Terry Pratchett's novel Hogfather is being made into a 2-part, 4-hour film which will be shown on Sky One, the British cable channel at Christmas. This will be the first time that any of Pratchett's hugely successful Discworld books (which have sold more than 45 million copies and made the author a triple millionaire (at the last count), have been brought to life on the screen by real actors. David Jason will lead the cast as Albert, Death's assistant, a grumpy 65-year-old wizard.
When he was asked why it had taken so long for one of his novels to be filmed, Pratchett admitted:
"I'm not a very easy person to negotiate with. The books make me a lot of money and I have very much enjoyed writing them. You have to give up a lot of control for the movies and I can't quite bring myself to do it. TV is more fun than movies, because you can get involved more, because these people are close at hand."
Ian Richardson, who starred in the Andrew Davies TV adaptation of Michael Dobbs's book
House of Cards, will provide the voice of Death, a regular character in Pratchett's books, although an unnamed 6ft 7in Dutchman will play Death in person.
Pratchett has been closely involved with the feature, which is being shot in Romania because of the need for vast studio space and ready access to mountain scenery.
Johnny and the Bomb, a non-Discworld children's novel by Pratchett, has just been shown on BBC1; it starred Zoe Wanamaker. It followed an earlier live action adaption of
Johnny and the Dead, the prequel to
Johnny and the Bomb and second in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy. Previously animated versions of the Discworld novels
Soul Music and
Wyrd Sisters were made for Channel 4.
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The following fairly new books have caught my eye:
Reading "The Lord of the Rings": New Writings on Tolkien's Trilogy edited by Robert Eaglestone (Continuum, 2005) is a serious, scholarly book which includes an introduction by Michael D C Drout (editor of the forthcoming
The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment to which I have contributed); an essay called "Modernity" by Michael Moses; an essay called "Anglo-Saxon Women, Tolkien's Women" by Jennifer Neville and an essay called "After Tolkien" by Roz Kaveney (who is best known for her work on Buffy and Angel).
The Keys of Middle-Earth: Discovering Medieval Literature Through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Both the authors teach at Oxford University; Stuart also instigated the Virtual Seminars on World War One Poetry and its discussion forum, whilst Elizabeth works in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. The book takes incidents from
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings and matches them to incidents in Medieval Literature.
Finally,
The Return of the Hero: Rowling, Tolkien and Pullman by Christopher Wrigley (Book Guild Ltd, 2005). This books has one chapter on each of the three authors. I've just added all three books to my library list (none are in stock so I shall have to request that they be ordered before i can read them.)
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Just spotted this on
Bookmoot:
The Potter Index references every single word or phrase in the Harry Potter books by book and page number, although it only refers to the US editions at present. Apparently it will also reference the UK editions by the summer.
