There’s no news yet on exactly when the STARZ series will begin, but the cast of Outlander, based on the first title in Diana Gabaldon’s novels, is preparing fans with videos on how to “Speak Outlander.”

Below is Lesson One. Lesson Two and several other videos are available on the official web site, Starz.com/Originals/Outlander.

It’s appropriate that Lesson One teaches the pronunciation of Sassenach, an English person or an outsider. The lead character Claire Randall is an English World War II combat nurse who time travels back to Scotland in 1743 where she meets a handsome Scottish warrior, Jamie Fraser played by Sam Heughan, (the guy in the hoodie).

A “fan gathering” with the cast and crew, including author Diana Gabaldon, will be held in Los Angeles on Jan. 11. Fans can also find set photos on Instagram and more on the show’s Facebook page.

The publication of the 8th title in the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, (RH/Delacorte) was moved from its original December date to March 25, 2014 to tie in with the publicity for the STARZ series. [UPDATE: On her blog, Gabaldon recently announced that the date has been moved again, to June 10 — perhaps hinting that the series will begin this summer].

Librarian Nancy Pearl made one of her regular visits to NPR’s Morning Edition today to talk to Steve Inskeep about favorite books. She just returned from a “fishing trip” among her own book shelves with some of her favorite older titles.

These books are clearly old friends. After introducing one of them, Inskeep can’t help but comment on Nancy’s reaction, “I love hearing the change in your tone of voice … the excitement that comes over you just from the name.”

All four books featured on the show, plus four more they couldn’t get to, are still in print and listed on the site with excerpts, including the following first paragraph from The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian McKinty, which Inskeep loves so much that he reads it aloud:

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.

The Cold Cold Ground is the first in The Troubles Trilogy, followed by:

I Hear the Sirens in the Street, which came out in May

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, to be published March 4 (all by Prometheus/ Seventh Street Books; audios from Blackstone).

This big year for movie adaptations is ending appropriately, with several arriving over the next few days.

As USA Today notes, seven new films open on Christmas Day, plus another on Friday, taking advantage of the fact that, “Over the past decade, Christmas week has been the year’s highest-grossing stretch.”

The majority are adaptations (for trailers, see our links at the right, under “Movies & TV Based on Books — Trailers”).

Three are based on books (links are to the tie-ins):

The Wolf of Wall Street, (based memoir by Jordan Belfort; tie-ins, Random House) — The Daily Beast examines “The Real Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort’s Vulgar Memoirs,” while the NYT writes, “Investors’ Story Left Out of Wall St. ‘Wolf’ Movie. The abridged audio tie-in has a bit of Hollywood glitz; it is narrated by Bobby Cannavale.

The Invisible Woman,  (limited opening, to expand later; based on the bio of Charles Dickens’ mistress, Nelly Ternan, by Claire Tomalin ) — USA Today gives it 3.5 stars

Lone Survivor, (limited, to expand later; based on the best selling 2007 memoir by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell; tie-ins from Hachette/Little, Brown ) — USA Today writes that the movie strives to stay true to the book.

Three are adaptations of other written material:

47 Ronin, (loosely based on Japanese folklore, the tie-in, published by Macmillan/Tor is a novelization of the movie).  — Forbes, among others, does not expect this mega budget film to make back the investment.

August: Osage County (Dec. 27 based on a the the 2007 play by Tracy Letts; tie-in, Perseus/Theatre Communications Group) — the New York Times notes that play adaptations can be risky, and even more so, a dark comedy opening during what Sarah Palin has called the “jolliest season of them all.”

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty — Many liberties are taken with James Thurber’s 1939 short story in this updated version, starring and directed by Ben Stiller. There are no tie-ins, but Audible.com offers a free interview and reading of the story by Stiller. USA Today calls the movie, “well-intentioned but insipid.“

Next year is shaping up to be another strong at the movies for books. Already scheduled are adaptations of Monuments Men, Winter’s Tale, Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars, How to Train Your Dragon 2, The Giver, This is Where I Leave You, The Maze Runner, Gone Girl and Unbroken  (see our listing, with tie-ins).

