And the Oscar goes to...

Posted by Staff

The 84th annual Academy Awards Ceremony will honor the best films of 2011. Six out of the nine best picture nominations are based on books. Eleven literary adaptations received recognition in major award categories.  Don't just see the movies, read the books!

Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. (This author also wrote the source for the movie Blind Side).  "Explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money."

My Week with Marilyn by Colin Clark."Presents the author's diary accounts of the week he, an assistant on the set of the movie "The Prince and the Showgirl," bonded with Marilyn Monroe after she escaped the high-pressure set and toured the English countryside with him."

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. "Joey the horse recalls his experiences growing up on an English farm, his struggle for survival as a cavalry horse during World War I, and his reunion with his beloved master."

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré.  "Who is the mole buried within British intelligence, planted by Karla in Moscow years ago? George Smiley is back, in the first novel of The quest for Karla trilogy."

Albert Nobbs: A Novella by George Moore. "Long out of print, George Moore's classic novella returns just in time for the major motion picture starring Glenn Close as a woman disguised as a man in nineteenth-century Ireland."

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. "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."

The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher by John Campbell.  "Traces the life of Britain's only female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, from her upbringing in Grantham to her unexpected challenge to Edward Heath for leadership of the Conservative party and her eventual removal from power."

The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings. "A descendant of royalty and one of the largest landowners in Hawaii, Matthew King struggles to deal with his out-of-control daughters--ten-year-old Scottie and seventeen-year-old Alex--as well as his comatose wife, whom they are about to remove from life

support."

The Invention of Hugo Cabaret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick. "When twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan living and repairing clocks within the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, meets a mysterious toyseller and his goddaughter, his undercover life and his biggest secret are jeopardized."

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. "In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another."

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. "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.