Cast the Book: This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

 This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Topper
Call No.: FICTION TOPPER
Find it in the catalog!

Jonathan Tropper's novel about a semi-dysfunctional Jewish family, the Foxmans, sitting shivah after their atheist father passed away is being turned into a movie with one of the most exciting sounding casts around, including everyone from Tina Fey to Connie Britton (aka. Tami Taylor) and Timothy Olyphant. Topper's novel is laugh out loud funny and with this cast, it has the chance to be really good.  I'm a little less excited about the director, Shawn Levy, who's comedies never really worked all that well for me.  Then again, I'm not the target demographic for Night at the Museum or Date Night.  Below is the break down of the cast with character descriptions:

Judd Foxman:  Judd is the narrator of the story.  He's going through a divorce after catching his wife cheating on with his boss, a Howard Stern-esque radio shock jock, Wade Boulanger.

Who's Cast for Judd:  Jason Bateman.   Bateman is great at playing put-upon sad sacks, so he should do well here.  However, he's about ten years older than Judd in the book. 

Who I'd cast:  The Foxman boys are known for their curly dark hair, so when I read the book, I pictured Judd looking like the ever-adorable Hamish Linklater. 

Wendy Foxman:  Judd's sister, she is a mother of three kids.  Her husband Barry is an obvlious businessman who treats her badly.  Wendy's very blunt and she's obsessed with how thin other women are, especially Judd's soon-to-be-ex-wife Jen. 

Who's Cast for Wendy: Tina Fey.  Wendy's a little less spastic than most of the characters Fey plays, so it will be fun to see her play someone different.

Who I'd Cast:  Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  She's about 10 years older than Wendy in the book, but she looks great and can definitely play younger.  She definitely could pull off Wendy's bluntness and sass.  However, it's a bit hard to believe that Julia Louis-Dreyfus (or Tina Fey for that matter) would have body issues.

Paul Foxman:  Judd's alpha male older brother.  Paul runs the sporting goods owned by their deceased father.  He and his wife Alice are trying to conceive.

Who's Cast for Paul:  Corey Stoll, who was wonderful playing Ernest Hemingway in Midnight in Paris.  Stroll is actually quite a bit younger than Bateman, but he does seem more imposing.

Who I'd Cast: My first though reading the book was Rob Riggle or Vince Vaughan, however, I'm happy to see Corey Stoll in anything!

Philip Foxman:  Judd's ne'er-do-well  younger brother.  Philp tends to live life on the wild side, experimenting with drugs and dating models. 

Who's Cast for Philip:  Adam Driver.  Driver is fantastic on Girls, making his bizarro character (Adam Sackler) somehow both frightening and charming at the same time.  He definitely has the charisma needed for Philip. 

Who I'd Cast:  I actually think Driver is pretty perfect for this role.  He's handsome in an off-beat way, and has the irreverence and edge to play this character really well.

Mrs. Foxman:  The widow, known for her infamous enhanced cleavage.  She is a therapist who wrote a definitive book on child rearing (including examples from her own kids).  Mrs. Foxman is a smart woman, who tends to over share with her children.

Who's Cast:  Jane Fonda.

Who I'd Cast:  I don't really have any kind of strong opinions on Jane Fonda.  She does get name-dropped in the book, but not as a Mrs. Foxman doppleganger. However she's about ten years older than the character in the book.  I pictured Mrs. Foxman as being more Susan Sarandon-esque.  Diane Keaton might be too zany and not surgically enhanced enough for Mrs. F, but she's great at playing high-maintenance, over-sharing moms.

Alice Foxman:  Paul's wife.  She desperately wants to have a child.  Unlike the rest of the Foxman clan, she had a regular upbringing and doesn't quite get the way the Foxmans communicate.  Alice is on fertility drugs that make her overweight. 

Who's Cast:   Kathryn Hahn.