The L.A. Times confirms the rumors that worried fans have followed on Twitter since late yesterday; YA author Ned Vizzini, has committed suicide. He was 32.

He is the author of It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Be More Chill, (both from Miramax) Teen Angst? Naah (Random House), and The Other Normals (HarperCollins/ Balzer + Bray). This year, he published House of Secrets (HarperCollins/ Balzer + Bray) which he co-wrote with movie director Chris Columbus; a sequel, House of Secrets: Battle of the Beasts is scheduled for release on March 25.

In a tribute on New York magazine’s blog, Vulture, Vizzini’s friend Kyle Buchanan writes, “He was one of the most enthusiastic, vibrant people I knew.”

We kind of hate ourselves for falling for “first” hype around movies; the first teaser, the first full length trailer, and now the first clip. But, here we go…

The first clip from the film adaptation of the YA dystopian novel, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, debuted on Entertainment Tonight and on Yahoo Movies yesterday.

Tris and Four KISS…

Divergent arrives in theaters on March 21.

The studio is so confident they have a hit on their hands that they’ve already scheduled the other two movies in the trilogy; Insurgent for March 20, 2015 and Allegiant for March 18, 2016 (IndieWire), breaking the recent tradition of dividing the final book in a series into two movies.

The tie-in editions will be published in February:

Divergent Movie Tie-in Edition
Veronica Roth
HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books
On Sale Date: February 11, 2014
Hardcover: 9780062289841, 0062289845
$17.99 US / $21.00 Can.

Paperback: 9780062289858, 0062289853
$9.99 US / $11.99 Can

In its final issue of the year, on newsstands now, People looks at the best of the year (the cover line promising worsts isn’t delivered, unless you count the Kardashian family, picked as one of most intriguing because their “merry-go-round finally spun out of control” this year or the celebrity Feuds of The Year).

Books appear throughout the issue, beginning with the cover that features an actress who has appeared in several movies based on books, one of which, American Hustle comes in at #3 on the list of ten best movies of the year. At number one is the book adaptation 12 Years A Slave, with Saving Mr. Banks at #7 and Philomena, #9.

Several best TV shows are also based on books –#3 Masters of Sex, #6 Hannibal, #7 Behind the Canelabra, and #8 Orange is the New Black.

Finally, there’s the list of the Top Ten Books themselves which includes several titles that have already been declared best by many other publications, as well as one that has not, the bio of Johnny Carson at #6. UPDATE: No sooner did we say that then the NYT‘s Janet Maslin declared the Carson bio one of her favorites of the year.

People‘s Top Ten Books

1) Tenth of December,  George Saunders, (Random House)

2) The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt, Hachette/Little, Brown

3) Going Clear: Scientology, Celebrity, and the Prison of Belief, (RH/Knopf)

4) The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer, (Penguin/Riverhead)

5) The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri, (RH/Knopf)

6) Johnny Carson, Henry Bushkin, HMH

7) The Husband’s Secret, Liane Moriarty, (Penguin/Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam)

8) Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala, RH/Knopf

9) Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, (S&S)

10) The Engagements, J. Courtney Sullivan, (RH/Knopf)

The first images have been released  for the adaptation of Tom Rob Smith’s best selling Soviet era thriller,  Child 44, (Hachette/Grand Central). Starring Tom Hardy, as a demoted secret police agent battling both his superiors and his unhappy wife, played by Noomi Rapace, while trying to track down a serial killer who targets children, it costars Gary Oldman and Vincent Cassel, and is directed by Daniel Espinosa (Safe House).

Before the heavily promoted debut was published in 2008, Ridley Scott bought the film rights to this first book in a trilogy that continued with The Secret Speech (2009) and  Agent 6 (2012).

No release date has been announced, but the film is expected some time in 2014.

Smith is publishing a new book in June, The Farm, a contemporary psychological thriller.

On NPR this morning, AudioFile founder and editor Robin Whitten selected several audiobooks from the magazine’s picks of the best of the year to showcase  ways in which producers are “expanding the envelope …with multiple narrators, sound effects and sound design, as well as a single voice just telling you a great story.” Not only books, but comics have made their way to audio (Graphic Audio has released dozens, including AudioFile Best, Marvel’s Civil War)

AudioFie’s “BEST Audiobooks and Best Voices” is available this year in a nifty new format, complete with audio samples.

With the tag line “One Sick Love Story,” the first poster for the adaptation of John Green’s YA novel The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin/Dutton YR), has just been released, featuring Shailene Woodley as Hazel, wearing an oxygen tube (click on the image to see more details), and Ansel Elgort as Gus. The movie opens June 6, 2014.

UPDATE: John Green responds to some negative comments on the poster’s tag line on his Tumblr site, saying that, although the tagline is not his decision, ” I like the tag line. I found it dark and angry in the same way that Hazel is (at least at times) dark and angry in her humor. I mostly wanted something that said, ‘This is hopefully not going to be a gauzy, sentimental love story that romanticizes illness and further spreads the lie that the only reason sick people exist is so that healthy people can learn lessons.’ But that’s not a very good tag line. I like the tag line because it says, literally, the sick can also have love stories. Love and joy and romance are not just things reserved for the well.”

The poster is currently being offered as a perk to those who donate to the Indiegogo campaign for awesomeness.

Before the release of TFIOS, Woodley and Elgort will be seen playing brother and sister in the adaptation of another YA novel, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, (HarperCollins/Tegen), scheduled for release on March 21. Ads for it are set to debut on Facebook tomorrow (trailers were released earlier) in a test of the site’s new auto-play ad feature.

The Swedish publisher of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, Norstedts Förlag (covers of the original and U.S. editions of the first title in the series, above), has announced that they have hired Swedish journalist and author David Lagercrantz to write a fourth book, scheduled to be published in August, 2015.

The publisher added that it has nothing to do with the manuscript that Larsson left unfinished when he died in 2004 (the series was originally planned as ten books and there is still a legal dispute over ownership of the rights to the unfinished manuscript).

In a press release, Norstedts explains why they chose Lagercrantz for the task, “His ability to find the right tone and voice, his great experience and his manner of engaging readers of all ages – most recent in the form of the global success that is I am Zlatan [which he ghost wrote for the soccer player Zlatan Ibrahimovic]  – makes him the right choice. David Lagercrantz is not just a skilled novelist, he has also, through his work searched for different characters and complex geniuses. He is also used to working in editorial environments”

U.K. rights were acquired by British publisher, Quercus, which launched in the U.S. this fall (see their web site here) with a list that includes a book of articles by Larsson, translated into English, The Expo Files. Larsson, like his main character, was a crusading journalist. No news yet on whether Quercus, or the U.S. publisher of the previous titles in the Millennium series, Knopf, will publish the new title here.

A very early work by Larsson, a story he wrote when he was just 17, will make its first appearance in English in an anthology of works by several Swedish crime writers, A Darker Shade of Sweden, coming in February 2014 from Grove/Mysterious Press.

The author of 155 popular romance novels (50 of them set in each one of the states) and a fixture on best seller lists, Janet Dailey, died suddenly over the weekend after complications from heart surgery. She was 69.

Her latest title, Merry Christmas, Cowboy, (Kensington), was published in September.

Newspaper coverage:

In a year-end video, HBO wraps up 2013 and offers brief (warning: VERY brief) glimpses of the upcoming year, including several shows based on books or with book connections:

The Leftovers —  based on the novel by Tom Perotta, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; tie-in scheduled for 5/6/14)

Olive Kitteridge —  based on the novel by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

The Normal Heart — adapted from the play by Larry Kramer, (Grove Press)

Billy Crystal: 700 Sundays — Crystal’s one-man show, (Hachette/Grand Central), to be taped before a live audience

The video also includes glimpses of continuations of other series based on books — Game of Thrones (spring release), Boardwalk Empire (begins Sept. 8) and True Blood (final season; summer release).

Q: What’s the link between Fifty Shades of Grey and the life of P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins?

A: Both have been adapted as movies (the latter titled Saving Mr. Banks), with scripts by Kelly Marcel.

Marcel, who was handpicked by E.L. James to adapt Fifty Shades of Grey, speaks to Vanity Fair about her process for each movie. One involved reading a bio of her subject, Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers by Valerie Lawson (S&S). The other, watching “lots of porn.”

Saving Mr. Banks opened in a limited run last week and will expand to more theater this Friday. Fifty Shades of Grey, currently filming in Vancouver, is scheduled for release on Feb. 13, 2015.

The number one title on the January LibraryReads list of ten library staff favorites for the month, released on Friday, features Alan Bradley’s almost-12-year-old detective, Flavia de Luce in her sixth adventure, The Dead In Their Vaulted Arches, (RH/Delacorte; RH Audio; BOT; Thorndike). Describing it, Nancy Russell of Ohio’s Columbus Metropolitan Library, says, “You’ll enjoy seeing new depths in Flavia – this novel takes the series in an exciting direction.”

Earlier this year, author Bradley talked about how pleased he is that director-producer Sam Mendes bought the film rights to the series for a 10-episode television series. The new title completes the original story arc, but with the TV series a possibility, Bradley is planning at least four more Flavia novels.

Other books on the list bring to light little-known aspects of the two world wars. In The Wind Is Not a River, (Harper/Ecco), author Brian Payton sets his WWII novel against the Japanese invasion of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. A Star for Mrs. Blake is set after WW I, when  Gold Star mothers were offered funds by the U.S. government to visit their sons’ graves in France. The novel imagines the journey of five of them, including one feisty small-town librarian.

The list also includes a novel from indie Brooklyn publisher Melville House (their blog is one of the most entertaining and outspoken in publishing) with an attention-getting title, A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor.

Describing it, Jane Jorgenson, of Wisconsin’s Madison Public Library says, “Leonard works for Neetsa Pizza, a Pythagorean pizza chain, in the near-ish future. His job is to take calls, listen to complaints and help his customers achieve maximum pizza happiness. His employee manual gives him an answer for every scenario–until he gets a call from Marco, who seems to be calling from another time or space. Think of Terry Pratchett crossed with Douglas Adams.”

Many of the ten titles are available as eGalleys, so you can read them now and be ready to recommend them when they are published. Our downloadable spreadsheet, LibraryReads, Jan. includes information on eGalley availability, as well as alternate formats.

Remember to nominate your favorite forthcoming titles for LibraryReads!

To learn more, come to the LibraryReads program at Midwinter:

LibraryReads: Collaborative Discovery for
Librarians & Patrons
Saturday, Jan. 25, 11:30 – 12:30    PCC 114 Lecture Hall [PLEASE NOTE change in time and location]

Find out how to share the books you love with readers across the country and enhance your professional profile by participating in LibraryReads, the monthly, nationwide library staff picks list.

Librarians tweeted their favorite ten titles of the year in a countdown ending Dec. 10th.

We now have a ranked list of all the titles and it proves how eclectic and wide ranging librarian’s tastes are. With over 950 votes, only two titles received more than 25 and both are by the same author, Rainbow Rowell for Eleanor & Park and Fangirl (each from Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin; Listening Library; Thorndike).

As we noted earlier,  Eleanor & Park was also picked as one of the year’s best books by all the library sources (Kirkus, Horn Book, SLJ and PW) as well as several consumer sources (Amazon Editors Top 20, NPR Staff Picks and NYT Book Review Notable Children’s Books). Fangirl was the #1 LibraryReads pick for the inaugural, September list and was also picked by SLJ,  NYT Book Review as a Notable Children’s Books and by Amazon Editors for the best kids list.

One novel that ranked high with librarians, but has not shown up on other best lists is John Scalzi’s SF title, The Human Division (Macmillan/Tor; Brilliance Audio).

Librarians expressed their enjoyment, saying:

“… excellent space opera”

“Absolutely awesome SF. May be next year’s Hugo winner”

“… love his humor”

“The B team tries to save humanity!”

The real fun of the list is scrolling through to see the variety; Libfaves13. All Titles, Ranked. It’s great inspiration for readers advisors.

Thanks to Robin Beerbower, Stephanie Chase and Linda Johns for organizing #libfaves, now in its third year.