Books This Isn’t Exactly News…
posted by on November 28 at 12:22 PM
… but I can’t help be surprised all over again. Four of the top twenty paperback bestsellers this week are new or forthcoming movies, and one (The Road) is probably getting a boost from the same. The number one fiction paperback in the nation right now is a 1988 novel in translation by Gabriel García Márquez.
Maybe it’s worth a godawful adaptation if it gets people to read the original? I confess, I—or rather, the paper, if a certain vacationing someone ever gets around to submitting the receipt—purchased a copy recently in preparation for that review. I hadn’t read it previously, and I’m thrilled I did.
By the way, it’s totally worth reading Atonement before you see the movie (out in Seattle next Friday) . In some ways, I think I like the movie more than the book (no irritating Woolfian tics that are revealed not to be the author’s own irritating Woolfian tics), but having read the book makes the movie better.
Hmm, where's "Beowulf"? I guess it must be on the Best Selling Epic Poems Paperback list.
Actually, yeah. The 2000 Seamus Heaney translation tops Amazon's list of bestselling poetry.
It's kind of like when you look up a band with a song in any Guitar Hero game, that song is the most popular on iTunes.
i haven't read the book yet, but i saw an advance screening of the film, Atonement, and it rocks the house...
Joe Wright is an amazing filmmaker and the cast is excellent.
this old curmudgeon has to admit that his eyes were a bit damp at the end of the movie...
sniff.
More importantly, Annie, three of the top nine (including The Road and Cholera) were recent Oprah picks, which has even more sway than Hollywood.
fiction books are pretty much populist crap anyway.
@5 has it right. Love in the Time of Cholera is Oprah's most recent pick. That's why it's #1. I doubt the movie has much to do with it.
@5: Right, but it's also circular. You think Oprah picked Cholera before she knew it was being made into a movie? The Road, granted.
@8. It's possible... she apparently likes Gabriel Garcia Marquez alot and had One Hundred Years of Solitude as a pick a few years ago.
The Road is going to be a movie? Nice!!! I still haven't seen No Country For Old Men; I gotta catch up.
@9: No, she knew.
That's not to say she doesn't like Márquez; I have no opinion on Winfrey's personal tastes. But there is a wide universe of books she could have picked. I'm suggesting that the fact a movie was being released may have influenced her decision--or at minimum, her timing.
@10: That's not exactly what I meant--I was proposing it was getting an indirect boost from the No Country for Old Men adaptation--but yeah, John Hillcoat (The Proposition) is directing an adaptation for possible 2009 release.
Hopefully they fixed the translation since the version that came out in the late 80’s.
I looked it over from time to time while reading the original in Spanish class—if you want easy Spanish language reading stick to Isabel Allende—but after about 50 pages dumped the translation because they mistranslated “sixty” into “seventy” or vice-versa.
@4 -- Oh, Michael, read the book (Atonement)! It's devastating.
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