Bout of Books Sign-Up + Days 1 & 2 Challenges

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 22nd and runs through Sunday, August 28th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 17 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

So this Bout of Books thing... I always seem to miss the ball on it, and I've been hesitant to participate since it seems to be fairly Twitter-centric, and I don't use Twitter. But I've -- a bit belatedly -- decided to finally take the plunge and sign up for this week-long read-a-thon!

Since I'm not working yet (for those of you who are new here, my husband is in the military and we recently moved to Hawaii) and I have a major backlog of library books (I had SEVEN holds come in at one time and I've got four left to get to), I thought this was the time to jump in if there ever was one! The library books are all ones that I desperately want to read, and they almost all have requests so I'll be unable to renew them. Hopefully Bout of Books will give me the motivation to read my butt off this week.

Yesterday afternoon I finished "The Invisible Library" by Genevieve Cogman, a super-fun fantasy novel that's the first in a series about alternate-world-hopping Librarians, and I'll be starting "Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi today. My goal for Bout of Books is to get "Homegoing" and one other book completely finished, and be at least midway through a third by Sunday night. We'll see how the week goes!

One of the fun things about Bout of Books is the daily challenges. I'm already too late to link up for a prize in the Day 1 challenge, but it's a fun topic so I'll participate anyway.

Day 1: List your favorite and least-favorite book-to-movie adaptations. (Hosted by Writing My Own Fairytale.) This is a toughie! Even though they're often poorly done, I love seeing the movie versions of the books I've read!  I've learned to not watch the movie too soon after reading the book, which helps me avoid picking the film apart. I can't say definitively that these are my absolute favorites and least-favorites -- this post is pretty last-minute and I'm going off the cuff here -- but they fall squarely into the categories of really good and really disappointing.

Great Book-to-Movie Adaptations:

(The Swedish film version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.")

Painful-to-Watch Book-to-Movie Adaptations:

Day 2: Mix 'n Match. Pick out 10-15 books from your shelf, any genre, any language, and any length. In each book, flip to a random page and pick the 1st word (articles such as "the", "and", "an", "or", etc. don't count as the 1st word). Use all these 1st words to try to create an actual sentence.

My words:
-oil-smeared (The Invisible Library)
-pivoting (Morning Star)
-maze (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child)
-breakfast (84 Charing Cross Road)
-fucked (The Girls)
-grass (Meadowland)
-read (Allegiant)
-garden (Life After Life)
-only (The Likeness)
-thought (The Language of Flowers)
-all (The Art of Racing in the Rain)
-licking (Homegoing)

This was rather difficult with the above words and my wacky sentence makes zero sense, but here goes:

Licking breakfast in the garden while reading, the grass was pivoting, only it was an oil-smeared maze! All she thought was, "I'm fucked."