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This isn’t the first blog post to note the many literary antecedents of this morning’s Oscar nominations, but it may be the most comprehensive. I’ve linked the movie titles to the Booklist reviews (when available) of the books and stories that inspired them. Read on, and let me know if you see anything I’ve missed. [...]

I finally watched 2009′s A Christmas Carol, written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Jim Carrey as a motion-captured Scrooge. I was seriously impressed. Despite what some critics have said, I think the film’s visual style perfectly suits the material. Charles Dickens’ 1843 story is a fantasy about ghosts, time travel, and Christmas. It can [...]

Blame my dentist for this one. I was strapped into the chair. While he rooted around in my gaping maw, we were jawing about movies, and he mentioned he’d recently let his 12-year-old son watch The Exorcist (1973). The boy found the movie, and I’m quoting here, “lame.” The Exorcist is, of course, based on William [...]

A while back I briefly mentioned Fatherland, the 1994 television movie based on Robert Harris’s 1992 thriller about a German police detective investigating a homicide (and uncovering a high-level conspiracy). I recently watched the movie again, and I’d forgotten just how gripping it is. The novel is set in 1964. Preparations for the celebration of [...]

Being celebrated by the literati as the most venerable of critics, we editors are inevitably invited to stand before the assembled gala crowd, looking smashing in our tuxes and holding our martinis, to give our opinion of the about-to-be-published book. Sometimes this goes well. Other times it goes really, really, really badly. To give you [...]

So, I’ve been away for a while. Now that Sarah Hunter is doing a fine job taking over the awards beat, I’ve had a little more time to nurse my growing Hunger Games addiction. Annie Bostrom has been kind enough to let me share my rabid anticipation of the film and fill in for this [...]

After there was Cowboys & Aliens the movie — well, not after: at roughly the same time — there was Cowboys & Aliens the novel, published by Tor and written by Joan D. Vinge. Novelizations, books written from screenplays, can be pretty awful (I have a few things to say about them over here), but this [...]

There’s a famous line from John Carpenter’s They Live: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.” That’s exactly what I did to the third annual 31 Horror Films in 31 Days Challenge. Previous Octobers I suffered the tortures of the damned, with the final days [...]

(Has anyone ever gone over to your bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “What is this doing here?” This series of blog posts explains some of the more curious findings on one Booklister’s home shelves.) This is the rarest book I own. How rare? Only one copy was ever made. Its monetary worth is [...]

Before there was Cowboys & Aliens the movie — a splendid movie, why didn’t more of you go and see it? — there was Cowboys & Aliens the graphic novel, published in 2006 by Platinum Studios and created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. With words by Andrew Foley and Fred Van Lente, and terrific artwork by Dennis [...]