Book v. Movie: Earwig and the Witch #MarchMagics

Welcome to a chat about Earwig and the Witch! I read the book on the first day of March Magics and finished it on, well, the first day. (It's just over 110 big print pages and full of illustrations.) When I set it down, I spent the afternoon watching the movie. Here are my thoughts ...

This was DWJ's last completed fiction book, published in June 2011, just after her death in March of that year. It's probably for the youngest audience of all of her books besides a 1992 picture book and a handful of short stories. The US edition (seen above) was illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky. It's the story of Earwig, a young girl who was left at an orphanage when she was a baby with nothing but a note that said "GOT THE OTHER TWELVE WITCHES ALL CHASING ME. I'LL BE BACK FOR HER WHEN I'VE SHOOK THEM OFF. IT MAY TAKE YEARS. HER NAME IS EARWIG." The children's home staff, of course, aren't sold on the witch story or the name and they try to call her Erika Wigg. Still the nickname Earwig creeps back in and she grows up with it and with the special talent of making anyone and everyone do just what she wants. Another day comes when foster parents are to arrive and choose kids to take home with them and Earwig expects the usual thing to happen, a bunch of cooing over babies and toddlers and the ignoring of the older kids. This time though, a very weird pair of adults, one who seems to get taller and grow horns as he stands there, actually choose Earwig to go home with them. What happens after this is unpredictable and fun.

The thing I like most about this book is that Earwig is not a bad kid. She gets her way and she does things that she doesn't have permission to do but she is not trying to hurt anyone. And, in the end, she stays happily with the same people who she didn't think cared about her at all. It's a found family story which is different from many DWJ stories that have bad parents. This one has adults that don't want to be parents who kind of grow into the role because of the strong personality of Earwig. Also ... talking cat!

Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the book, we get the Studio Ghibli film version of Earwig. This is the studio's first computer animated film and was directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son, Goro. As far as story goes, this film is almost too faithful to the book. It uses the exact dialog and pacing from DWJ's book and, in my opinion, it's not quite the right pacing for a film. It does start with an added scene of Earwig's mom taking her to the orphanage while being chased and there are two brief additional plot lines but neither really brings anything interesting to the story and seem tacked on. But these were only obvious to me because I had literally just read the book that morning. Most people won't have read the book and will may not have these issues. But the thing that disappointed me most was that the movie has Earwig's mom return at the end. That killed the entire "found family" aspect of the book and it bummed me out a bit.

As a huge Studio Ghibli fan (you may remember my Ghibli watching project in 2010), I missed the magic that Hayao Miyazaki brings to a story. I adore DWJ's Howl's Moving Castle but will admit that Miyazaki's film, with its differences, has more heart than the original tale. His son needs to learn to find and grow the spark that makes a good book into a great film. Also, the animation of Earwig was a little weird with thin old-lady eyebrows and too many angry looks. And the cat had no fur texture which, as we all know, Pixar perfected twenty years ago with Monsters, Inc. It just didn't work for me the way hand-drawn Ghibli films do ... although the workroom was exactly how I imagined it, so dirty and slimy! I also missed the music of Joe Hisaishi, which is one of the threads that tie all Ghibli films together and also adds to the magic.

Side note: this is the promo image for the film and it is not something that happens in the movie. That's kind of weird, right? Anyway, I know a couple of you were going to be able to watch the film so what did you think? Did you read the book first? How do you think it compares to other Studio Ghibli films (if you've watched any of them)? What was your favorite thing about the movie? Least favorite? Please share!

Time for #MarchMagics

I don't know where February went but here we are -- March! It's time again to celebrate the lives of two incredibly imaginative and prolific fantasy/sci-fi authors, Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett. Here are some key dates:

6/7 March - EARWIG AND THE WITCH watch and discuss

11 March - Discussion post for Nation (TP) read-along

25 March - Discussion post for Power of Three (DWJ) read-along

I don't have the energy to coordinate an actual watch-along of Earwig but I'll post about it on the 6th and then we can discuss here on the blog or on Twitter or Instagram. It will be the first book I read this month as well. Speaking of ... here's my stack for the month in the order I think I'll read them:

Earwig and the Witch

Nation

Guards! Guards!

Men at Arms

A Tale of Time City

(When I get close to this one I'm gonna start bugging you, Jenny. Be ready to reread with me!)

Feet of Clay

Power of Three

The DWJs are all rereads and only two of the Pratchetts are new-to-me so I'm doing a lot more comfort reading than anything else. If I can find the time, I'll pick up another DWJ or two (because how can I have a year with no Chrestomanci?!).

Link any posts you have this month here and be sure and use the MarchMagics hashtag on social media. And, most importantly, have fun!

