Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: Film versions of 5 bestselling books are 2012 Oscar nominees

Five of the books on the Publishers' Weekly bestseller list have film versions that have been nominated for the 2012 Academy Awards. Winners will be announced tomorrow (Sunday, February 26). The nominees (in no particular order) are:

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - British agent George Smiley ferrets out a mole in the Secret Service and begins his epic game of international chess with his Soviet counterpart, an agent named Karla.
Moneyball - Tells how the Oakland Athletics general manager, Billy Beane, tried to use statistics to find better players without resorting to the larger budgets big-market teams were able to employ.
The Help - Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, raising her seventeenth white child. She eventually writes a tell-all book about what it's really like to work as a black maid in the white homes of the South with a grown white child she has raised and another black maid.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind.

Check out the bestselling books that inspired these Oscar-nominated films at your Community Library!

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

Film versions of 5 bestselling books are 2012 Oscar nominees

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