Sir Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel about Indian independence, Midnight’s Children, is to be made into a movie by the prominent director Deepa Mehta.

The author says that he is willing to work with Ms Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian, to co-write the script. Work is expected to begin next year with hopes that the film will be released in 2010.

I can’t really see how they’ll manage to make this into a movie and to get it to work. The upside to this is that Rushdie is willing to work with Deepa Mehta on the script. I haven’t seen any of the previous movies Mehta has done so there’s a lot of room to hope for a good movie.

BBC News article: Midnight’s Children to be a film

So back to the matter at hand.  According to Engadget, Oprah has given her thumbs up (”my new favourite thing!”) to the Kindle, and offered viewers on her show a $50 off Kindle’s $359 when you checkout at Amazon using the code OPRAHWINFREY.  This offer stands until Nov 1.

Already there are lots of readers who avoid books chosen by Oprah’s Book Club like the plague (although I don’t fully understand why, despite having touched on it in one of our earlier episodes), and there are also those who would put a couple of bullets through ebooks the first chance they get (but of course they can’t do that, as ebooks are comprised of digital bits that… oh never mind).  The amalgamation of Oprah and the Kindle will surely kill some people.

As of early Thurs morning, I had 5 Bookbabble episodes already recorded, but sitting on my hard drive waiting for the attention that I couldn’t give due to some really hectic real-world adventures.  However, the guys were still gracious enough to keep the episodes coming, despite the lack of push on my part.  Thurs itself we recorded our sixth unpublished episode, and this time, the content is very time sensitive - we were babbling about the US Presidential Candidates, and for any of it to make sense, it had to be out on time.

So I’ve decided to release this episode out first, because we will sound like idiots if this comes out after Nov 4.  I’ve also decided to keep the numbering intact for this, as an added incentive for myself to fill in the gaps as soon as I can, so this show doesn’t look broken for too long.

Already the idle rambling we had on the Nobel Prize is 2 days old.

Speaking of time-sensitivity, a couple of episodes back Gem spoke about the Large Hadron Collider ending all of humanity, but since then the bloody thing was started up, throttled along for a couple of days, interrupted after being hacked, and finally shut down for repair work.  We’re still here (presumably), so when you get to that episode, try not to laugh too hard.

Hang on to your hats - the other episodes should be coming along shortly!

We’re unbiased.  Really.

Show Length: 65:25 mins

Links:

• McCain’s Reading List in Amazon
• Obama’s Reading List in Amazon
• Michael Palin ‘better running mate’ than Sarah Palin
• Matt Damon Rips Sarah Palin
• The Onion News Network: Portrayal Of Obama As Elitist Hailed As Step Forward For African Americans

The major departure of the Nobel Prize for Literature from other major awards is the fact that it is not bestowed upon a particular novel, but is a recognition of an author’s entire body of work.  If nothing else, it presents an excellent avenue for readers to seek out a whole new world (if this author was previously unknown to him/her, that is).

His first novel has the unfortunate name of “Le Proces-Verbal” (Minutes of a Meeting), which is very unappealing to me seeing that I’ve had to write plenty of those at work, most of them under duress, so I’m not sure I’ll be picking Monsieur Le Clezio.

Oh, and in our show today, we were talking about the prize, and it looks like Bjorn’s preferred winner will have to wait for another year.

Anyone read Le Clezio?

So anyway, I was suitably impressed with the book, and wanted to share the love.  I found that Gaiman’s readings of the book (he’s currently on the Graveyard Book Tour, you see) is up at Vimeo.  You may want to pay him a visit there.

Better yet, check out his scheduled appearances here, and see if you can catch him live (you lucky buggers you).

p.s. The episodes are coming.  Really.

Those of you who would like to sample Kelly Link can now do so for free as her collection of short stories is now released as a Creative Commons licensed download.  Yes, you can download her work for free.  Go here and get it.

Thanks to Boingboing for the heads-up!

Show Length: 52:21 mins

Download audio file (bookbabbletheshow-124586-09-02-2008_pshow_264892.mp3)

Download the show here.

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