Book Blogger Hop #323

 

 

This meme is hosted by Billy at Ramblings of a Coffee Addict!

 

 

 

 

This week's question is: It's back-to-school time. What book would you recommend to students, whether it's an educational read or an enjoyable diversion from textbooks? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer) 

MY ANSWER: Oh man. I actually struggle with this one. I don't want to recommend a book I loved, not knowing what other students might be into. It's like someone recommending me a contemporary book. I won't read it as it's not my genre of choice.

I feel like going old school with this choice. I'll first pick Gregory Maguire's Wicked!

Honestly I feel like this one is a good choice for soooo many reasons! It's gained a lot of popularity over these years, can you believe it's been almost 30?! Not only does it give you a different look to the Wicked Witch of the West, but it also kind of deals with relevant topics too that are still present in society today. You can do a lot of comparisons with this one. Not only with the original Wizard of Oz books and movie, but also compare it to the Broadway musical which did make some changes to it. And then we have the movie coming out in the fall, which I am actually curious about too. I wonder which ending they will go with, the book or the musical? I almost wonder if this is in any school curriculum for high school students.

And because I took a class in college with a book-to-film comparison theme, which was a lot of fun! I feel like adding this to my make-believe curriculum:

Okay, I know you all think I'm probably just obsessed with Jaws, and yes I am! But Peter Benchley's Jaws really is phenomenal when you combined it with the movie. There are quite a few differences. Ones that actually had me liking the movie more because of them, yes a very rare occurrence but I grew up on the movie before I was "old enough" to read the book. It's really this and The Princess Bride where I watched the movie 1000x before reading the book that has me liking the movies more.

 

Not only can you do that sort of side by side comparison, but you can also look at the impact this book/film had on summers. Summer movies changed because of Jaws! It was the first summer blockbuster before Star Wars came out. Then you also see how it effected people and their mindset of going to the beaches. Benchley regrets how he villainized sharks because afterwards people went shark hunting way too much and kind of endangered sharks too. They are not near extinction or anything, but there was too much hunting for the sake of hunting and yes, perhaps some of it was out of fear.

But then you could even expand upon this sort of comparison and all the shark movies that came afterwards. Each of those maneating shark movies kept making their sharks bigger and bigger! I think some of them were books too, like The Meg!