Putting the book down

I just spent six months looking at books. The right thing for a poet to be looking at I guess. In the meantime my daughter stole the march on me and appeared in spoken word appearances in Melbourne, Sydney and Chicago.

She has also offered to illustrate my chapbook so we'll see.

As with other topics, there were exclusions that may have mystified readers: why leave out the Berlin Literary Festival? If you want a TV show based on the books you can't go past Little House on the Prairie (yet this blog did) and Bones even references the fact that the forensic cases serve as a model for the novels by the 'title character'
Great short story writers have popped their head up on television - or in writing credits at least.

Certain authors are favoured but this genuinely is a reflection of the popularity of their works. We have seen what the Web has to say about books so, unless we want to pay a further visit to a message board devoted to an author or title. Or, if you're really hip, their social media.

THE END

The record of the book

Books made into albums
(books that inspired albums, rather)

• 1984
• Animal Farm
• Brave New World
• The Diary of a Young Girl
• The Grapes of Wrath
• I, Robot
• [Thomas Ligotti short stories] 
• Lord of the Rings
• Moby Dick
• Neuromancer
• The Raven
• War of the Worlds

Not so much a Songbook as a

Books that inspired songs

• A Rose for Emily
• The Bell Jar 
• The Bluest Eye
• Henderson and the Rain King
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• The Invisible Man
• Lord of the Flies
• The Master and Margarita
• The Sound Sweep
• Watership Down
• Wuthering Heights

Stories to air

I don't presume to talk of radio co-opting or converting verse since it is a natural medium for the voice. There does have to be the interest in listeners.

A short story can be all too easily read on air.

Before commenting on what a boon Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is to voice actors, we  realise that books that have been adapted to radio have often also been the subject of stage adaptations, made into films, had their characters used casually in TV shows for dramatic effect. The potent storylines, characterisations and/or classic status of the work or its author all contribute to this desire to use the material in these novels.

The chronology is messed up as there are cases of radio programs produced in response to a character who has gone on to popularity in film and television or a theatrical presentation. Few would be surprised to hear that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple have been voices on the wireless. Others can speculate on the attraction of exotic locales, speculative fiction, and mystery or, in the case of the Grapes of Wrath, the aforementioned classic status and the way the story speaks to its audience.
In this way, we accept it as inevitable that Frankenstein and Dracula will be given every kind of treatment there is.

Radio as read

• Biggles
• The Cisco Kid
• Discworld
• Hopalong Cassidy
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth
• The Phantom of the Opera
• The Pickwick Papers
• Space Cadet
• Treasure Island
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Televerse

I am not sure that poetry got much traction on television and short stories - at least according to the searches I did - to television isn't a thing. Though I think I remember reading that many Twilight Zone episodes were adaptations of short stories that had originally appeared in pulp magazines.

Now that TV has spread to accept every endeavour, there might still be room for a rhyming versifier

Here's to the waste and the waist and the wistful yearning for simpler times
to the echo of arcs we had once embarked on remarked upon
cheers to the taste and the Test and all of it teased tossed into a toast
farther Sun & wholly go-est on to boast
recorded as rewarded
entwined with entertained

Square i's

Books brought to the small screen

• Brideshead Revisited
• Darkly Dreaming Dexter
• Game of Thrones
• The Handmaid's Tale
• [Sherlock Holmes]
• [Hornblower series]
• Jamaica Inn
• [Land of Oz]
• War and Peace
• The Witches of Eastwick

Big screen poetry

• The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace
• Beowulf
• Gunga Din 
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• The Illiad
• Jabberwocky
• The Man from Snowy River
• The Night Before Christmas
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• The Odyssey
• The Raven
• The White Cliffs

Flicks through the pages

Short stories made into film

• Babylon Revisited
• The Basement Room
• Eisenheim the Illusionist 
• In a Grove
• Las babas del diablo  ("The Devil's Drool")
• So Much Water So Close to Home
• Three-Ten to Yuma
• We Can Remember it For You Wholesale
• Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
• Why Don't You Dance?

Book at Box Office

Book to film

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• The Body
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
• Gone With The Wind
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Great Expectations
• Heart of Darkness
• The Sheep-Pig
• Trainspotting 

Book to play

Besides books of plays we also have books that have been turned into plays. Too many to enumerate though nowhere near the number of books that have remained books or plays plays.

• Adam Bede
• Anna and the King of Siam
• Death in Venice
• Don Quixote (Man of La Mancha)
• The Man on the Bench in the Barn
• Porgy
• Simulacron-3
• The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
• Wicked
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz