Best books that were made into movies in 2023
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A Hallowe'en Party/A Haunting in Venice
by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie's books are constantly being turned into movies and TV series, and 2023 is no exception. British actor Kenneth Branagh is back as her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, for a third time. The movie is called A Haunting in Venice and the book it's based on A Hallowe'en Party, one of the later Christies, written when she was 78. It's set in the English countryside at a children's party, where apple bobbing goes horribly wrong. It features Ariadne Oliver, Poirot's scatty writer friend, as a main character. As you would expect from Christie, it has a clever plot. In bookstores, you may see a special edition of the book, with a foreword by screenwriter Michael Green, who admits to having committed his own crime while writing the screenplay for the film: "I confess I stole that sparkling ingenious premise — a murder at a Halloween Party — and killed the rest."
Maigret and the Dead Girl
by Georges Simenon
Now out in a movie with Gerard Depardieu as the French police inspector, Maigret and the Dead Girl is a good place to start with this classic European detective series by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989). Simenon wrote around 75 Maigret novels, so the quality tends to vary. These are realistic novels, in that they're not selling escapism and you do feel like you're in Paris in the 1950s, going around with Maigret as he deals with often sad lives and even sadder crimes.
Daisy Jones & The Six
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
“Oh my God, I love that book so much…It has many different characters telling the same story from different points of view, and you get to know the characters through how all of the other characters see them. It’s a perfect example of alignment in how the characters are portrayed and also the differences, by the way the emotional content comes through in the audiobook.” Read more...
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American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin
🏆 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
American Prometheus is a bestseller (again) in the wake of Christopher Nolan's movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer. The movie is long, as is the book (700+ pages) but it is highly readable. The scariness of the weapon Oppenheimer ended up creating gives the book a built-in narrative momentum as you read about his German Jewish background, his schooling in New York and holidays in New Mexico, into the major events of his life.
The Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
“This is one of the very few novels that I’ve read twice. My lasting memory of it, and I think why it plays such a special role for me, is that it’s such a poignant and touching and unflinching depiction of change, and of when people feel caught out by change, and how the old order feels about the introduction of new customs and new regimes. There’s this kind of wistful way in which the prince describes his own inability to move with the times. For anyone who’s interested in Europe, where we’ve just seen this ceaseless ebb and flow of the new replacing the old, I just don’t think you can find a better book to summarise the wisdom and the conservatism and nostalgia that any order that is having to make way for a new order feels.” Read more...
The Pale Blue Eye (book)
by Louis Bayard
The Pale Blue Eye (2003) by Louis Bayard is an excellent murder mystery, reminiscent of Wilkie Collins in its style. It's set at West Point Military Academy in upstate New York in the 19th century and features Edgar Allan Poe, author of what most experts agree is the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The Pale Blue Eye is set in the period before Poe became a writer of detective fiction and is not in any way based on a true story, though Poe did attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. After a stint in the army, Poe joined West Point in March 1830, was good at the classes (especially French), but hated the discipline, stopped attending classes and was court-martialled and officially dismissed a year later.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Winner of Winners Prize, which aims to pick out the best nonfiction book of the past 25 years
“It’s an extraordinary book. He’s writing of extraordinary things, but that alone won’t make it a good book. There’s incredible artistry in putting this story together. And because he has a very transparent style—he’s a New Yorker staff writer—and it’s not fancy, it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, he just had to research it and write it down.’ But no, it’s incredibly beautifully done. It’s about the Sackler scandal, this family that’s made a fortune out of Oxycontin, this very, very addictive opioid that’s killed more Americans than have died in all the wars the country has fought since the Second World War. What he does is go back and look at the origins of the company, Purdue Pharma. It’s a fascinating story. It’s an immigrant family, Russian Jewish. The father has a grocer’s shop. They work incredibly hard. Against all the odds the three boys, the first generation, all become doctors. It is the American dream. They’re doing something extraordinary and it’s admirable at the start.” Read more...
American Born Chinese
by Gene Luen Yang
“It’s very cool. I think it’s better known in the United States because of the splash he made with a book called American Born Chinese.” Read more...