Top Ten Tuesday: Books About New Year’s

For That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday:

Todays prompt is:

January 10: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2023

But since I’m trying to read what I have and NOT to make a million more TBRs, I decided to do my own thing. Since we’re starting a new year, and looking ahead, I’ll share some books set on/near New Year’s, or that have significant New Year’s scenes.

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore – New Year’s Eve 1982. The title character is set to turn 19 at the stroke of midnight. She faces some big decisions in the year ahead. But as the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints. When she wakes up, it’s 32 years in the future, and Oona is 51 years old physically (mentally she’s still 19). She is greeted by a stranger who tells her that for the rest of her life, she will leap to another age at random. So from 19 she leaped to 51. From 51 she might leap to 25… Oona tries to build a life given her “condition.” There are perks and drawbacks and we watch Oona grow up (and down, and up again) on the outside, while developing normally on the inside.

Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding – This book opens on a New Year, when the title character decides to make some resolutions. These include, but are not limited to:

• develop a functional, adult relationship
• go to the gym 3x a week
• learn to program the VCR
• keep a diary all year

Some of these resolutions are more successful than others naturally!

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby – Four people meet one New Year’s Eve at a popular London spot for suicides. They all have the same plan for midnight. In four alternating first person perspectives, we get to know who these people are, and why they got to this point. Once they all meet, they end up sharing their stories and agreeing to postpone mortality (at least temporarily) to help each other.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith – This starts on New Year’s Day in 1975 and circles around to another New Year’s later on in the book. At the beginning, Archie, who’d planned to start the New Year with his suicide, ends up at a New Year’s party instead. At this party, he meets his future wife. The book itself is actually more about his friendship with fellow WWII vet, Samad Iqubal, but New Year’s party, and the resulting marriage, definitely set Archie’s life on a different path.

Middlemarch by George Eliot – This novel begins on New Year’s Eve, at a party given by the Vincys. It seems cheerful but there are a lot of tensions under the surface. Rosamund’s husband bores her. Mr. Lydgate has money problems. Mr. Farebrother is flirting with Mary, which makes Fred jealous. We get to know these people and their various problems big and small over the course of the novel.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – While the knights of Camelot are having a New Year’s feast, a gigantic green knight shows up. Gawain wins a fight with him, but the knight tells Gawain that he will return next New Year’s to take his revenge. Not the most promising start to a year…

Mixed Doubles by Jill Mansell – One New Year’s Eve, three friends are sharing their resolutions. Liza wants to get married this year. Pru wants to stay married, and Dulcie wants a divorce. Over the course of the next year, best laid plans will naturally go awry. Things get even crazier when the characters try to help each other.

Baby-Sitters Little Sister: Karen’s New Year by Ann M. Martin – When I was about seven years old, I thought that Karen Brewer was a kindred spirit. Case in point: on New Year’s Eve, Karen encourages her friends and family to make resolutions. Karen joins in, making a number of resolutions herself. To help make sure people are doing what they should, Karen takes up spying on them. Surprisingly, Karen’s nearest and dearest don’t appreciate this! They spy on her in return…

Fear Street Superchillers: The New Year’s Party by RL Stine – Another nostalgic New Year’s book, this one that actually begins at a Christmas party. A prank turns fatal when it turns out that the intended target had a heart problem. Naturally, the pranksters decide to hide the body and swear secrecy (because is there another way to handle it?). But then the body they’ve hidden disappears. In the lead up to the New Year, the pranksters start to die, one by one.

Happy reading in 2023 everyone!

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Fear Street: Reboot Films and Nostalgia

Last summer Netflix’s The Babysitters’s Club sent me into nostalgic bliss. This summer, Netflix kept my childhood literary nostalgia going, with their Fear Street trilogy. When I was about eleven I devoured these books. They didn’t particularly scare me, they were more trashy, self-consciously cheesy fun. So when I heard that Netflix had adapted the series into a three film event, I definitely wanted to watch. It sent me on a walk down memory lane (which just so happens to be adjacent to Fear Street.)

