A-Z Book List: M for Memoirs

Not many books are successful as a movie. It is not very easy to convert a book into a movie in the first place. Books can be anywhere between 10 pages to 800 pages (a rough estimate that is) but a movie cannot be more than the max of 3 hours (if by then it doesn’t put you to sleep that is) Adapting a novel and delivering it with a good screenplay is always a challenge. That is why we have so many movies which failed to impress us visually even when their book counterparts were very successful. But, like everything else, we have exceptions to these too. And this book falls on that list.

Name: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Genre: Fiction, Romance, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance

Honestly, I had a tough time to choose from my selection of books for M. I could have chosen Mahabharata by C. Rajagopalachari (which is an abridged version of the epic tale) or Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayanan or The Mirror, by our very own Navigator (a fellow blogger) I am listing these here so that you might have a chance to check these out too 🙂 And I have done a set of posts on ‘The Mirror’ already which also included an interview with the author himself 😉

Coming back the book of the day, Memoirs of a Geisha. I gave this book 4 stars in Goodreads. It is very poetic in nature. That is how I felt about it when I read it. Can you bring a certain grace and calm and elegance to characters with your words? It is not that easy. But this book does that. The pain, the suffering, the love, the yearning, the hate, the disappointment – we feel all that the Geisha feels. We are taken into a whole new different world in a different era and go through a whole life. A very well written book. The movie also was equally amazing. Mesmerizing performances by everyone involved. Very well adapted movie. One other book that comes to my mind where I was equally enamored with both the book and the movie was ‘Gone with the Wind’.

PS: Check out the rest of the A-Z Book list here