Who I'd Cast:  I love Kathryn Hahn.  She's usually hilarious.  However, she's not overweight by any stretch of the imagination.  If they drop the fat jokes from the books, I think Hahn would be great.

Tracy:  Philip's much older therapist girlfriend.  Tracy is in her mid-forties and is "engaged-to-be-engaged" to Philip. 

Who's Cast:  Connie Britton.

Who I'd Cast:  Lauren Graham.  Britton is a fantastic actress, but she seems too together to fall for someone like Philip.  While I'm sure Graham is a pretty together lady in real life, she's great at playing a mild mess as the relationship-hopping, still living at home single mom Sarah Braverman on Parenthood. 

Jen:  Judd's soon-to-be ex-wife, Jen is in her early thirties, very pretty, blonde, and pregnant (but not showing).

Who's Cast:  Abigail Spencer.

Who I'd Cast:  I'm not familiar at all with Abigail Spencer, but IMDB tells me she's way younger than Bateman and not a blonde.  With Hamish Linklater, I'd cast Jen as Katherine Heigl.  With Bateman, I'd reteam him with his Arrested Development love interest, Christine Taylor. 

Horry:  He's the Foxman's next door neighbor Linda's son and Wendy's high school boyfriend.  Horry has a brain injury from a bar fight that makes him still have to live at home.

Who's Cast: Timothy Olyphant.  

Who I'd Cast:  I'm always a fan of Olyphant, but being as Horry isn't repeatedly described as "incredibly good looking," I'm going to guess that he's a tad too handsome.  I'd cast Luke Wilson.  He's great at playing characters who are nice but frustrated with their lives, like Levi on Enlightened or Richie from the Royal Tenenbaums. 

Rabbi Charles Grodner:  The family's youngish rabbi who was a childhood friend of Paul.  Grodner wasn't exactly pious in his youth.

Who's Cast:  Ben Schwartz, who is fabulous as Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation. 

Who I'd cast: Brett Gelman.  I am sort of interested to see Schwartz play a character who is trying not to be outlandish.  However, he's a little bit on the young side.  While Gelman is actually only a couple years older than Schwartz, his beard and receding hairline make him look more mature.

Penny:  Judd had a crush on Penny in high school.  She works at the Foxman's sport store and ice skates in her free time.  She's also impossibly thin. 

Who's Cast:  Rose Byrne.  Byrne can be very funny and is certainly thin, but she's not really believable as Bateman's high school contemporary (unless he was held back a lot).

Who I'd Cast:  However, her Bridesmaid cohort Kristen Wiig is closer to Bateman's age and could bring some darkness to Penny's quirk.

Wade Boulanger:  Judd's former boss who is currently sleeping with his (Judd's) wife.  Boulanger is a radio host in the vein of Howard Stern, only if he was jock. 

Who's Cast:  Dax Shepard.

Who I'd Cast:  Vince Vaughn would be great at this role. 

Recent Reads

You Before Me by JoJo Moyes
Call No.: FICTION MOYES
Find it in the catalog!
I initially checked out this book just to see if I was right about the ending (I was), but it proved to be a really great read.  It's about a working class English girl Louisa (Lou) Clark who lives a relatively sheltered life and works at a small local cafe.  However, when the cafe closes shop, Lou is forced to take a job care-taking for a wealthy cantankerous quadriplegic, Will Traynor.  Will used to be an adventurer and shrewd businessman before being badly injured in a motorcycle accident.  Despite their differences and Will's perpetual bad mood, the two soon become friends.  However, Louisa discovers that Will has a shocking deadline.  This book is a real tearjerker, but there is humor throughout the book.  I really enjoyed Louisa's somewhat contemptuous relationship with her single mother sister, Katrina- the "smart one" of the family. 

The Movement of Stars by Amy Brill
Call No.: FICTION BRILL
Find it in the catalog!

