Garrison Keillor’s sleepy-voiced radio monologues from the A Prairie Home Companion radio show might be the only way you know the native Minnesotan, but he’s also an author of more than 17 books. He’s published numerous short stories and poems since being published in the New Yorker in 1970, he hosts A Writer’s Almanac daily on NPR stations around the country, and posts regularly to his blog on the Prairie Home website. He’s also a daily columnist at Salon.com, which makes you wonder how he finds time for the rest of his life.

But despite all the books he’s written, Keillor hasn’t had anything made into a movie. Robert Altman directed a fictional feature film version of A Prairie Home Companion, but to a Keillor fan it came off as more of a parody of the radio show than anything else. So where are the movies? Here’s a guide to the five Keillor books I’d really like to see on the big screen.

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I was reading Diablo Cody’s recent article in Entertainment Weekly about her love for Judy Blume, and started wondering why there haven’t been any movies made from anything she’s written. Earlier this summer my friend Jen Jones published a biography of Judy Blume, and when I rang her up about any Judy Blume films, she confirmed my fears: she’d been relegated to the world of made-for-TV movies and development hell.

Blume signed a multi-picture contract with Disney way back in March of 2004 (The New York Times talks about why it took so long), and since then we’ve neither seen nor heard a glimmer about the Deenie movie that was supposedly in development, nor anything about her other books. So in an effort to prime the pump, we’re going to present our top five dream casts for five of our favorite Judy Blume books. Check them out after the break.

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Every week Kevin Kelly will look at different writers whose books should be turned into films, films that were much better as books, or books that should never be turned into films upon pain of death. We’ll also talk about book to movie trends and deals if anything interesting happens.

My first introduction to Stephenson came back in the mid 90s when I was working at a bookstore in Austin, Texas. I’d read everything William Gibson had written, and was hungry for more when a coworker suggested Snow Crash. It’s a very Gibson-esque book that is probably one of Stephenson’s most cinematic works, meaning that it would probably require the smallest amount of effort to take it from the page to the screen in terms of putting a screenplay together.

Snow Crash is about a sword-wielding, pizza-delivering hacker who is trying to stop the spread of a computer virus that only affects computer programmers, along with the help of a young female courier who travels around on a high-tech skateboard using a magnetic harpoon to slalom through traffic. Sounds like a movie, right? Hollywood thought so too, since it was optioned by Touchstone Pictures and several drafts were written before it was abandoned due to budget concerns.

Neal Stephenson has been writing books since 1984, on subjects spanning the ecology, cyberpunk, steampunk, cryptography, artificial intelligence, information trafficking, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. However, none of his works has yet been turned into a movie. If you take a glance at Cryptonomicon or any of the three books in The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, or The System of the World, you’ll see why: these are massive tomes that average about about 800 pages in length, and those four titles could take up an entire shelf on their own. Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U are all “normal” sized books, so why haven’t they been smacked onto celluloid?

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Lists are indispensable. Lists are how we keep track of things and define who we are. A list of my favorite books, a list of places I’ve lived, a list of friends I have or no longer have. Lists are the bones my life’s story is built on. In lists I can also find out what I share in common with somebody else. We believe in making lots of lists.