Source: Bloody Disgusting

The Fear Street books were centered around a street (called Fear Street) in the town of Shadyside, Ohio. They were more of less stand alones set in the same universe with some characters appearing in more than one book. However, there were several “miniseries” within the main series. These were (usually) trilogies, centering on one storyline. They included 99 Fear Street: The House of Evil, Fear Street Cheerleaders, and the origin story, The Fear Street Saga. There were also some spin-off series.

The Netflix films act as a sort of mash up of bits and pieces the series. They use tropes that appear a lot in the series, along with settings readers may recognize. Author RL Stine began writing the series in 1989 (I started reading them years later) and they reached their heyday in the early-mid 1990’s. The first film begins in 1994 (when the books were probably at their height of popularity), and they move backwards with the second set in 1978 and the third in 1666.

Part I: 1994

source: bookstr.com

Rivalry between Shadyside (home and Fear Street and Murder Capital USA. We never really learn why people continue to go there…) and the nearby Sunnyvale (nicest place to live ever) is high. When Deena Johnson’s girlfriend, Sam moved to Sunnyvale, Deena broke up with her. Now things are tense to say the least. One day, Deena and her friend Kate are on a school bus, with Sam and her new boyfriend in a car behind them. In an ill considered move, Deena and Kate throw a water cooler out the emergency exit, causing Sam and her boyfriend to crash. No one dies in the accident and Sam’s injuries seem minor. But the crash disturbed the grave of Sarah Fier, executed for witchcraft in 17th century Shadyside. Soon ghosts from the violence in Shadyside’s past come torment Sam, Deena and Kate as well as Deena’s brother, Josh, and their friend, Simon.

The Sarah Fier storyline references the Fear Street Saga. That’s a story that’s followed through all three parts of the film series. The plot of this film brings together several elements from other books. .

Part II: 1978

Souce: IMDb

The second film in the series is set in Camp Nightwing (book fans may recognize this as the setting of Lights Out) on the border between Shadyside and Sunnyvale, in the summer of 1978. Ziggy, rebellious and angry, is in her last year as a camper. Her older sister, prim and proper Cindy, is a counselor. When the camp’s nurse tries to murder Cindy’s boyfriend, Cindy soon comes to realize that she may have had a reason to do so. A reason that ties in to the death of Sarah Fier almost three hundred years earlier…

In this film, we meet another important family: the Goodes of Sunnyvale (these names really aren’t subtle!) The connection between the Goodes and the Fiers goes back to the days when Shadyside and Sunnyvale were a single colonial settlement.

Part III: 1666

Source: Wikipedia

The conclusion is set in Union Settlement (soon to be split into two towns, Shadyside and Sunnyvale). Sarah Fier is a friend of Solomon Goode (ancestor of Nick). One night she and several other friends attend a party. Several strange things happen, and the next morning, the town is struck by misfortune. Food goes rotten, animals become viscous and the pastor goes mad, locking several townspeople into the chapel and killing them. Solomon Goode’s brother, Elijah, convinces the townspeople that Sarah Fier is a witch who brought a curse upon the settlement. The accused witches are condemned to be hung and dawn, but Sarah has a plan to turn things around.

I liked that this series managed to tell a story both forwards and backwards. We see Deena’s story upfold over the course of the trilog as she tries to break Sarah Fier’s curse, while the 1978 and the 1666 stories are told via flashback. The origin story in this is significantly changed from The Fear Street Saga books. One difference (that I remember at least! there are probably many others but my memory of the books isn’t great) was that in the books we learn how “Fier” became “Fear.” Also, in the books, the creepiness was centered around the titular street. The films have the same title, and we see a road sign for “Fier Street” in 1994, but the focus is on Shadyside and Sunnyvale as a region. That’s not a criticism: because they books are all stand alones set in the same universe, it’s waaay too much to adapt them all, unless you’re making a longform series. Hence the mash up and streamlining. But I would have liked to see how the film’s Sarah Fier tied into a street in Shadyside somehow.

But really what I liked most about these movies was playing “spot the reference.” For example, the first scene in the trilogy takes place in a mall bookstore. We see some very Fear Street inspired book covers on the shelves, and the author of this series is Robert Lawrence. I’m one of probably only a few viewers who knows that “Robert Lawrence” is what the “RL” in “RL Stine” stands for. Yes, I am that much of a geek!

