Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Recommending Favorite Books to Favorite TV Characters

Here's a fun little game I like to play sometimes: which of my favorite books would I recommend to my favorite fictional characters? In this iteration, I'm imagining what I would suggest to some of my favorite TV characters, should I ever fall through my TV screen and have the opportunity to inflict my bookish opinions on them.

Father Brown (Father Brown): The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
Father Brown can't leave a mystery alone and is deeply invested in both his faith and in doing what is right in order to help people. The Sparrow, in the way it weaves together questions about faith and humanity with the mystery of what happened on a Jesuit-run first contact mission to another planet, should be irresistible to him. 

John Crichton (Farscape): The Princess Bride, William Goldman
Crichton comes slowly unhinged over the course of Farscape, but never (permanently) descends fully into madness. He learns to embrace the absurdity of his situations, often with good humor, and thus he should feel right at home with the tongue-in-cheek, postmodern adventure story of The Princess Bride. 

Phryne Fisher  (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries): Ms. Marvel, G. Willow Wilson
Phryne has no time for your prejudice, whatever its form, and she hasn't met a sticky situation she wouldn't jump into headfirst. I think she would follow the adventures of Kamala Khan and her transformation into Ms. Marvel with delight.

Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Poirot): Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
Frayn's play about Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, quantum mechanics, and war is so delightfully thinky without ever losing sight of the human cost of all the questions it brings up that I think Poirot would find himself and his little grey cells, perhaps surprisingly, enraptured by it.

Oliver Queen (Arrow): The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
So many of the big things LotR is *about* seem like they would resonate pretty strongly with Oliver and maybe, maaaaybe help him hold on to the slivers of hope he sometimes manages to find. The concept of "the long defeat," Gandalf's counsel against despair, and the Scouring of the Shire all seem like bits that would be heartbreakingly relevant to Oliver Queen.

Who are your favorite TV characters, and what would you tell them to read?

4 comments:

  1. I think The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up would serve Mr. Monk's soul. But I'm not smart enough to recommend a book to Geordi OR Captain Picard!

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    1. Ooo, Geordi and Picard *would* be hard to rec to.

      Thanks for reading!

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  2. Ooh, I like the background on your blog.I know the characters but not the novels. Interesting concept.

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