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!

Thrilling Series Starter: The Boy in the Suitcase

In this first installment of a newly-translated series of Danish thrillers, Red Cross nurse Nina Borg retrieves a suitcase from the Copenhagen train station, discovering to her shock that its contents is a drugged three-year-old boy.  Too scared to go to the police, Nina risks her life to protect the child in this high-adrenaline novel, which is on Goodreads' featured November "Movers and Shakers" list.   Fans of other Scandinavian crime writers such as Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Jo Nesbo (The Snowman), and Lars Kepler (The Hypnotist) will especially enjoy this latest series to cross the Atlantic.  Reserve Lene Kaaberbøl's The Boy in the Suitcase from your Community Library by clicking the link and entering your barcode information.

Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Stieg Larsson's worldwide bestselling Millennium trilogy has touched off a firestorm of interest in Scandinavian crime fiction. As of this writing, Larsson's now 4-year-old book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo still has enough interested readers in the Mastics/Shirley area to keep eight out of the Community Library's ten copies in circulation. Thanks in large part to Larsson, American readers now have a wide selection of translated works by other Nordic crime writers to choose from, such as Henning Mankell (also from Larsson's homeland of Sweden), Jo Nesbo (Norway), Karin Fossum (Norway), and Jussi Adler-Olsen (Denmark). If you enjoy Stieg Larsson, you might want to give these other Scandinavian noir writers a try.