Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Book Trailer Thursday switches gears this week from puppies to apocalpyse with John “I’m a PC” Hodgman’s That Is All. Lighten up the gloomy (in Chicago, at least) day with this hilarious trailer, which boasts more celebrity cameos than BTT has seen in a long while along with perhaps the most annoying song ever written. [...]

According to this article at the Hollywood Reporter’s website, A&E is going to air a four-part miniseries based on Stephen King’s 1998 novel Bag of Bones, to be directed by King veteran Mick Garris (The Stand, Desperation, Riding the Bullet, the quite bad television version of The Shining). Pierce Brosnan, my third favorite James Bond, [...]

I’ve always considered 1991′s The Firm to be, in terms of its story if not its writing (the author has markedly improved as a storyteller over the years), to be one of John Grisham’s better early novels. I didn’t much like the 1993 Sydney Pollack movie, with Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere, the law school [...]

Bones, the popular FOX series based on the life and writings of forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, is being spun off. But it’s not one of the regulars who’s getting his own series, it’s a new character. Walter Sherman, also known as the Locator, is a former military policeman who finds people who really don’t want [...]

According to this article at The Hollywood Reporter, Stephen King’s 1978 post-apocalyptic plague novel The Stand is coming to a movie theater near you. The Stand, which was more than 800 pages long in its original incarnation, and more than 1000 in its 1990 “complete and uncut” reissue, is one of King’s best novels. Rich [...]

I finally had a chance to catch the first season of The Walking Dead on AMC. Engineered by three-time Academy Award nominee Frank Darabont, the series is based on the comic book series created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore. The Walking Dead, if you’re not familiar with it, follows Kentucky deputy sheriff Rick Grimes [...]

In case you need more proof that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi is a monster and must be stopped, she’s written a book. She wanted to surprise everyone by writing fiction.  Don’t get too excited, A Shore Thing is basically a novelization of her life, with plenty of GTL* for everyone. To add insult to injury, the Today [...]

In December, 1944, the Wehrmacht — the German army — was trying to push through the Ardennes mountains in Belgium. Easy Company, of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, was among the defenders in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. Stephen E. Ambrose chronicled this, and other Easy Company missions, in his [...]

Okay, so you’ve seen, and this is just a conservative estimate, 1,489,226 television shows and movies based — sometimes exceedingly loosely — on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). But how many literary spin-offs have you read? Adam Roberts, the British science fiction writer and parodist — I talked about him back in March, in [...]

Morning Glory, the new movie starring Rachel McAdams as a television producer, is getting solid reviews. There is, rather predictably, a tie-in novelization, but here’s the surprise: it’s a good book. “Novelization” is a sort of literary dirty word, used to describe books written from screenplays. As a general rule they’re badly written, with paper-thin [...]