Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! Every Friday they have a different topic for participants to write about and discuss, e.g. like this post.

This week’s theme is about casting in (movie?) adaptations of books:

Casting in book-to-film adaptations is always a big topic, and recently, the Wuthering Heights movie starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi has been the source of a lot of controversy. Other 2026 high-profile adaptations include Project Hail Mary, out March 20th, and the new Hunger Games movie, set to release in the fall, both for which the casting has been received more positively. What is most important to you with casting for book-to-film adaptations? Is the perfect hair color, or right height or eyes always a must, or is personality more important? When are book-accurate looks in casting most important? What are your favorite—and least favorite—book-to-film adaptations when it comes to casting?

I must admit I don’t have a lot of skin in the game (again) because I don’t really watch movies very often — nor TV, to be fair. I have surprisingly seen Knives Out and Glass Onion, because I got curious enough about the classic mystery type setups they had going on, but otherwise I’m hard pressed to name anything particularly recent that I’ve seen. I still name Pacific Rim as a recent-ish movie I’ve seen and, uh, well…

It also doesn’t help that I don’t have a visual imagination at all: I’m completely aphantasic, right on the “5” end of the apple test scale, so I don’t really imagine characters in the way described. Instead I get more of a sense of them: you know how birdwatchers get the “jizz” of a bird? Something like that, I think.

I do love the old BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, so let’s turn to those for an idea of what I think about casting. The main players here are Ian Carmichael (in the black-and-white era) and Edward Petherbridge (in 1987) — I don’t know of any other adaptations, and I don’t know if I want to, because between them Carmichael and Petherbridge set a pretty high bar. Neither of them is quite the right physical type, but they each manage to capture different aspects of Peter’s manner perfectly. I can see Peter right away when I look at Petherbridge, but for Carmichael it takes seeing him in motion and hearing his voice.

The same is pretty much true of the way they speak, to be fair, but reversed: Carmichael needs only speak and immediately he sounds like Peter, while for Petherbridge it’s more the combination… But really, both of them are wonderful Lord Peters, and I delight in their performances.

Ian Carmichael also voices Lord Peter in the BBC radio adaptations, and they’re really good. The BBC often hits it out of the park on radio adaptations, or they did a few decades ago: The Lord of the Rings had a glorious adaptation, and even Andy Serkis (who did a great job as Gollum) can’t quite dislodge my conviction that the radio adaptation’s Gollum is the Gollum. On the other hand, the radio adaptation voice of Aragorn strikes me as wrong every time, though I do get into it as the adaptation rolls along. When it comes to the movie, by contrast, Viggo Mortensen was instantly Aragorn to me: manner, voice, clothes, the way he held himself… Perfect.

(That said, I was disappointed by the movie version of Faramir and never really reconciled with that portrayal, particularly with the changes made to the character for the sake of screen adaptation. Something too “soft” about him, and no, I can’t explain that statement any further.)

There are also times when I’m very sceptical of casting, like casting David Tennant as Crowley and Michael Sheen as Aziraphale in the Good Omens series, but makeup, costuming and pure skill from the actors make it fit like they were perfect all along. I’ve heard the same about the adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, where Alexander Skarsgård has been able to win over people who were deeply sceptical; I’m definitely curious what I’ll think when I get round to it, if I ever do.

(NB: I’m aware of the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Good Omens was also Terry Pratchett’s — some say the majority of it was Terry Pratchett’s — and I think the TV show was also so much more than Gaiman, though I acknowledge his heavy involvement. I’m not sure if I’ll watch the remainder or rewatch the first two series, and at the moment I don’t expect to. All the same, David Tennant’s Crowley was perfect to me, and I don’t want Gaiman’s misdeeds to take that achievement away from Tennant. Still, I think making this acknowledgement is important.)

All in all, I think I can forgive a lot of infidelity to details like hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, etc, as long as the actors can capture something fundamental about the character. Some can do both, like Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn or Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher, while some can carry the day with voice and mannerisms like Ian Carmichael as Peter Wimsey.

Sorry, though, David Wenham. You just aren’t Faramir. I’m sure you’re perfectly nice, but you’re not Faramir.

