It is award season! In celebration with the 95th Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow night, we have compiled a list of recommendations based on nominees. This discovery list includes at least one book recommendation for every film nominated in the Best Picture category.
All Quiet on the Western Front
If All Quiet on the Western Front is your favorite Oscar nominee, check out the novel of the same name, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. The novel follows Paul Baümer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of work, duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other, if only he can come out of the war alive.
If you’re looking for something similar to the film, but not the source material the film’s based on, check out Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevallier. Like all Quiet on the Western Front, Fear is a classic of war literature and inspired by the author’s life experience. It follows Jean Dartemon as he enters what was not yet known as World War I in 1915, when it was just beginning to be clear that a war that all the combatants were initially confident would move swiftly to a conclusion was instead frozen murderously in place. After enduring the horrors of the trenches and the deadly leagues of no-man’s-land stretching beyond them, Jean is wounded and hospitalized. Away from the front, he confronts the relentless blindness of the authorities and much of the general public to the hideous realities of modern, mechanized combat. Jean decides he must resist. How? By telling the simple truth. Urged to encourage new recruits with tales of derring-do service, Jean does not mince words. What did he do on the battlefield? He responds like a man: “I was afraid.”
Fans of Avatar: The Way of the Water may enjoy Octavia E Butler’s science fiction classic, Dawn. Dawn follows Lilith lyapo after she wakes from a centuries-long sleep aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent alien race—intervened in the fate of humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth—but salvation comes at a price.
For those looking to read something like The Banshees of Inisherin, J.G. Farrell’s historical fiction novel Troubles may be the right choice for you. While The Banshees of Inisherin takes place towards the end of the Irish Civil War, Troubles takes place right after World War I and right before the Civil War started. Troubles follows Great War survivor Major Brendan Archer as he makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family’s fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel’s hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of “the troubles.” Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel.
People who loved the Elvis movie may find themselves craving some more details or information about Elvis. A two-part, deeply-researched biography should fill in any of the gaps or questions left by the movie. In Last Train to Memphis, Guralnick covers the first 24 years of Presley’s life, from his passion for music at an early age to the year he was drafted and his mother died. It is an intimate account that also expands outward to trace Presley’s influence on culture and music in that time. Careless Love explores the last two decades of Presley’s life, from his army service in 1958 Germany through his death in 1977, and focuses on his relationship with manager Colonel Tom Parker.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Whether you were more of a fan of fantastical dimension hopping in an ordinary setting or the way Everything Everywhere All At Once managed to examine rich, complex relationships in such a narrative, Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a great next read for you. Before The Coffee Gets Cold follows four customers who reevaluate their formative life choices in a small back alley in Tokyo at a century-old coffee shop, which is rumored to offer patrons the chance to travel back in time.
Fans of The Fabelmans who enjoy the way film shapes the protagonist’s adolescence may enjoy Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, whose protagonists relate to the world through video games, much the way movies are used in The Fabelmans. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a modern love story about two childhood friends, Sam, raised by an actress mother in LA’s Koreatown, and Sadie, from the wealthy Jewish enclave of Beverly Hills, who reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives. The books spans thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, and it examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
IIf you are more interested in getting more factual information about Steven Spielberg’s life after watching The Fabelmans, a biography may be a better choice. Molly Haskell’s Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films details Spielberg’s many films and describes how his unique and evocative gift for storytelling evolved from experiences in his own life, including his parents’ divorce and his return to Judaism after his son was born.
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is a great read for fans of Tár. Like Tár, Harmless Like You is a stylistically complex story about a flawed main character, whose life is in the arts. Harmless Like You is set across New York, Berlin, and Connecticut, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki’s son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront the mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old. The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki’s life is unmoored. Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds, which asks–and ultimately answers–how does a mother desert her son?
Fans of Top Gun: Maverick can learn the real story behind Topgun through Dan Pederson’s action-packed, fast-paced autobiography. Topgun : an American Story shares the untold story of how he and eight other young pilots revolutionized the art of aerial combat and created the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School (aka “TOPGUN”), which is a center for excellence and incubator of leadership that thrives to this day.
Viewers who enjoyed the satirical comedy of manners of Triangle of Sadness may enjoy reading Kevin Kwan’s Sex and Vanity. Sex and Vanity follows newly engaged Lucie Churchill after running into George, a man with whom she had brief fling several years earlier, in East Hampton. Lucie finds herself drawn to George again. Soon, Lucie is spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiancé, the co-op board of her Fifth Avenue apartment building, and, ultimately, herself as she tries mightily to deny George entry into her world—and her heart. Moving between summer playgrounds of privilege, peppered with decadent food and extravagant fashion, Sex and Vanity is a truly modern love story, a daring homage to A Room with a View, and a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures.
Women Talking was based on a novel of the same name by Miriam Towes. Women Talking follows eight Mennonite women who meet in secret to decide whether they should escape to a place outside the colony or stay in the only world they’ve ever known after learning the men in the community have been drugging and attacking more than a hundred women.
If you’re looking for a book similar to Women Talking, but not necessarily the source material for the film, you may want to add Mercy House by Alena Dillon to your to-read list. Mercy House takes place inside a century-old row house in Brooklyn, where renegade Sister Evelyn and her fellow nuns preside over a safe haven for the abused and abandoned. Gruff and indomitable on the surface, warm and wry underneath, little daunts Evelyn, until she receives word that Mercy House will be investigated by Bishop Hawkins, a man with whom she shares a dark history. In order to protect everything they’ve built, the nuns must conceal many of their methods, which are forbidden by the Catholic Church. Evelyn will go to great lengths to defend all that she loves. She confronts a gang member, defies the church, challenges her own beliefs, and faces her past. She is bolstered by the other nuns and the vibrant, diverse residents of the shelter–Lucia, Mei-Li, Desiree, Esther, and Katrina–whose differences are outweighed by what unites them: they’ve all been broken by men but are determined to rebuild. Amidst her fight, Evelyn discovers the extraordinary power of mercy and the grace it grants, not just to those who receive it, but to those strong enough to bestow it.
