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The Ghost Writer, the new Roman Polanski-directed movie, is getting some pretty good reviews. It currently rates 82% on the Tomatometer, which is really quite excellent. The movie is based on Robert Harris’s 2007 novel The Ghost, the gripping story of a professional ghostwriter who’s hired to co-write the autobiography of a former British prime minister, [...]

Repo Men, the new movie starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, is based on a novel by Eric Garcia. You might be familiar with his series of books about a dinosaur private eye, the first being 1999′s Anonymous Rex. He also wrote Matchstick Men (2002), which Ridley Scott made into a movie. Repo Men is a gritty [...]

Whoops. So I forgot to hit “publish” on this edition of Weeklings last Friday. Lucky thing, though, because this week I’ve been far too busy to compile a new one. Portland, Oregon, here I come! A government poisoning its own people — sounds like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, right? How about the U.S. in the [...]

I’ve been fortunate enough to review both of Carrie Ryan’s horror/romance/action/post-apocalypse/period-drama zombie books. What I like about them (aside from the way they pull off that fivefold-hyphenate) is that they take zombies seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the z-word is not used; rather, the undead are “the Unconsecrated” or “the Mudo.” Classy, huh? (Another [...]

Back in December, in Booklist‘s Spotlight on Sci-Tech, we featured Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life  of Henrietta Lacks, a powerful chronicle of the life of the woman who, unbeknownst to her, gave the world  HeLa cells, the first “immortal” human cells grown in a lab, cells that have made countless medical advances possible for the last five [...]

Up in the Air, writer-director Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, received six 2010 Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for George Clooney and Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Reitman and Sheldon Turner. But here’s the thing: when he turned the book into a movie, Reitman made some pretty substantial changes. In the book, [...]

I am very pleased to announce that David Pitt, a stalwart Booklist reviewer and our “Reading the Screen” columnist, is the latest addition to the growing team here at Likely Stories. His beat? Why, films based on books, of course. Writing shorter blog posts instead of long-form columns will give him a chance to cover more books [...]

When reviewing a book like Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequences, it is difficult when in some cases you, the reviewer, disagree with the facts as presented. So with some of what I considered to be Rove’s more contentious claims, including the startup to the Iraq War, I did some fact checking of my own. Although there’s always room for [...]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! A travesty has occurred, and I’m not talking about Alan Bradley’s Dilys award win for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. No, that’s fine. Great, even. The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association has abandoned their wicked-awesome silver skull award for a more dignified (read: boring, safe, not a skull wearing puzzle piece earrings!) plaque-like award. [...]

Oh, how will I be able to live with myself for abetting the hype machine that is Quirk Classics? Well . . . the video for Dawn of the Dreadfuls is pretty funny. It starts too slowly, but the A-Team sequence is worth watching. Question: how many of you feel that, having watched the trailer, you don’t need [...]