Set in the mid 1800s in a Quaker community in Nantucket, this novel follows 24 year-old Hannah Price who dreams of one day discovering a comet.  She works as a librarian and spends the evening observing the stars. Overall, Hannah is pretty happy with her existence until her father announces that he is moving to Philadelphia to remarry.  As an unmarried woman, Hannah is forced to either leave her observatory and the island she's lived all her life, or marry a man she doesn't love for stability.  Things are further complicated when Hannah takes on a student Isaac Martin, an ambitious sailor from Azores.  Martin is not white, and his relationship with Hannah causes problems for them both even in the relatively liberal Quaker community.  This book is slower paced, but moody and romantic.  Hannah is sometimes a bit too stubborn, but it was hard to not be sympathetic to her plight and inspired by her accomplishments.  I definitely rooted for Hannah and Isaac's relationship.  Hannah is very loosely based on a real life "lady astronomer" Maria Mitchell.

The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh
Call No.: FICTION MCVEIGH
Find it in the catalog!

The premise of this book sort of reminded me loosely of W. Somerset Maugham's Painted Veil.  In spite of her father's Irish working class roots, Frances Irvine has led a life of privilege in London until her father dies suddenly.  Before his death, her father had made some poor investment choices and Frances is left with nothing.  Frances must choose between either working as caretaker for her aunt or marrying a distant cousin Edwin, a doctor in South Africa.  Frances doesn't really like Edwin all that much, she finds him rather serious and boring.  However, after initially rejecting his proposal, she changes her mind and agrees to the arrangement.  Edwin pays for her to travel to South Africa by ship.  While en route, Frances meets the charming and handsome diamond miner William Westbrook.  Frances falls hard for William, but finds out he's engaged to wealthy woman in Kimberley.  Once Frances arrives in South Africa, she finds life with Edwin even worse than she expected.  He lives in relative poverty, and insists of investigating a potential smallpox outbreak in Kimberley despite the express displeasure of the powerful mining boss.  Will Frances leave Edwin for the more dashing William? 

Frances can be a difficult character to sympathize with, mainly because she makes some really poor decisions.  One of the guys is so clearly great and on the right side of history and the other guy is an obvious jerk and up to no good.  However, the setting of the book is really interesting and I found the plot quite compelling.

Recommended Read: When You Reach Me

There are some great kids book out there that adults can enjoy too and I've got one such book for you: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. I was first introduced to this book by my 11-year-old niece: "It's my favorite book. You have to read it."


Miranda, the protagonist sixth-grader, is likeable as she rambles around New York City in the late 1970s. She lives with her quirky single mother, who is obsessed with going on the TV game show $20,000 Pyramid. Miranda's life gets complicated when her best friend, Sam, inexplicably pushes her away and she begins to receive mysterious notes with messages that are important to the future, but have no context in the present, such as "I'm coming to save your friend's life, and my own." The story circles back on itself and you may end up wanting to re-read it to make sure everything holds up. 

Even though it's a mystery with a sci-fi time-travel bent, it's a quite realistic read overall and uses the time-travel angle poignantly. If you're a fan of L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, you'll enjoy this one, and if you need further convincing, When You Reach Me won the 2010 Newbery Medal.

Remembering Roger Ebert

Everyone has a favorite memory of beloved film critic Roger Ebert; whether it's a clever remark he made on his long-running television show, a favored sentence from one of his thousands of movie reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, a passage from one of his many books, or a cherished personal encounter with a man who was, by all accounts, friendly and approachable and happy to discuss the movies with anyone who was interested.

My own favorite memory of Roger Ebert comes from an old episode of Siskel and Ebert and The Movies that aired sometime in the late '80s. The format of the show was simplicity itself; Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel would alternately introduce a film that was currently playing in theaters, some clips would be shown, the two critics would share their impressions of the film, maybe some banter, and then a verdict would be rendered: thumbs up or thumbs down. That was it. And you always kind of hoped that they'd disagree on the film in question. When the two disagreed, you got a fuller sense of what they really thought of the film, good or bad. There was something charming about the way they wanted each other to appreciate what was unique about a given film, or what made it uniquely awful.

