in Books, Featured, Video, Whatcha Reading
Whatcha Reading, David Nicholls?
“Whatcha Reading?” is a web series from Ron Hogan in which authors recommend a great book.
David Nicholls was a successful screenwriter for film and television before he began writing novels. So when plans got underway to turn his internationally bestselling One Day into a big-budget picture with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, he was an apt choice of screenwriter. Though he did make a few changes from page to screen, the fundamental story remains the same, checking in with Emma and Dex on every anniversary of the day they first met, from 1988 to the present day.
Nicholls is very passionate about his love for Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, which he first read as a teenager. He describes the novel as “a wonderful, passionate, lean thriller… It’s a very violent book, a very passionate book, with this fantastic Gothic sense of menace.”
It’s also a bit of work-related reading: He’s writing the screenplay for a film version of the novel directed by Mike Newell and starring Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch. It should have a ready audience here in the United States; in addition to being one of the Dickens novels commonly assigned in English classes, Great Expectations was also one of the two novels that Oprah Winfrey chose last year for the final book club selection on her show.
DEEPER DIVE
Watch the trailer for One Day.
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Elsewhere in inReads: Find out what it takes to adapt a book for the big screen.
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About The Author:
Ron Hogan
Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. His most recent book is Getting Right with Tao, a print edition of his popular online “translation” of the Tao Te Ching into modern vernacular. He is also the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, a visual tribute to ’70s Hollywood, and a contributor to the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning and the critical anthology Secrets of the Lost Symbol. Ron Hogan is a member of the inReads Advisory Board.
