Read/read/reading: Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 1; Up in the Air, by Walter Kirn; Drive, by James Sallis.

(Minor declaration of interest: I write sometimes for BWDR, though none of my work appears in the first or second issues.)

First off, the first issue of BWDR’s Newsstand app is everything I hoped it would be - excellently-designed, featuring illustrations like this and containing some of the best writing they’ve ever published. It’s an extremely solid start (and contains nothing like this tripe), and I can’t wait to see where it goes next. It’s a hallmark of an excellent publication when you’re a contributor who honestly doesn’t care if his work is included or not, so long as it continues to be good; that’s exactly what I felt reading this.

Up In The Air is an odd book. The film is decidedly different - the one entirely sympathetic character is missing in the novel, and the Ryan Bingham as written in prose is a lot more jaded and on edge than smooth-talking George Clooney ever could be. I’m hesitant to say too much about this - I’ll be saving it for an upcoming podcast - but I liked it a lot, despite a couple of issues with narrative voice that came up once in a while. Overall, though, Walter Kirn is a brilliant writer, and this ranks amongst the best of his work.

Drive is in-keeping with the film-oriented stuff I’ve been reading; oddly, I haven’t yet seen the film, despite the fact that it contains two huge crushes of mine, but I’m still interested nevertheless. Brooding, ultraviolent existentialism is how I got into reading in the first place.

Read/reading: Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, Up In The Air by Walter Kirn.

You might have noticed - that was quick. Reading Warm Bodies has taught me that it’s ages since I’ve read a YA novel (the last was probably the Hunger Games trilogy, the freaked out reactions to which Arden can attest were during April 2012), and it’s almost alarming how quickly the words fly off the page when you’re used to more dense, tortured material. But it’s fun!

It’s funny - Stephanie Meyer has a cover quote, but it’s far from her dreck; there’s a metric ton of gallows humour, a believable and active female character, and a protagonist who reinvents rather than wholeheartedly dilutes an already-established idea (zombies to Meyer’s vampires). It feels very filmic already, so I can see where the adaptation came from; that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they change a couple of things. Like the clear nod to erections in the closing pages. I doubt that made it in.

Continuing with the books-with-film-adaptations theme for a little while. Most of it’s because I’m currently bleeding the college library dry, and they’re mostly academic so have an awful literature collection; but, at the same time, stuff like this tends to be fairly interesting. Usually, even if the film adaptation’s awful, the work that it’s adapted from holds some scrutiny.