Sunday Salon: Semantics, Pulp Fiction, and Remakes

I am finally feeling back to normal now that the family has traveled back to their respective homes and school's evened out as we start week 3. My reading and blogging is getting back to normal as well. Thank the book gods.

This past week I've read Dust by Joan Francis Turner, a zombie book which didn't quite do it for me. My full review will be up Tuesday when the book releases. Dust was my BUYA (pronounced boo-yah), meaning it was my Break Using Young Adult. After, I grabbed up Mary Roach's Packing for Mars, and while I am completely loving her snarky intellectual wit, I do need a break from it every now and then. Plus the third volume of Fables, Storybook Love, was just calling to me from the shelf, so I had no choice but to read it.  Still not wanting to jump back into space with Mary, I read Suzanne Collins' Gregor the Overlander, the first book in one of my favorite YYA (young young adult)/middle grade fiction series. My fingers were itching to pick up book 2, but I thought "Geez Trish, get back to Mary." So I went over to pick it up, and then I saw volume 4 of Fables and my good intentions went out the window. It's back to Mary today though, and I'm really going to try to stay focused on read the rest of Packing for Mars.

Why am I telling you all this you might ask? Well, it got me thinking about how I read books. I'm always in shock that people will read multiple books simultaneously, and I always claim that I'm a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader. I still maintain that I am despite what may seem like damning evidence above. Let me explain:

When I envision someone reading multiple books, I see them bouncing back and forth, reading twenty pages of Book A one day, thirty pages of Book B the next morning, floating back to Book A that night, and so on. I do not do this. I do, however, stop reading one book and read one whole book before going back to the first. For me, this does not qualify as reading more than one book at a time. Semantics right?

My question for you today is: Do you guys 1) read one and only one book; 2) read many books simultaneously; or 3) read one book in the middle of reading another?
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I put up a Top Covers post yesterday focused on pulp fiction covers. The top two:

I have little postcardish versions of both of these in my office at the college. They are just so wonderfully strange. The more I looked at the post though, the more I thought I should elaborate a bit. Some points I want everyone to know as they peruse my pulp fiction covers:

• I do not believe Satan was a Lesbian. I like these covers for their ridiculousness, not any sort of sympathetic feeling.
• I have never read these books, and probably never will as I'm sure they are horribly sexist and full of frustrating gender and sexual cliches.
• I do not prefer girls; although I sometimes wish I did.

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Enough of the me-me-me. Greg over at The New Dork Review of Books put up a wonderful post about remakes that I think you should all check out. After reading Dracula, My Love by Syrie James, I really got to thinking about retellings and how much I like them (this is of course based on the very very few retellings I've actually read). I had not considered the relationship to film remakes, however, something I generally despise. I wondered why remaking a movie would tick me off in a way book retellings do not, but then I realized. When they revisit a book, it is typically manipulated heavily. The story is told from an entirely new perspective, they change the setting/time period, etc. They intervene within the text dramatically, and in essence create something new. In film, however, they tend to just remake the original with very little creative changes. I am, of course, making generalizations here. But what do you guys think about book v. film remakes?

Okay, now I'll stop jabbering and go head off to space with Mary.