The Oscars: Birdman Leads Bookish Gold Rush

As outlined in the February 23, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness, five of the eight best picture nominees at the 2015 Academy Awards ceremony were either based on books or were "book-related." 

Here they are, have you read them all?

• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), based on a Broadway stage adaptation of Raymond Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love;"
• Still Alice, based on the novel by Lisa Genova;
• The Theory of Everything, based on Jane Hawking's memoir, Traveling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen;
• The Imitation Game, based on Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges;
• The Grand Budapest Hotel, inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig;
• American Sniper, based on American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History by Chris Kyle and Scott McEwen.

Click here to read the full article.

Oscars 2014 Read-Alikes

Are you looking for books similar to the movies nominated for tomorrow's Oscars? Here are a few recommendations from Kirkus Reviews list "If you liked this Oscar nominated film, you'll love this book" that you can find at the Community Library:

For fans of Gravity, try The Martian by by Andy Weir: Stranded on Mars by a dust storm that compromised his space suit and forced his crew to leave him behind, astronaut Watney struggles to survive in spite of minimal supplies and harsh environmental challenges that test his ingenuity in unique ways.

For those who liked Nebraska, try The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine: A modern tale inspired by Sense and Sensibility finds financially strapped literary sisters Miranda and Annie moving in with divorcée Betty in a run-down Connecticut beach cottage, where they find love among the suburban aristocracy.

For fans of Philmena, try The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin. With AIDS about to claim a well-loved young man, three generations of his family are reunited at his bedside in Ireland, in a novel that explores the nature of love and the complex interrelationships among family members. The Blackwater Lightship is a novel about morals and manners, about culture clashes and clashes of personalities, but it is also a novel full of stories, as the characters give an account of themselves, and the others listen, awe struck or deeply amused at things they have never heard before.

For those who liked 12 Years a Slave, try A Slave in the White House by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor: Chronicles the life of Paul Jennings, a former slave to James and Dolley Madison, tracing his early years on their plantation, his service in the Madison White House household staff and post-emancipation achievements as a first White House memoirist and father of two Union Army soldiers.

To see the full list of Kirkus' Oscar nominee read-alike recommendations click here.

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!