Quote Originally Posted by Batman View Post
I've not got much left of that one, I was going to try and finish it tonight but being when it was written you can imaging that them 70 odd pages are not easy to just fly through.

Movies that captured the books? that's a pretty fucking tough question, I'm guessing that the majority of ones that I would mention are pretty famous films already

True Grit, To Kill a Mockingbird, Clockwork Orange etc

Blindness wasn't a bad film adaptation although it still wasn't anything on the book (by Jose Saramago, check it out if you haven't ever read it)
Swedish version of Girl with a dragon tattoo
Swedish version of Let the right one in
Room was really good, film and book

A couple of horrors that did it well would be Amityville horror, Exorcist, The Entity

A film that came out recently was A Monster Calls, the film was horrible and the book is for kids but it was fucking fantastic and actually nearly made me shed a tear at the end, I think I purchased it when I was drunk (I have a bit of a habit of doing that)

one of the books I ordered today was The Postman by Charles Bukowski, I think it may have actually been you that recommended that to me ages ago.
Right, I can only imagine. I had to struggle through the last pages of the book on Maj. Frederick Russell Burnham as he was all out of adventures at that point.


Thank you for your list of movies that were true to/as good as the books. It's not so much that I am lazy it is that I am better at listening to things and soaking that up in my brain rather than reading them. I read quite a lot actually, but typically comments and articles rather than books, I do enjoy when I get ahold of a good one. My Uncle has just published a book, kind of an autobiography but that's really the next one on my list.

I might have to look into those books you listed.


I am not sure if I suggested that specifically, but Bukowski was an interesting guy and I have most certainly watched a documentary on him again and again. He was simple yet complex, he had the ability to do any number of things but the drive and ambition to really only accomplish 2 things successfully write and drink. He was a souse, a drunkard, a boozer, a vagabond, and just a worthless pock marked lush.....that said he was unapologetically himself and he had a certain charisma which drew people to him. He was very Jekyll & Hyde as drinking that much can make you....you go from the fun tipsy drunk to the angry bitter violent lout in the blink of an eye.

Buk wasn't a Beat and he hated the Beats actually, but they all loved him and took him in with open arms. He was almost a replacement for Kerouac who drank himself to death but before doing so alienated himself from Ginsberg and Burroughs.


The first books I read which I actually really got into or that I wasn't forced to read for school were: 'The Count of Monte Cristo' - Dumas, 'Tortilla Flat' - Steinbeck, 'Jurassic Park' - Crichton, 'Born In Blood' - Robinson, but typically it was a lot of Edgar Allen Poe and (I always relate these two as they lived in the same period) when I got into art it was Van Gogh...I feel like Poe wrote the way Van Gogh painted if that makes any sense at all. They could both be macabre but sometimes without even trying to be, the final painting of Van Gogh the 'Wheatfield with Crows' where he said in letters to his brother Theo "I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness" and then you've got Poe's The Raven, Van Gogh had his crows which he said "They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions so prudent and sage a bird." which to me really brings the two together. Both were extremely depressed, had troubled lives, and died alone, in miserable conditions Poe maybe having had a bout with rabies and Van Gogh shooting himself.


But anywho, I was actually a pretty happy kid when I read those things and admired that artwork....it is hard to turn away from those things especially when you know so very little of what those guys were dealing with on an emotional level. It's like looking at a car crash.