Wonderboys - Michael Chabon - A Review by Caroline

The Sunday Times were offering Waterstones vouchers enabling you to choose from a different title every week and buy it for 99p. I bought Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. I absolutely love the film, and I am delighted to say that it was pretty true to the book. The story focuses around a published author who has been writing his next best-seller for the past seven years, while spending most of that time stoned, teaching, and getting married or having affairs. It got a little bit lost in the middle, but it was actually really good to read. I have to admit the film version of Grady Tripp was far more tolerable than the book version, but Crabtree remains the same in both. At one point, I really didn't like Grady in the book, and I did wonder why I was reading the book, but I was determined to persevere, and as it came to the end when everything came together, I found that I had discovered a new and interesting author. I also enjoyed the way the author focused so much on the skill of writing. Anyway, I shall be checking out some of his other books in the future.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick

As a student of film one of the lessons I enjoyed learning concerned the difference between the film pioneers, the Lumiere Brothers and Georges Melies.  The Lumieres were realists; and they busied themselves travelling around and filming real things - one of their classics is The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat; the plot involves a train arriving in La Ciotat.  

Melies, however, was an illusionist; he specialises in surprising us, or making us dream.  His stories are absurd fantasies; and he takes us among other places to the moon and the sun - his explorers journey to the sun in a train.  Of course, in real terms, Melies travelled far less than the Lumieres - Melies filmed in a studio; but the lesson remains the same, the further a film takes you - think Star Trek - the less the characters actually have to travel.

Anyway, I love this book.  I also loved the film; but the book, with its many illustrations and film stills, has a particular charm of its own.  It concerns Georges Melies, though it is not a biography; it is a fantasy about a boy who saves Georges Melies by finding and re-building an automaton that Melies once invented.  As children's novels do it has simple, recognisable morals; it is also full of pleasure, awe, excitement and escape, and it is determinedly, deliciously old fashioned.  Well worth it.