Announcing #MarchMagics 2021: All Together Now

Thank you so much for responding to my last post and sharing what is important to you about March Magics. After a couple of comments came in, my brain miraculously kickstarted and within an hour or so I had a theme and graphic and some ideas for events during the month!

I hope many of you will join me this March for a celebration of the wit and wisdom of Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett, may both of their names be spoken forever. I have chosen the theme "All Together Now" for a few reasons. First is that we all professed our fondness for coming together during the month and to having and making friends with a shared love of one or both of these authors. Many (most? all?) of us are obviously feeling lonely and isolated after this long ordeal and some of us need to be reminded that we can still come together past physical boundaries. Second, both of these authors do marvelous things with ensemble casts, whether it's the Chrestomanci clan at the castle or the Nac Mac Feegles under the chalk. Celebrating teamwork and shared responsibility in literature may even inspire us in our real lives. Finally, I have been seeking out music recently that brings me joy and The Beatles' All Together Now never fails to get me smiling and it immediately popped into my head when I was thinking about togetherness and the joy of this event so here we are!

So what should you read? It's entirely up to you. This theme is meant to be very loose and can be applied to the actual plots of the books or just the experience of reading these authors while others are doing the same. I will definitely be rereading Earwig and the Witch and Guards! Guards! and will finally continue with the Watch series. Past that, I'm going to let my whims guide me. Per Stephanie's (bahnree) great suggestion, I created a bingo card for the month. I will post it in my Instagram stories on March 1 for those of you who want to copy or reshare it there but here it is if you want to blog it and/or use it to spark some ideas about what to read --

As for readalongs, Jean suggested The Power of Three (DWJ) and I am dying to reread Nation (TP - and not a Discworld book, in case those aren't your thing) so I will have posts up on 11 March (Nation) and 25 March (Power of Three) where we can discuss. Feel free to participate even if you don't get a chance to freshly reread. I'll come up with some questions/thoughts to relate the books to our theme.

And if anyone does happen to have a way to watch the new Studio Ghibli Earwig and the Witch movie (HBOMax or in theaters), let me know and I'll time my viewing similarly and chat with you somewhere!

Finally, I am considering small sessions of reading aloud on Instagram Live throughout the month. This is still up in the air as I have to gather A LOT of courage and find a place where I won't bother my family in their work/school/etc. If I end up doing this, I will make heads-up announcements on Twitter and Instagram.

I want to open this up to all of you as well. If you want to host another readalong of your own, do some live readings or meet-ups, or anything else you can think of, please do! Just share with me what you are planning and I will spread the word and probably participate as well because what else do I have to do?!

Share your thoughts about this year's March Magics below!

(One last thing -- remember to use the #MarchMagics hashtag on social media so we can find each other's posts.)

#MarchMagics 2021 - Help!

I have been thinking about March Magics for the past month and just can't seem to settle on a theme or plan. Therefore, I am turning to you, my lovely readers with a couple of questions:

1. What are you hoping to get out of March Magics this year? Is community interaction important or do you just need a flimsy excuse to get to old and new Pratchett and DWJ favorites?

2. Do you have the will/time for read-alongs this year? What about a watch-along of Earwig and the Witch? Does anyone else even have HBOMax?

3. Do we need a theme/graphic or is the hashtag enough to bring us together?

Please let me know your thoughts in a comment or find me on Twitter or Instagram if you want to chat!

2021's Big Reading Plans

I started this year's reading by finishing The Pickwick Papers as my book for Monika's Chunkster Readathon. It felt so satisfying to be immersed in a sizeable book (719 pages) for almost a week that it has led to my choosing mostly bigger books since. I listened to A Promised Land, the first Barack Obama memoir which is 768 pages and about 30 hours of audiobook. (It was fantastic and I can definitely recommend listening to him reading it.) I got through 300 of the 800 pages of Death and Mr. Pickwick before I decided I just wasn't enjoying it enough to continue. And I'm now reading Lost Acre, the third book in Andrew Caldecott's Rotherweird trilogy, which is 473 pages long. This doesn't mean that I won't be reading many shorter books this year, just that I am going to deliberately start choosing some of the longer reads from my shelves and giving myself permission to spend a week on a book sometimes. This probably means more Dickens, Murakami, and maybe, finally, Trollope! I did read one novella that I had from the library (Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings) and I found myself wishing it had been longer and more fleshed out. I'm sure that all of this has something to do with regaining my concentration, my thought cycles, and my sanity.

What types of books are you reading in 2021?

