Book dinosaur, reading

When I first started telling my friends about the book I was writing, I was surprised to learn that only one of them had an e-reader.  The rest read printed books.

I read both print and ebooks.

I find that I primarily buy print books that I want to make notes in and plan to keep.  And of course, the impulse buys in bookstores are printed books.  Right now, I think that about one third of my new books are hard copies, and the other two-thirds are digital.

I believe that e-readers, like all technology, will stop working and become outdated at some point in the future, and the “content,” as the books are often called, we have loaded onto them will be lost.

Plus there is the troublesome fact that we don’t actually own this “content” we purchase.  We are renting digital rights, which can be withdrawn at any time.

But still I was surprised to find that only one of all the people I knew read regularly on an e-reader.

My audience had just become very much like these friends I have never met in person, the ones out there reading and writing in this ether, in the space between us.  Transmitting thoughts, words and ideas over an invisible electronic ocean.

So my book will being transmitted through space via waves and frequencies I don’t fully comprehend, through the magic of Internet retailers.

Yet I will trust my finished work to it, a balancing act between the new and old worlds of reading.

And I will keep print copies.

Zombies at twilight

I have always thought of myself as a vampire girl.

Sure, there are zombie movies out there that I love, including the 1968 version of The Night of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and 28 Days Later, among others.

But until recently, I hadn’t read any zombie novels, only zombie short stories.

That changed in 2013.  I had preview tickets to Warm Bodies, so I read Isaac Marion’s book before seeing the movie.  The book surprised me with language and characters I had not expected, a rich imaginative world.  I loved it.

During the previews, I heard about World War Z, another zombie novel which was in the process of being made into a blockbuster movie with Brad Pitt, so I checked it out as well.  The book took a journalistic approach to a zombie apocalypse, telling stories form the survivors, beginning with a doctor, and showcasing a variety of heroes and villains, including privateers and smugglers, astronauts and deep sea divers.

I saw the charming movie Warm Bodies, released around Valentine’s Day, 2013, and brought memorably to life by actors Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer, with John Malkovich as Julie’s father.  The movie stayed close to the spirit of the book, and I thought it was very successful in bringing the Romeo-Juliet story to life, showing us the world Isaac Marion had created on the screen. After seeing it, I looked forward to World War Z.

World War Z was made as an action thriller and given blockbuster treatment with big sets and a memorable scene of zombies overrunning the city of Jerusalem.  The character Brad Pitt plays wasn’t in the book, and the movie is about his efforts to save the world.  Though an exciting thriller, I missed all those rich characters from the book.

Different adaptions for different purposes. A star vehicle or a sweet romance.

Book versus movie.

Movies and books are different media, but I wonder if the director or screen writers for World War Z ever bothered to crack open Max Brooks’ novel.  And I wonder if anyone else will attempt to bring Max Brooks’ amazing world to life on the big screen.

I hope so.  I would love to see it.