Books to Read Before the Movie Comes Out
We all love a few hours at the movie theater, but there’s just no substitute for
curling up with a few hundred pages of printed magic.
By Mark Athitakis
1 of 10
Far from the Madding Crowd
By Thomas Hardy
448 pages;
Vintage Classics
Our kind of Victorian romance, this story combines
old-fashioned courtship with a decidedly independent-minded heroine. The
latest version of Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel,
starring Carey Mulligan, is the third feature-length treatment of the classic.
As in the book, Mulligan’s
Bathsheba must choose between three fetching suitors who liven up the screen as
much as the period costumes and sharp banter. Yet the novel version of
Madding has more room to explore the
complicated love trapezoid and all its romantic complications. And even the
finest cinematography will have trouble matching Hardy’s rhapsodies on the English
countryside, where the morning mist casts “a fulsome yet magnificent
silvery veil, full of light from the sun.”
— Mark Athitakis
Published 05/26/2015