Project 365! A Year of Tea Time

So here goes! My first of 365 tea time posts. 4:00 pm EST each day, I’ll post something for tea time.

Day No. 1.

Drinking: Yogi Goji Berry Energy Green Tea

Listening to: Don’t Rain On My Parade

Today’s tea for thought comes from NPR.

This week, Robert Siegel interviewed Walter Kirn, the author of the novel Up In The Air that inspired the new Clooney film of the same name. You can listen to the interview by clicking the above link. What interested me most was Kirn’s articulate explanation of why the movie is never the same and how film adaptations are such different medium than novels. He explains:

KIRN (Author, “Up in the Air“): There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

Later in the interview, he explains it in a different way, but I love this, too. He says:

KIRN: You know, here’s how adaptation works – almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it’s as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks and some of the jacks have been made into twos. And it’s as though, you know, a new poker hand has been made out of these cards that were dealt in the book.

And yet the book and the movie to me are both obviously members of the same family. They’re like non-identical twins. You see the nose. You see the ears. You see the stature and the voice in the way of moving, and you go, yes, these are the same creature in some respect, but they are two different versions of the creature.

A real master of the metaphor, that guy. It makes me want to read his writing. He has written 7 novels and a memoir called Lost In Meritocracy {reviewed here in the New York Times} about his school days.

Here’s one of his essays about a road trip in Outside Magazine that I include here mostly for my friends Steve & Jill. If you haven’t already, check out their adventures which, most recently, have led them to New Zealand.

Speaking of books, anyone ever read Nevil Shute? If you are a fan, Vintage Classics has re-released several of his novels with these amazing graphic covers. I’ve never read him, but after seeing them on Eric Forbes’s Book Addict’s Guide a while back, I’m intrigued. They are available for sale here.

Happy new reading!