Filmbook: Your Oscar Nominees Reading List

• Charles Portis, TRUE GRIT (10 nominations, including Best Picture and a very young Best Supporting Actress)
• Ben Mezrich, THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES ("The Social Network," discussed here to death; 8 nominations including Best Picture)
• Aron Ralston, BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE ("127 Hours," 6 nominations including Best Picture)
• Daniel Woodrell, WINTER'S BONE (4 nominations including Best Picture)
• David Lindsay-Abaire, "Rabbit Hole" (okay it's a play, but still -- 1 nomination)
• Chuck Hogan, PRINCE OF THIEVES ("The Town," one nomination)

The ceremony is February 27 and the one book on this list I would really like to read despite having already seen the movie is TRUE GRIT. I looked, I waited for the library book, and... I threw caution to the winds.

An English major gets her wings

Tag line on the new TV spot for "The Social Network." Tipped off by Caroline McCarthy of CNet on Twitter.

Ben Mezrich exists for my amusement

Would someone from Doubleday please confirm for me that this is real? Or Mr. Mezrich himself? Anonymity guaranteed! (It's from what purports to be their Tumblr account.) Because, WOW.

Mark Zuckerberg: Possesed of a sense of humor?

On "The Social Network" to Business Insider:



"Every single shirt or fleece that I had in the movie was a shirt or fleece that I own."

I think his criticism is flawed, but still: points.

Leftovers

• Not only is there potentially a fourth Stieg Larsson book, his dad is now claiming there is a fifth which he wrote before #4 because it "was more fun to write." (L.A. Times)
• "The Kindle changed my reading habits, because I now buy books pretty much only when I’m drunk, and late at night." Elif Batuman sounds like she'd be fun to hang out with. (Boston Globe via Peter W. Knox)
• Forgive me if you all knew that Keith Olbermann is a huge James Thurber fan who reads his short stories out loud on his show. I just found out this week, perils of the cableless. (GalleyCat)
• Literary betting news! Britons can no longer bet on the Booker Prize after a suspiciously large amount of money was placed on only slightly tarnished star Tom McCarthy. (Guardian)
• "Discussed: Comical Hats, Tertiary Characters, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark One, Typologies Within Typologies, Moral Predicaments, Braid-Yanking, Rhapsodies Over Brocaded Silk, Arcane Metaphysical Theology, Clark Gable." Name that fantasy author! (The Believer)
• This SPOILERY review of "The Social Network" is probably my favorite which I also disagree with. It's an art. (The New Republic).
• "It was a great way of getting out of the house, of not being stuck alone in my room all day, and, as I have Lonoff say in THE GHOST WRITER, I got to use a public urinal — that was a breakthrough — and also I got to read a lot." Yeah, Philip Roth, it sounds like you really got a lot out of teaching. Any of his former UPenn students wish to speak to that experience? (Esquire)

Bad reputations

I'm collecting links like a postmodern Collyer brother, so here are some quick hits:

• To the surprise of no one, Facebook isn't that thrilled about the new movie based on Ben Mezrich's book. (New York Times)
• In other adaptation news, "The Switch," the romantic comedy based on the Rick Moody Jeffrey Eugenides (see comments) story "The Baster," is tracking dismally and will probably finish 7th this weekend, behind a "Twilight" parody, "Eat Pray Love" and "Piranha 3-D." [Unrelated: I've been spelling 'piranha' wrong all this time?!] Jason Bateman, fire your agent. (Deadline.com)
• Jodi Picoult should not be startin' somethin' with the aforementioned Times about their rave review of FREEDOM. For one, her reviews in the Times have been complimentary enough; for another, Jennifer Weiner did this routine 6 weeks ago (and not wrongly) abotu Gary Shteyngart. Summer's for reruns? (NY Mag via DRA)
• Anyway, all the cool kids are already over FREEDOM and looking forward to Tom McCarthy's next book C, out Sept. 7. Here he is on technology, Futurism and James Joyce. (The Guardian)
• Where did "Chicago" come from? Bookslut-in-Chief Jessa Crispin investigates in the review of a new book called THE GIRLS OF MURDER CITY about the Second City in the 1930s. (The Smart Set)
• Finally, I walked by a bar on Friday whose awning read "The Tavern O. Henry Made Famous." Is it ever okay to grant a bar the endorsement of someone who eventually died of cirrhosis? Unfortunately, the claim that O. Henry wrote "The Gift of the Magi" in a bar booth in Gramercy Park is dubious and likely unprovable; on the other hand, there was a "Seinfeld" episode shot there. (Petestavern.com; Iamnotastalker.com)

Filmbook: "The Social Network" full trailer

An adaptation of THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES by Ben Mezrich, who surely could not have dreamed his book would turn out looking like this:



"The Social Network" will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in September, which gives you about two months to read the source material. After you watch that, check out the Best Week Ever parody about the founding of MySpace.

Love For Only One

A while ago my mom mentioned she had read two books about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, David Von Drehle's TRIANGLE: THE FIRE THAT CHANGED AMERICA and Katharine Weber's TRIANGLE: A NOVEL. She insisted that I had to read both, otherwise I wouldn't get the proper perspective on the event.

I'm sure Von Drehle and Weber's respective publishers didn't acknowledge each other's existence in any way, but their books in a sense complement each other... unlike those instances where two books on the same topic, in the same genre, are forced to share shelf space. I don't know if this is happening more often recently, or if my scope of book-news has just expanded to the point where I'm more aware of it, but these pairs are everywhere! Here are two other pairs that immediately sprung to mind:

Nancy Horan's LOVING FRANK vs. T.C. Boyle's THE WOMEN: Who knew Frank Lloyd Wright's love life had enough juice in it for two novels? I own and plan to read both of these; Aforementioned Mom has read both, and says LOVING FRANK is "terrible, I don't know why it's so popular." So there you go. If I had to pick one I'd be more inclined to reach for the Boyle because I've read and liked some of his other books.

David Kirkpatrick, THE FACEBOOK EFFECT vs. Ben Mezrich, THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES: Facebook is such an unavoidable force right now that you could justify reading two books about it, and I probably will if only to avoid the filtering that would result from hearing about them secondhand. Kirkpatrick's is, according to reviews I've read, better written but less even-handed since he had Zuckerberg's cooperation; it's also the most current, as it has just come out this week. However, Mezrich's book is already being adapted into what I am confident will be one of the most insane movies of the year, the David Fincher-directed, Aaron Sorkin-scripted "The Social Network." (Already campaigning for an office outing on its release date.)

Can you think of two books that are like this? And which one did you or would you pick?