It’s Monday, so time for more of the Fantasy With Friends discussion meme (hosted at Pages Unbound). This week’s discussion theme iiiis:

“The Chosen One” is an often-mocked trope in fantasy literature. Do you frequently run across this trope in the books you read, or has it been a while since you encountered it? Do you dislike it, or do you think it can be done well? Are there any interesting twists on the Chosen One you’ve seen?

I think the “Chosen One” trope can be a lot of fun whether it’s played straight, subverted, or dissected. I’m actually having trouble thinking up examples right now where it’s played straight, because that was more common in a different era of my reading, and it also depends on how literal you want to be. To hark back to Tolkien, since we were talking about it last week, was Frodo chosen, as Gandalf suggests? Or did he just put his hand up and take it on because he was a good person? Is it kinda both? I know a lot of people read it as Frodo being Chosen, but does that mean he doesn’t have a choice…?

Playing it straight but digging into what it might mean to be Chosen, Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children books try to examine the impact on the the type of Chosen Ones who travel to another world (like the Pevensie kids in the Narnia books, and other portal fantasies), and what happens once their part in the stories is done. What happens if they stop fitting the role, or falter, or slip out of their world?

In more recent reading, I liked the way that Caitlin Rozakis’ The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association handled it. There’s a prophecy, there’s a constant stream of large and small disasters, and the protagonist’s kid is being whispered about as a bringer of calamity (while others are being positioned as potentially Chosen Ones to act in opposition to her). But (spoilers ahead) the prophecy isn’t like that at all, the kids are all just kids, and someone’s benefiting from pretending things might be otherwise.

Another way to play with the Chosen One trope is the accidentally Chosen One. I’m thinking of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, where the magical kingdom of Romany use magic to snatch a girl from modern Japan. She’s their Chosen One, but they inadvertently bring along Seiichirou Kondou as well because he sees her being dragged into a magical portal and begging for help, and goes to rescue her. In the end, he’s as instrumental as she is to solving the problem they needed a Chosen One for, if not more — and he makes sure they will never need to do so again, fixes the kingdom’s finances, and pushes along massive technological advances.

Along the way, Seiichirou also warns the girl who is the Chosen One not to blindly help the kingdom without examining what they’re asking of her, which… she doesn’t take well, but is actually a good point. What if you’re chosen for something awful? I think “the Chosen One doesn’t want to be a Chosen One” (for whatever reason) is probably a bit overplayed itself by now in simple forms, but I can think of a bunch of fun ways to play with it still…

On another tangent, I love that in Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, Huiwon gets sponsored by a righteous “constellation”, and gets a skill called “Time of Judgement”, which allows her to fight and destroy evildoers. It’s not quite the same as the Chosen One trope, but she’s chosen by the constellation and essentially becomes his incarnation, so it’s close. The problem is, “Time of Judgement” will only activate when approved by her sponsor and constellations aligned with him, and Huiwon’s definition of evil and evildoers is different from theirs. Early in the story, she frequently tries to call on “Time of Judgement” and is declined, even when she sees things she feels are deeply wrong. So what if you’re a Chosen One, but your intentions don’t fully align with those of whoever is doing the choosing?

So… I think there are reasons to mock or avoid the trope, because it can be really overused and under-examined. For me, though, there are so many ways to put a fun spin on it, or dig into what it might actually mean for the characters, and otherwise do surprising and interesting things with it. I won’t say I’d never read stuff with a Chosen One trope, but I do prefer it when people are consciously playing with it and teasing out the implications!

After the Top Ten Tuesday prompt about interesting typography this week (check out my post if you’re curious), I saw a few people commenting that they don’t even look at book covers, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, “book covers don’t matter”, etc. And there’s a sense in which this is true — I’ve read some books with truly awful covers, really plain covers, etc. I’m not a visual person, so I don’t find covers particularly memorable, in general. I often describe them simply, just by the title and name of the author, because once a book is in my hands I don’t think an awful lot about it.

However, I think it’s a bit rash to dismiss book covers entirely! They’re serving an important purpose: they help the right people find the book, in a number of different ways, starting as simply as “by having the author’s name and title on the cover”.

