2001 is absolutely not a book of the film. They were created in tandem.

The Sentinel was really just the jumping off point.  Only the part occurs on the moon borrows from The Sentinel.  It doesn’t sound like I can change your mind regarding your attitude towards the book, but if anything it’s a film of the book, not the other way around.  Clarke details his partnership with Kubrick and the process they went through in forging the story together in his introduction to the book.  I can understand being sniffy about novelisations of films (I think the only one I have ever read is Alien 3 by Alan Dean Foster), but with 2001 it really was a unique creative process.  Also, it’s Arthur C. Clarke, not some hack.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Davy, I wasn’t trying to talk you into actually reading it, just pointing out that it isn’t your typical novelisation of a film.  If you do read it then of course I hope you enjoy it, and if you don’t you can let me have it with both barrels.

55.  Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.  This is the second book in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.  I read the first one, Titus Groan, a couple of years ago.  Like the first it’s a weighty tome, and after finishing Titus Groan I felt like I needed a break, because the prose is dense and demanding.  The same, unsurprisingly, applies to the sequel.  The prose, like the rambling castle and its denizens, is arcane, eccentric and…well…rambling.  If there’s one negative I could throw at it, it’s that it’s too long.  There’s a whole subplot in there involving Titus’ headmaster wooing Irma Prunesquallor that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever ever on the overall plot, and a considerable portion of the book length is dedicated to it.  But then I wouldn’t take it out, because for me it was the most enjoyable part of the story, and that’s because of Gormenghast’s primary strength: its characters.

It doesn’t seem as if there is a single “normal” character in Gormenghast except for maybe Titus himself, and he spends much of his time dreaming of escaping the overbearing confines of the castle and its relentless succession of rituals and observances.  Everyone else is almost cartoonish in their eccentricities, and some of the exchanges between characters, especially Dr. and Irma Prunesquallor and headmaster Bellgrove, are just an absolute joy to read.  So it’s too long, then, and yet I wouldn’t take anything out of it.  The prose, too, is frequently beautiful.  But I can’t imagine these books are for everyone; they’re just so unusual.  I know nothing about Peake, but I like to imagine he was every bit as eccentric as his castle and it’s people.

A quick note on the BBC adaptation.  My first contact with the story was watching this adaptation some twenty years ago.  It’s been a few years since I watched it, but I can say is that the casting on that show was exquisite perfection.  Christopher Lee as Mr. Flay, Stephen Fry as headmaster Bellgrove, John Sessions as Dr. Prunesquallor…*chefs kiss*.  And the list goes on; it’s stuffed to the gills with perfectly cast British talent.  If your not up for the books, it’s well worth seeking out the television series.

56.  I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.  Another reread.  It’s a great book, and one that left an indelible mark on my imagination.  Other books came and went, but this one stayed with me for some reason.  When I read it the first time around (I was probably about 17) I’d taken an interest in screenwriting, and I found myself tinkering with ideas of how it might be adapted into a film.  It’s possible I didn’t know then that there were already two film adaptations floating around.  Old habits die hard, I guess, because even though there are now three film adaptations out there (that Will Smith one really doesn’t deserve to share the title) there was still a little part of my imagination whirring away as I read it this time, turning over ideas of how to adapt what is not any easy story to tell in film.  There’s just something about this book that fires my imagination, and I’m not even that into vampire stories.  Also, the part with the dog broke my heart when I was 17, and it just broke my heart all over again.  If you’re up for an apocalyptic tale with a difference, I recommend it.

Yeah, great book

Raiziel wrote:

56.  I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. 

This is a true classic as far as I'm concerned. On my "buy a nice version for the shelf" list.

Deep into Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman at the mo. Classic Russian 20thC, loads of characters to track. But what a work. Set during the siege of Stalingrad.

Raiziel wrote:

55.  Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.

I hear Folio Society are doing a Limited Edition of the series illustrated by Dave McKean.

I enjoyed 2010 the film. I've watched it a few times. Having something explained can sometimes spoil things but this handled it well.

Splendid cast helps it but the story is solid.

59.  2061: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke.  Of the three I’ve read so far I like this one the least.  The simple reason for that is that, while the first two are about momentous events in the history of mankind, this one feels like little more than a space adventure.  I haven’t read it yet, but it feels more like a conduit between the important stuff that happens in the first two books and what might happen in 3001: The Final Odyssey.  Also, bizarrely, I had no idea what this book was even really about for over one hundred pages.  Clarke spends so much time in the first one hundred plus pages world building and catching us up on what’s happened in the last fifty years that he forgets to entice the reader with at least a few stepping stones of storyline.  I’ve noticed this before in his storytelling, especially in Childhoods End, where he just gets a little too carried away in imagining his future worlds that he forgets he has a story to tell.  It’s not a bad book at all, but it does feel slight.  I am, however, really looking forward to finding out how it all ends in The Final Odyssey.

60.  Voyagers by Ben Bova.  Oh boy, this was a big one for me to go back to.  I think I read it when I was 13 years old.  It was the first grownup novel that I can remember picking up in a shop and thinking I’d like to read it.  Before then it was The Outsiders and Stig of the Dump that school foisted on me.  So Voyagers is a hard sci-fi first contact story that is more political drama than it is aliens and spaceships, as it concerns the Russians and the Americans scrambling to get their mitts on a single alien vessel as it heads towards Earth from the vicinity of Jupiter.

Coming back to it something like 35 years later and it makes a terrible first impression.  I feel like in the first half of the book there’s a pretty unpleasant attitude to women.  I can understand when an author wants to give a character some nasty attributes as part of their…well…character, but to find it here in three of the main characters (to varying levels) tells me the author must share some of these attitudes.  It doesn’t help very much that his main female character gets her way by sleeping with whoever.  Overall it just feels icky.  Fortunately virtually all of that unpleasantness evaporates in the second half of the book as the ship draws closer and things ramp up.  Now when I say ramp up, I’m probably being generous; this is definitely not a thriller.  It’s very slow, and I’m not sure it would satisfy folk who come to it for the first contact stuff, but while it’s there, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of it.

I read this again because last year I heard that Bova passed away (I believe it was COVID related), and when I looked up his books for the first time in a long time I discovered he’d written a fourth and final book in the Voyagers series.  So I’m reading the first three books again so I can finally do this last one.  It’s a meal I have to finish, even if some of the courses are a little unpleasant going down.  Can I recommend it?  Not really.  He’s actually a decent writer, but some of the stuff in the first half isn’t great to read if you have modern sensibilities.

STOP READING SO MANY BOOKS!