosts and lovingly cultivated resentments that somehow get stronger with each passing day. I have devoted far too much of my time and energy to loathing The Julia so I’m going to exorcise all my hatred of her in a single essay....

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The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: The Green Odyssey. by Philip José Farmer (1956)

(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 35.)

We’ve covered Philip José Farmer before via the short story collection Down In The Black Gang. Here’s a quick refresher course before we tackle his first novel:

1. He was key at bringing sex, and not just the suggestion of sex into science fiction. That doesn’t really play into The Green Odyssey so much, but it seems to have been a big part of his breakthrough short story “The Lovers” (later expanded into a novel). And I’m going to venture a guess that it plays a part in a forthcoming Box Of Paperbacks subject, Flesh. Here the sex is mostly suggested.

2. He’s something obsessive about... read more

SPOILER WARNING: Book Vs. Film is a column comparing books to the film adaptations they spawn, often discussing them on a plot-point-by-plot-point basis. This column is meant largely for people who’ve already been through one version, and want to know how the other compares. As a result, major, specific spoilers for both versions abound, often including dissection of how they end. Proceed with appropriate caution.

 

 

• Book: Paranoid Park, Blake Nelson, 2006

• Film: Paranoid Park, adapted and directed by Gus Van Sant, 2007

Given how often books get turned into films for the wrong reasons—say, because the book is popular enough to guarantee an audience, even if the adaptation is crap, or because a filmmaker can see a couple of elements worth strip-mining out of the book while rendering the rest of the...

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Not long after my Primer on The Rolling Stones was posted late last night, an old debate was re-ignited on the message board: Beatles or Stones? Actually, it wasn’t much of a debate. Right away (in the nuanced parlance of message boards) it was “Beatles>Stones.” (Or for those who prefer backing the trendy dark horse, “Kinks>Beatles>Stones.”) I’m not surprised by this development, though as a Stones guy I’d like to make a brief attempt to completely and totally discredit it. (In my own mind, at least.)

First off, I’ll state for the record that I love, love, love The Beatles. (I also love The Kinks, though I place The Who higher in the classic rock pantheon. Just a personal preference. To me, The Who has always been like a best friend, while The Beatles were like the girl you wanted to marry and The Stones the girl you wanted sleep with and never could.) I love The Beatles for the same reason everybody who loves The Beatles loves The Beatles: they were pretty much perfect. No bad albums, no embarrassing career moves, no bad songs. Sure, nitpickers can nitpick. Magical Mystery... read more

Warning: The following Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club entry contains highly graphic language and adult situations. Due to its EXPLICIT SEXUAL revelations about ALL YOUR FAVORITE RAPPERS, WORLD-FAMOUS ATHLETES, and MAJOR MOVIE STARS, it should not be read by anyone under the age of 17. It also contains a reference to FRED DURST’S PIERCED, THROBBING, ERECT COCK that may cause sensitive readers to voluntarily undergo a self-administered ice-pick lobotomy to purge that image from their psyches permanently. Anyone not interested in the TAWDRY SEXUAL SHENANIGANS of HUGELY FAMOUS, ATTRACTIVE CELEBRITIES and their INCREDIBLY KINKY, DRUG-AND-BOOZE-FUELED SEX LIVES is strongly advised to look elsewhere.

If Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again is the ultimate Hollywood tell-all, then Karrine “Super-Head” Steffans’ Confessions Of A Video Vixen is the ultimate hip-hop tell-all. If Steffans were more irreverent or self-aware, she could have named her torrid tome... read more

(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 32.)

Last week, I covered The Outlaws Of Mars, a novel by professional Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator Otis Adelbert Kline. I didn’t care for it all that much, and having not read Burroughs, I was not looking forward to this week’s entry. Furthermore, this week’s book is the second book in a trilogy begun with The Land That Time Forgot and completed with Out Of Time’s Abyss. I thought I’d be lost in a sea of overwrought prose and abstruse plotting.

Fortunately, my dread was misplaced. The People That Time Forgot proved both an enjoyable read and a brisk one. Where Kline would attempt to end his chapters with little cliffhangers, Burroughs actually made me care what happened next. And though there’s no great psychological depth here, the book’s...

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