I try not to pay too much attention to literary prizes. It’s mostly because I like to decide what I read based on my own parameters. I don’t agree with lists that offer you a list of books that everyone should read. Who is to say which books everyone should read? Wo has the same taste as everyone else? It all goes back to the canon and who decided which books were deemed appropriate. I won’t go into it all again but I’m not the kind of person who automatically picks up an author because they’ve won a prize. However, I was super excited to get my hands on Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. There was an awful lot of pressure on him to create something great and it did concern me that he was writing about AI. After all, we’ve seen literary fiction writers crash and burn when they attempted science fiction. Although, at least Ishiguro has previous.
When it comes to audiobooks the narrator is key. If you get a bad one it doesn’t matter how much you like a book. As I’ve said countless times recently, I’ve been using my audiobook binge as a reason to go back and reread books I’ve not read for a while. I’ve had the Audible edition of Fahrenheit 451 for a while now. I was really excited because it’s narrated by Tim Robbins. I can’t say he’s my favourite actor but you can’t not like Tim Robbins, right? So, I was excited to start listening and, after a weekend’s break, I started on my Monday commute. It should have been a book that I finished that day but I just couldn’t get into it. Robbin’s narration just didn’t engage me. He was too slow and laid back. There was no real fear or danger to his interpretation. His version of Montag just seemed like a bumpkin and that’s not how I imagine him. It took me ages to finish because I was so bored. And this is a book I genuinely love. It should have been easy but it wasn’t. In the hands of a different narrator, this story would have come to life. But, thanks to Robbins, I didn’t really care at all.
Now that Brad Pitt has been exploring space in Ad Astra, it’s become pretty clear that the Ocean’s 11 gang aren’t the best people to send into space. Matt Damon obviously had a tough time during The Martian. Brad Pitt had to face up to his daddy issues. And, way back in 2002, George Clooney was facing his own demons in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. The film was based on the 1961 science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem. By 2002, the book had already been turned into a Soviet television film and a film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. Though the earlier film is critically acclaimed, Soderbergh claimed that his version would be more faithful to the novel than Tarkovsky. Unfortunately, the author hated both versions. Well, I guess you can’t please anyone. With the release of Ad Astra recently, there were plenty of critics who were bringing up Clooney’s space adventure. Well, I guess the two are science-fiction films that dealt with the deep stuff. It felt right to watch it for today’s post.