A Not-So-Quick 2020 Summary

This has been the most exhausting year and I am so very glad it is finally over. I haven't entirely quit blogging (mostly because that also takes a certain amount of effort) so I suppose I have to record my reading stats for 2020. A look at the basics:

Books read: 124

Number of those that were audiobooks: 29

Rereads: 25

Non-fiction reads: 11

Books in translation: 8

My "best" of the year are a bit different than usual because I was choosing mostly reads that were either comforting or distracting or "easy". My once-varied library list ended the year looking quite stern and scholarly as I selectively plucked out the light and genre reads and left the heavier non-fiction and literature titles alone. My home TBR was whittled down to a few classics and some titles that have been sitting there for years and probably should just be weeded. A quick count says I read:

Mystery: 30

Sci-fi: 16

Fantasy: 39

That means 68.5 percent of my reading was genre this year which seems rather high compared to my normal numbers though I'm far too lazy to actually count past years' numbers. Still, they were the perfect choices for this year of stress and uncertainty and I really liked almost everything I read. Here are the highlights:

In non-fiction, I can highly recommend From Holmes to Sherlock by Mattias Boström to any Sherlock fans. I learned a lot of cool pieces of trivia and was surprised to find that I had read/watched most of the post-ACD Sherlock content that was mentioned. One day I'll admit that I'm a Sherlockian. Also, Nature Obscura by Kelly Brenner inspired the best thing to happen to me this year -- my hummingbird feeder! I now have a daily visitor (a male Anna's) who is just getting used to me and sometimes lets me stand on the other side of the window watching him eat and fight. Though Kelly's observations are all about Seattle animals and locations, her love of exploring urban wildlife habitats is infectious and will definitely get you out into your yard or local park. (Plus, tardigrades are literally everywhere.) Finally Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran was super fascinating. Again, it was probably more interesting to me since the author and I are the same age but a good immigrant story is always worthwhile. Honorable mention goes to How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi for being an essential read to change one's basic thought processes around race and racism. I think about it constantly.

My favorite rereads? The Starless Sea and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, all four of the Murderbot novellas by Martha Wells, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and all of Kate Milford's Bluecrowne/Greenglass books. Honorable mention goes to a couple of the gothic novels I revisited: Jane Eyre and Rebecca. All of these books will always be on my home library shelves.

Finally, new-to-me books that I loved (in the order read because I don't have the energy to rank them):

Truckers, Diggers, and Wings by Terry Pratchett were written for a younger audience but were such great escapes, made more exciting by the great escapes of the wee little characters.

The Philosopher's War by Tom Miller was an exciting sequel, quite different from the original but brilliantly detailed about nursing and war and the magic system of the world. I wish this series had more fans.

The Vanishing Stair and The Hand on the Wall were books two and three in a murdery boarding school trilogy by Maureen Johnson and I absolutely loved them.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami was just like his other books, so removed from any reality that I know that they always provide near-perfect entertainment. There were certainly some weird parts, as there always are, but I appreciate that they never seem gimmicky.

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty was apparently "fantastic" in my spreadsheet but I don't remember very much about it except for blood smears. That happens with me and audiobooks so I'll be sure to get a paper copy to reread later.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune wins the award for book that made my heart the happiest this year. It was just a lovely tale of love and found family and I adored it for it's simplicity and honesty. I gave a copy to my sister for Christmas and she better love it or else.

Even though I mentioned the other books in the series in my rereads list, I'm going to call out The Thief Knot by Kate Milford because my spreadsheet note on it is the absolute truth - she has written the fictional world I would most like to live in. As I've said before about her books, they are marketed as middle grade but are really complex and interesting enough for all ages.

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne by Elsa Hart is a new period mystery series with two smart young women as the protagonists and I look forward to reading about more of their adventures.

One that I didn't expect to like as much as I did was A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H.G. Parry. I got it from the library and looked at the summary and thought "why did I possibly think this would be interesting? It's just real history with magic stuck in." It turns out that real history with magic stuck in is AWESOME.

Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker (Seanan McGuire) was made of everything I love. I need a copy on my shelves but am waiting and hoping that I'll be able to get a signed copy sometime next year since she's a local author.

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix made me really annoyed that I've put off reading Garth Nix until now. I loved this one with its weaving of myths and magic and London (but sadly not much actual bookselling).

And A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik makes it onto the list simply because the negativity of the narrator was such a perfect fit to this year and my mood. She was angry and cynical and moody and I absolutely felt like I had found a friend (except she didn't want friends). It was also a humorous take on magical boarding schools that was fresh and fun.

Finally, honorable mention goes to all of the American Mystery Classics that I read this year (put out by Penzler Press). They weren't all perfect but the editor chose such a wide variety of authors and types of stories that I never knew what I was going to get and had fun with all of them! Rocket to the Morgue and A Puzzle for Fools were especially good.

So, I guess that's a wrap on this crap year. At least the books were good!

In the comments, recommend one book that you loved this year.