I would've been about ten years old when this particular episode aired. In addition to reviewing whatever Hollywood films were current that week, none of which I remember, there was a review of Alejandro Jodorowsky's film Santa Sangre. And these were, unquestionably, the strangest, most unsettling images I had seen in my life to that point. I remember Ebert, in voice-over, explicating a scene where an armless woman was playing the piano with the aid of her son, who had slipped his arms through the sleeves of his mother's dress. There was something off-kilter in the acting, and the candle-lit set appeared baroque, almost operatic. The succeeding images were dreamlike and menacing, evocative of dark mysteries that I couldn't possibly understand. Needless to say, Ebert gave it a thumbs up.

That peculiar memory resurfaced at the news of Roger's passing, those four or five minutes of a decades-old episode. I've been thinking about that, how appropriate it is that Roger Ebert used his popular weekly TV show to highlight a little-known art-film about magic, vengeance, and religious fanaticism, directed by a Chilean-French filmmaker whose name almost certainly meant nothing to the vast majority of viewers. Roger Ebert loved the movies. Big movies and small ones, great movies and otherwise. Roger Ebert loved the movies. It was an enduring, lifelong love-affair, and we were fortunate to share it with him.

Cast the Book: Gone Girl

 Read the book!
Or listen to the audio!

Gillian Flynn’s smoking hot thriller is being turned into a film.  David Fincher (Zodiac, The Social Network, Fight Club) is in talks to direct, so my hopes are pretty high for the film.  Gone Girl is a dark and often very funny domestic drama following the events surrounding the disappearance of beautiful Missouri housewife Amy Elliott Dunne.  If you read the book, you probably already have an idea of who you would like to play Amy and the other lead characters.  Below are some of my picks.

SPOILER ALERT: The book has some major twists, some of which are revealed below.  If you haven’t read the book, tread carefully!

Nick Dunne:  Nick is Amy’s husband.  He used to be a journalist until he was laid off, now he’s a bartender and part-time college professor.  He’s in his early to mid-thirties, handsome in an 80s movie villain sort of way (think: James Spader in Pretty in Pink), and from Missouri (he and Amy relocated from her native NYC after they both were laid off).  Nick constantly seeks the approval of others and has some secrets that he’s hiding.  When I was reading the book, I pictured Nick as being played by Matthew McConaughey ten years ago Sadly, time travel has not been invented yet, so he’s a little bit too old now.

First Choice:  Bradley Cooper.  Cooper is a little bit on the old side, but he can play younger.  He’s got the jerkish good looks and acting chops to play Nick.

Runners-Up:  It would be fun to Jake Gyllenhaal play a character who is a little bit of creep and Maggie Gyllenhaal could play his twin!  Adam Scott would be really, really good in this role too, even though he’s older than B.Coop and not nearly as big of a name.  I’ve also heard Ryan Gosling mentioned for this role, but since he’s on hiatus from acting, that’s probably a no-go.  Personally, I think he’s too confident and naive-looking for the part.

Amy Elliott Dunne:  The pivotal character in the book, a former NYC career gal turned Missouri housewife.  Amy is in her late thirties (she’s a little older than Nick) and a beautiful blonde.  She’s the inspiration for her parents’ successful series of children’s books, Amazing Amy.  Amy is a tough role to play.  Her character goes from sweet to frighteningly crazy, and she’s incredibly smart.  When I read the book, I envisioned her as played by Anne Hathaway though she’s too young and brunette for the role.  Reese Witherspoon is producing the movie and was rumored to play Amy (though she’s since backed out).  While Witherspoon is the right age and look, she might be too much of an obvious choice.  Maybe it’s just because I’ll always associate her with Tracy Flick from Election.

First Choice:  I really like the idea of Gwyneth Paltrow taking on this role.  She is blonde, from an upper class family and New York City raised, so she has a really similar background to Amy.  And Paltrow can be really good with the right material.