Now that I’ve put my geekery on display on my blog for all to see, I’ll sit back and wait to see what kind of literary nostalgia Netflix has in store for me in the future.

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve (Probably) Read The Most Books By

For That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday:

Today’s topic is:

July 7: Authors I’ve Read the Most Books By

But since Goodreads got rid their Most Read Authors page, I can’t be sure. So I decided to add a “probably”, since this isn’t really scientific.

1. Ann M. Martin- As a kid  I was a Babysitter’s Club addict. I also read her Little Sister spin off series. Since they came out with a new book every month or so (in retrospect I think a ghost writer might have had something to do with it) I’m sure it added up to a lot. Yes, I also watched the film and TV series. I’ve also watched the new netflix series and plan to blog about it soon. At heart, I’m still very much a nine year old girl!

2. Francine Pascal– I also read a lot of  Sweet Valley books in my childhood. There were Sweet Valley Kids, Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley High. I was too young for the Sweet Valley University books that emerged at some point. But I’m sure it added up to a lot. And yes, I think a lot of these were from a ghost writer too.

3. Carolyn Keene– Nancy Drew was another favorite series in my childhood. I read the old school series and the newer ones. I’ve since learned that “Carolyn Keene” was the pseudonym that the Stratmeyer Syndicate authors used. Many of the Nancy Drew books were written by Mildred Wirt Benson, but other ghostwriters used the name as well. So I suppose I should say that I’ve read a lot of books by the various authors who used that name.

3.RL Stine– Yet another one from me youth. I read the Goosebumps books when I was little and the Fear Street series when I got a little bit older.

4.Dean Koontz– I had a whole shelf full of his books at one point. I think he was the first “adult” author I read, when I was about 12. I was really interested in scary stuff  and someone recommended them to me. I think I was as enthralled with reading “grown up” stuff as I was with the books themselves. I haven’t read anything by Koontz in years.

5.VC Andrews– These were my 12 year old guilty pleasure. I devoured them! Though VC Andrews herself only wrote the Dollangager series, My Sweet Audrina (the sequel to this one was written by the ghostwriter), and the first books in the Casteel series (Heaven, Dark Angel, Fallen Hearts) before her death. The rest of the books were penned by a ghostwriter hired by her family after she died. Supposedly the ghostwriter had a lot of notes and drafts for other books to work from. I used to imagine exactly when he/she ran out of material is when the quality declined sharply. I’d try to identify where that was. Again, I haven’t looked at most of these in years.

6.Sidney Sheldon– I stayed with my Grandmother one summer when I was about thirteen and she had a lot of these books. I devoured them and then sought out more! I remember very little about them except that everyone was beautiful and had evil secret plans. According to wiki he wrote 18 books but it feels like I read more than that… It’s been many years since I’ve read one of these though.

7. Lisa Gardner- For years Lisa Gardner has been a go to writer for me when I want a fast moving plot that will absorb me while I  read it, but not as too much of me in the way of outside investment. I think she’s got about 25 total. She also writes romance under the name Alicia Scott but I haven’t read any of those yet.

8. Karin Slaughter– I got to this author for the same reasons as the author above. The quality of her work has been pretty consistent over the years. But she does sometimes get a littler darker than I’d like for “mindless reading.” I think I stopped reading her Grant County series at one point when I was upset about a plot development but I picked the series back up and went along with it as it morphed into the Will Trent series) According to wiki she’s written 18 novels, but again it feels like more.

9.LM Montgomery– I’ve loved LM Montgomery since I was a kid, and that love has continued into adulthood. In this case I’ve read most of her novels (she wrote 20: 8 “Anne” books, 3 “Emily” books, 2 “Pat” books and several stand alones) but I also have several volumes  of her short fiction. I still love her work.

10.Sophie Kinsella– I think Sophie Kinsella might also deserve a place on this list. I gave up on the Shopaholic series about  5 books in (around the time when the main characters antics crossed the line from cute to grating, IMO) but I’ve also read most of her stand alone titles and the books that she wrote under her real name (Madeline Wickham) She’s good for a laugh and an escape from reality, which is why I find myself returning to her often over the years.