I enjoy comparing novels and their film adaptations -- even when I don't think the film an improvement. So after being one of the last people to get to see SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE before it left theaters, I ordered the novel by Vikas Swarup, originally entitled Q&A. The novel is very different, both more sentimental and more realistic.

Paradoxically, you appreciate how the film improves the story's cinematic and thematic cohesiveness, even though the Bollywood and Hollywood elements are clichés. The novels White Tiger and Sacred Games seem to me to be much more original and complicated novelistic portraits of India's class and gender wars. Sacred Games is particularly well written.

FYI, I think one of the best film adaptations is THE PLAYER (directed by Robert Altman, starring Tim Robbins), which Michael Tolkin adapted from his own novel of the same name. The novel is a better novel and the film a better film precisely because of the differences between them. One of the things that amused me is the fact that the cell phone conversations which are so important to the movie didn't take place in the novel because it was written before they became ubiquitous.

Something most of us probably knew: reading -- even for six minutes -- is a better way to relax your heart than listening to music or playing a video game, drinking tea or taking a walk.

http://www.booktrade.info/index.php/showarticle/20466

Dr Lewis, who conducted the test, said: "Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation."

Synchronicity and speculation in fiction

William Gibson is one of the founders of "cyberpunk" science fiction. His new $10 paperback (and a bargain at that price), Spook Country, is probably one of his most optimistic novels in the genre. He prides himself on writing about the "near future," one in which the technology he describes already exists in proto-type (like the bicycle made out of paper in Virtual Light).

In Spook Country, the background technology is virtual reality, "locative art," but the dangerous uses to which such art is put -- by the media, the government, terrorists and organized crime -- requires non-violent intervention from self-appointed guardians of our civil rights.

On a minor note of synchronicity, I had just heard a piece on NPR about the popularity of a new cuisine Vietnamese Pho noodles, when I proceeded to read a chapter in which characters comment on the quality of the "pho" they are eating. As usual, Gibson's book (first published in 2007) is well ahead of the curve. Bouncing from lower Manhattan (with a fantastically realistic chase amid the Union Square farmer's market) to Sunset Boulevard and the Vancouver waterfront, Gibson opens a window on a new kind of outlaw gypsy family, one with Chinese-Russian-Cuban roots and the protection of vodoo gods, martial arts, and iPods.