So glad there's to be a film of this - maybe now Brian Morton will find a UK publisher. I bought The Dylanist in New York in 2000: I hadn't heard of the author but the title attracted me - and Bob does have a peripheral part. But I remember it dealt touchingly with loss, and I'd recently lost my mother. A wonderful novel, as is Morning.

I am tempted to say that all books are essentially unfilmable because they are a different medium. But we know that most books translate well to film. And we know that while the film can capture the essential gestures of a book and even the heart of it, there is so much more in a book because of the time differential. A book can take 20 or 40 or more hours to read and a film is only 2. This equation is off a bit because I'm a very slow reader. I would say that if you really love a film, you should read the book for more details and to immerse yourself in that world a little longer. As for really untranslatable, I think we saw that The DaVinci Code really didn't make it to film. I'm not eager to fault anyone who made the film. It was a very visual book and the film did justice to much of the visuals, but that book really couldn't be truncated like that. The Golden Compass, like the Harry Potter movies, was terrific to watch if you had read the book, but if you hadn't then it was pretty watered down and I wonder if the nonreaders really got what was going on half the time. I daresay that some day some ambitious producer is going to make a movie of Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game. I would say that this book will lose just about everything when it goes into film mode. And, hey, what about all the books where the language itself is so luxuriously gorgeous? That never translates into film since film is an audio-visual medium! Amy (find me at wozabooks)