Runners-Up:  It would be cool to see an actress who usually stars in fluffy material like rom-coms or romantic melodramas in this role.  Rachel McAdams, Jennifer Garner, or Katherine Heigl would all be fine choices to play Amy.

Margo “Go” Dunne:  Nick’s beloved twin sister.  She’s in her early thirties and very pretty in an old fashioned way.  Go works with Nick at their bar and has a dry sense of humor.

First Choice:  Zooey Deschanel.

Runners-Up: Maggie Gyllenhaal (and not just with Jake) or Juliette Lewis.

Andie:  SPOILER ALERT.  Andie is Nick’s “very very young, very very pretty” mistress.  She was a student in one of Nick’s classes.  Andie is a curvy brunette and very much the opposite of ice queen Amy.  When I read the book, I pictured Alison Brie playing Andie.  But while she plays a college sophomore on Community, Brie is really quite a bit older than Andie.

First Choice:  To increase the creepiness of Nick’s character, I would cast former Disney star Selena Gomez.  She’s 20 right now, so about the perfect age to play a college student.  And picturing her coupled with Bradley Cooper is quite unsettling.

Runners-Up:  Gomez’s Spring Breakers co-star Vanessa Hudgens could definitely take on the role.  She’s a little bit more mature, so it makes the pairing less weird.

Rand and Marybeth Elliott: Amy’s somewhat self-absorbed writer parents.  The Elliotts stand by Nick, at least initially.  I’d cast Mimi Kennedy  and Jeffrey Tambor.

Desi:  Amy’s ex-stalker, a wealthy momma’s boy.  Jude Law would be great if he can do the accent.

Desi’s Mom:  Looks creepily like Amy.  Blythe Danner is the obvious choice.

Nick’s Dad:  A senile misogynist.  He’s way overqualified, but no one convey crazed old man in the same was as Christopher Walken.

Tanner:  Nick’s sleazy defense attorney.  My first thought was Bob Odenkirk, who is so good as shady lawyer Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad.  But he probably doesn’t want to be typecast.  Matthew McConaughey could be really good and flashy in this part.  For a smaller name, Ray Wise could bring an interesting mix of creepiness and authority.  

Ellen Abbott:  A Nancy Grace-like TV show host.  If her sense of humor is good enough, the best person for this role is obviously Nancy Grace. 

Recommended Read: Wave

Sonali Deraniyagala has written one of the most honest, brave, and heartbreaking books I've read. We often define ourselves based on the familial roles we play: child, spouse, parent. Imagine if all of the those identities were stripped away in one fell swoop. Deraniyagala lost her husband, two sons, and parents in the 2004 Tsunami. She survived.

Deraniyagala's journey isn't pretty, nor a guide to handling grief. But, her family lives on in this portrait of her now-deserted existence; fittingly, in remembering the small details, she brings to life the whole picture of this previous life. You'll feel as though you know her children, could even pick them out in a crowd, she describes them so well. Her anguish and rage leap off the page. Her honesty is refreshing (from the hospital where she waits in vain for her family after the tsunami):

The boy kept walking back and forth and crying. I wanted him to stop. Someone brought a large towel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Still the boy sobbed. But I didn't speak to him. I didn't try to comfort him. Stop blubbering, I thought, shut up ... Vik and Malli didn't have a chance. Just shut up.

It reads as quick and deep as the wave that destroyed her family.
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
Find it in the catalog!

Record Books

 Imagine if your favorite album was also a novel.  Graphic designer Christophe Gowans re-imagined several classic (or cult classic) albums as books.  He even includes fictional synopsizes of the books.  The albums converted into books include everything from the Pixies (Surfer Rosa) to Bruce Springtsteen (Born To Run) to Alanis Morissette (Jagged Little Pill).  Two of my favorites include Prince's Purple Rain, which is turned into a pulpy Sci-Fi novel, and Boston's self-titled album, which is a phone book.  Check out all of the books on Gowans's website.