(I’m going to discuss some examples below: unfortunately they’re all pretty visual, because cover design is — but I’ve made an effort to add more descriptive alt text than I usually use, since the purpose of these cover images is to illustrate a point.)

Consider the British Library Crime Classics books: they’ve got a cohesive design principle, all based on old travel posters, so you know immediately when seeing one on a shelf what it is. You’re gonna get a classic British mystery, with traditional crime/mystery elements, with a helpful introduction (usually by the series editor, Martin Edwards), which contextualises the story a bit in terms of who the author was, any other pen-names they used (particularly useful with writers like E.C.R. Lorac/Carol Carnac, Miles Burton/John Rhodes/Cecil Street, Francis Iles/Anthony Berkeley, etc), etc.

They’re so iconic that they even get copied by others in the genre. Some of those I’ve seen have just been modern pastiches of the Golden Age style, which I admittedly find a bit annoying because it’s misleading, while others are classic authors who haven’t been picked up (yet?) by the British Library Crime Classic series for one reason or another.

I enjoyed The Ha-Ha Case, as I recall, in much the same way as I enjoy most of the British Library Crime Classics: it’s a classic mystery with classic elements. It’s quite right to try to use the same signals to readers, at least in terms of picking the right audience, since J.J. Connington is a classic writer whose work would fit beautifully into the British Crime Classics series. Whether you love them for their own sake, because you’re interested in that period of the genre in general, or both (as in my case), the cover steers you pretty fairly here.

Another example where the covers are doing a lot to draw in the right readers would be danmei. Seven Seas (the publisher of a lot of translated danmei) use very similar design principles to help draw in readers, and I think I could recognise their cover designs at a hundred paces.

These covers are telling you really important things about settings, the central relationships (romances between men), that the books are in a series… and they also help to enforce the really strong rules danmei often seems to have about how the characters should be imagined. You know immediately how Shen Qingqiu “should” look according to the author’s imagination. You’ll find his character design varies astonishingly little across different translations (though Binghe varies a bit more, e.g. not always having the curly hair, his outfits are consistent).

The same is true of so many genres: you don’t need to guess for long to know the genres of the covers below:

Respectively: romance, fantasy, non-fiction, sci-fi.

When something starts melding genres, covers can be a really big part of communicating that too. Here’s a series that I really loved, which melds a classic private eye kinda story with fantasy:

If you can, look how clever those are! Given the Raymond Chandler references, I’d bet there are covers of Raymond Chandler’s books that look just like this. But the images make it clear that there’s more going on too — I think these are such clever designs.

For another example, sometimes covers can be helpful to tell you what to expect for an author who writes several different genres. Compare these T. Kingfisher covers, some for fantasy novels, others for horror.

Did you have trouble telling which was which? Sure, the titles give a bit of a hint too, but sighted people are probably able to tell even before they look at the words.

Even covers with lower budgets, or which miss the mark in certain ways can give you a lot of info about what you’re getting into. I don’t love the covers below, but they still give you important info:

You can see the heroes of the Jordan L. Hawk series, and see that it is a series through the cohesive cover design. You can get the fantasy/horror vibes and an idea of the main pairing dynamic. From the Cat Sebastian covers, you can instantly tell it’s a romance and an idea at the pairings therein — though this is a little misleading in the case of Unmasked by the Marquess, one of the more unfortunate covers of Sebastian’s books. All the same, even with its flaws, it’s giving you important signals.

I didn’t even dig particularly deep for the examples here, or dig into the complex design principles behind many covers — this was an off-the-cuff quick post! The point is: covers are actually important, and cover artists can do an enormous amount for a book. Even on ebook stores, the cover is usually displayed, same on social sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph: unless you literally can’t see the covers (which of course is true of some!), there’s some degree of influence, even if it’s “oh, that has a self-published look” or “that’s a fantasy book”, etc — even when you may not be fully aware of it.

So in short, I think we should celebrate cover artists and designers, don’t discount their work! Sometimes the books don’t match up to the covers, and sometimes covers do the book a disservice — this will always be true. But covers have a valuable job to do, and books can find the right people through them.