Book Bucket List | Academy Award Nominations... for movies based on books

Break out the champagne and $10,000 dresses, the Academy Awards are just around the corner!  The awards this year feature quite a few movies based on books.  Luckily, our libraries carry these titles, so you can find out what the original stories were like before they were made into the year's best films.

The film, Philomena, is based on the book of the same name follows the story of Philomena Lee, who was forced to give up her child for adoption in Ireland because she was unmarried.  Fifty years later, she joins forces with a journalist to find out what happened to her son.  This film is nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress for Judi Dench.  This book is available to our patrons from our Link+ system.

12 Years as a Slave by Solomon Northup was made into a movie this past year featuring some of the best acting, editing, and screenwriting of the year.  It's nominated for numerous awards including Best Picture.  It is the true story of Solomon Northup written by him in 1853.  Northup was living as a free man in New York, but was later kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans.  The book is Northup's memoir of his experiences as a slave and what it took for him to reunite with his family.


Catching the Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort was made into the Wolf of Wall Street film by Martin Scorsese.  It's up for a ton of awards too, so everything will have some stiff competition.  This second book by Belfort was written after he spent two years in prison for securities fraud.  This book holds Belfort's reflections of what he did including all of the crazy illegal activities he partook in.