Bookworks Presents Shelf Awareness for Readers

Is that a soundtrack I hear? My reading life this winter has somehow become a ticket to a film-ish book festival. I'm not talking book-to-film adaptations, but works in which movies and Hollywood play a prominent role.

The realization hit me while reading Patton Oswalt's wonderful Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film, and was confirmed by Tara Ison's Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies. "Movies have gotten under my skin, formed my perceptions, influenced the choices I've made," Ison writes. "I've learned how to live at the movies, fromthe movies; I am who I am because of movies, and, to some degree, all the other movie freaks out there are, too." As am I.

This reminds me of something Molly Gloss said at an event last fall. Her latest novel, Falling from Horses, is the intriguing tale of a young Oregon ranch hand who goes to Hollywood in 1938 to find work as a stunt rider in cowboy movies. "Even kids who grew up on a ranch were influenced by cowboy movies," Gloss observed. "Bud wanted to be like the cowboy heroes he saw growing up in the movies."

As it happens, two other excellent novels I've read recently also have film connections. Stewart O'Nan'sWest of Sunset is a sharp, fictionalized account of F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years in Hollywood; and the movie world plays a key supporting role in Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling Station Eleven.

"Oh what a world it was!" recalls the disillusioned narrator of one of my favorite novels, A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien, whose father really had been a popular star in 1930s Westerns.

Book-to-film adaptations may be dominating this year's Oscar nominations, but these characters--real and imagined--are caught in the act of adapting their lives to the movies. --Robert Gray, contributing editor