All posts by Alyssia

About Alyssia

Alyssia is an Adult Services Librarian at the Vaughan Public Libraries. Nothing makes her happier than a great book and a great cup of coffee. She loves fiction in all formats - books, movies, television, you name it - and is always on the lookout for awesome new music.  |  Meet the team

From Book to Screen: Adaptations for the New Year

The new year may have just started, and we might still be in a post-holiday fog, but TV and movie adaptations don’t sleep! Particularly not when they’re set to debut on streaming services, which can be accessed from the comfort of our own homes (and don’t have to compete with the snow and slush to get people to a theatre). The early months of 2023 already promise an intriguing roster of new adaptations (not to mention new seasons of returning faves like You and Shadow and Bone). Below I’ve picked out five adaptations I’ve got my eye on with release dates set between January and March. Grab a copy of the books at your local branch before they hit the big or small screen!

January 4: The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante 

The latest Italian-language adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s work is set to air today on Netflix. Say what you will about Netflix’s (baffling, unsustainable) business model, one thing they’re good for: investing in and promoting international talent. Treading familiar territory for those who have read and/or watched Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (aka the Neapolitan series), The Lying Life of Adults explores the class divide in Naples, only this time it’s the 1990s (the trailer features the songs “Celebrity Skin” by Hole—an iconic 90s riot grrrl banger—and “E Mo E Mo” by Peppino Di Capri, the requisite 80s Italo-Disco song for any Italian media). When young Giovanna’s father remarks that she is starting to resemble her estranged aunt Vittoria, she decides to set out and find her lost family member. Her journey takes her from her middle-class, bourgeois hilltop neighbourhood to the more vulgar quarters down in the city’s depths. Along the way questions of truth and the nature of storytelling arise: who is lying, what counts as a lie, and why?  

Available in print and on Overdrive and Hoopla.  

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Babel: An Arcane History

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Babel (full subtitle: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution) by R.F. Kuang is a big, bold, incredible conundrum of a novel. Anything clocking in at over 500 pages is already going to be asking a lot from its readers. And that title? Music to my history nerd ears (eyes?), but what a mouthful! From the jump, Kuang is telegraphing what you’re about to sink into, and that is a dense, at times challenging, historical epic. Babel follows Robin Swift as he’s taken from his home in Canton to be raised in England, priming him for a lucrative career in Oxford’s translation department. But things aren’t all what they seem, and Robin quickly gets caught up in an underground, anticolonial movement called the Hermes Society.  

This book is marketed as a fantasy, but it’s light on the magic. In this version of Industrial Revolution era Britain, the gilded Oxford University has a Royal Institute of Translation (I googled: not a real thing) based out of a tower aptly named Babel. This institute works by translating and inscribing words into enchanted silver bars, which function like a source of energy for their owners. So, countries that can afford more silver bars gain more power. Kuang doesn’t imagine much of an alternate history here; Britain is the dominant force in the silver trade and thus has the strongest colonial power—just like real life. Truthfully, not much is different than actual British trade history. I know some readers were frustrated by that, but it doesn’t bother me. Just approach the novel like historical fiction with some slight fantasy elements, and that should mitigate any disappointment. 

Rather than the more typical elements of fantasy fiction, the magic in this world is the act of translation itself. This might be where reader reactions diverge. Kuang, a scholar through and through (she currently has two Masters, one each from Oxford and Cambridge, and a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature from Yale) is not shy about loading the text with thorough explorations of linguistics and the history of language. Your mileage may vary on how interesting this is; as someone who minored in linguistics, I am always happy to see the word “Proto-Indo-European” appear in the wild. Give me all the etymologies! 

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November Reading Challenge

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November Reading Challenge: Read A Book by an LGBTQIA2S+ Author

Our reading challenge for November is to read a book by an author who identifies as LGBTQIA2S+. Whether you’re reading outside your identity or within it, it’s always a good time to read books from marginalized voices. But lately it seems particularly apropos to highlight queer authors (I’ll use that as an umbrella term for simplicity’s sake). It’s hard not to be concerned about the storm brewing below our border; book bans (or more accurately, attempts at them) are on the rise, the target of which is largely books with queer themes (and books that deal with race—doubly so if a book contains both, such as George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue). PEN America compiled a detailed report earlier this year investigating these attempts at censorship, for those who would like to learn more. Across the pond we’ve also seen an alarming uptick in transphobic rhetoric, a sort of transphobe-mania gripping the UK, famously spurred on by She Who Must Not Be Named.  

Books can be tools for exploring the human condition, tools for advocacy and for empathy, for validation and support—and also, just for fun. In June, Vogue asked “Is this the golden age of queer literature?” While the answer is basically “not really”, it’s still certainly a better literary landscape than in the past. Queer authors have always existed in all genres, though not as openly (or as mainstream) as today. We’ll go over some of these genres paired with some recommendations! 

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