A Long List of Gothic Novels

We're nearing the end of Witch Week and I wrote a post that went up today, Mexican Gothic and the Classic Gothic Novel. In it, I mentioned making a list of the more than 75 gothic novels and short stories I have read over the years. They may not all be pure gothic but at least contain significant gothic elements. Here, for your curiosity and edification, is that list.

Peter Ackroyd    The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
Joan Aiken    The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

Jane Austen    Northanger Abbey

John Boyne    This House is Haunted

Octavia Butler    Fledgling

Mary Elizabeth Braddon    Lady Audley's Secret

Charlotte Brontë    Jane Eyre, Villette

Emily Brontë    Wuthering Heights

Edgar Cantero    The Supernatural Enhancements

Laura Carlin    The Wicked Cometh

Angela Carter    The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Agatha Christie    And Then There Were None

Wilkie Collins    Armadale, The Haunted Hotel, The Moonstone, The Woman in White

Michael Cox    The Meaning of Night, The Glass of Time

Charles Dickens    A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Dickens' Ghost Stories, Great Expectations, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Oliver Twist

Arthur Conan Doyle    The Hound of the Baskervilles

Daphne du Maurier    Don't Look Now, Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachel, Rebecca

Umberto Eco    The Name of the Rose

Alan Finn    Things Half in Shadow

Neil Gaiman    The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Charlotte Perkins Gilman    The Yellow Wall-Paper

Elizabeth Hand    Wylding Hall

John Harwood    The Asylum, The Ghost Writer, The Seance

Nathaniel Hawthorne    Rappaccini's Daughter

Jane Healey    The Animals at Lockwood Manor

Susan Hill    The Woman in Black

Shirley Jackson    The Haunting of Hill House, The Lottery, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Henry James    The Turn of the Screw

MR James    Short Stories

Franz Kafka    Metamorphosis

Elizabeth Kostova    The Historian

WW Jacobs    The Monkey's Paw

Sheridan Le Fanu    In A Glass Darkly, Carmilla

Harper Lee    To Kill a Mockingbird

Gaston Leroux    The Phantom of the Opera

Gregory Maguire    Lost

Erin Morgenstern    The Night Circus

Kate Morton    The Clockmaker's Daughter, The Distant Hours, The House at Riverton

Arturo Perez-Reverte    The Club Dumas

Edgar Allan Poe    The Fall of the House of Usher and more

Ann Radcliffe    The Mysteries of Udolpho

Diane Setterfield    The Thirteenth Tale

Mary Shelley    Frankenstein

Robert Louis Stephenson    The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Bram Stoker    Dracula

Horace Walpole    The Castle of Otranto

Sarah Waters    Affinity, Fingersmith, The Little Stranger

Oscar Wilde    The Picture of Dorian Gray

Cat Winters    The Uninvited

Carlos Ruiz Zafón    Labyrinth of the Spirits, Marina, The Angel's Game, The Midnight Palace, The Prince of Mist, The Prisoner of Heaven, The Shadow of the Wind, The Watcher in the Shadows

and now

Silvia Moreno-Garcia    Mexican Gothic

#RIPXV September Update

The RIP challenge has turned out to be a lifeline during this ridiculously stressful time. Escaping into old and new favorites in my favorite genre is the perfect antidote to the world right now. Here's how I did in September.

The books I finished:

Murder by an Aristocrat Mignon G. Eberhart

The Manual of Detection Jedediah Berry (reread)

Silver in the Wood Emily Tesh

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 P. Djèlí Clark

Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling Michael Boccacino (reread)

Mexican Gothic Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Infinite Blacktop Sara Gran (audiobook)

The Seance John Harwood (reread)

Finna Nino Cipri

The Crooked Hinge John Dickson Carr

My favorites of this batch were Finna, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, The Crooked Hinge, and The Seance. Although The Manual of Detection was really fun to revisit and Mexican Gothic was a great choice for my Witch Week post (which you will see in just over a month).

I've been extra stressed during the past week or so (PSATs and debates and such) so I have three books going at the moment: 

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, edited by Chris Baldick

Murder in the First-Class Carriage Kate Colquhoun (non-fiction)

Horrorstör Grady Hendrix (audiobook)

I listened to half of Horrorstör today because it is just that good! I tried to listen to Melmoth by Sarah Perry just before this but it was just too slow and after fifty pages I still didn't care about anyone in the story. I don't know if I'll put it aside for later or just be done with it.

Looking forward, I have a couple of books that I was saving specifically for October and a few audiobook holds that should come in this month. I don't know if I'll participate in Readathon just because I'm having a hard time with anything organized or social. We'll have to see!

Have you read anything for Readers Imbibing Peril yet? Anything you want to recommend?