I am very conscious of not wanting to be reading what everyone else is.
I'm not quite that self-conscious in my reading choices, but that bestseller list is pretty much a list of "You have a limit of brain cells, so don't bother with these until vacation rolls around, and even then, be selective."
Which I have to be anyway, since I almost never buy new (especially mass-market) books if I can help it.
Megan's right -- you'll probably enjoy the Bourne movies just fine, maybe better, without reading the books. I will say, however, that Ludlum always had an entertaining eye for the skillset of a spy. Book-Bourne is the king of tiny details, psychology, and elaborate plans, the sort of thing that is usually too cumbersome to pull off in movies. Also, his politics are way subtler.
I guess Anna Karenina is a beach read? Gosh, kids today! Is there a movie coming out, or is Tolstoy just super-cool this summer? (Or is it an Oprah book?)
It's an Oprah book. The first one she endorsed without even reading it.
HA! I knew someone would catch that (AK). I wonder why it is on the list? Oprah doesn't do books anymore and there is no movie.
eta: I guess she does do them still. I thought she had stopped.
"The Secret Life of Bees" is supposed to be pretty good. Nicholas Sparks is always bad.
I know very little about any of the other books. Really, i only read the bestsellers list to see if Al Franken is doing better than Ann Coulter (or whatever the lefty/righty authors of the week are) or the reverse.
Why has Oprah dropped books?
Oddly enough, we picked Anna Karenina for my classics book club this month. It's a little disconcerting to find it on the NYT best-seller list via Oprah.
I have read The Bourne Supremacy, and Nutty's right, they get progressively worse. The first one was kinda fun, but after that basically they just involve lots of running around and shrieking. I recall lots and lots of yelling. And swearing. I did however, think The Matarese Circle was very good, what I remember of it.
Now my spy novel reading basically consists of Alan Furst, who's excellent. Strong prose, complicated conflicted characters, dark and foreboding WWII-era and post-war Europe. Good stuff.
I see Dan Brown is on the list with another one. I keep hearing about another novel by two guys that is also sort of a secret history, but it's much better than The Da Vinci Code. Something of Four? That ring any bells?
I just checked her website and I was completely wrong, she still does books. Does she still do shows dedicated to the discussion of the selected book? I swear I remember something about her not doing book things anymore.
She suspended the book club for a year or so after Jonathan Franzen got snotty about "The Corrections" being chosen. I don't remember what the official reason was.
She did, with like live authors. Which bummed me out, cause I always learned from it. That Franzen asshole. But then, she got pissy back and said that she couldn't find anything inspiring in modern books anymore. Which, even unpublished, made me go "Hey!"
Friends don't let friends read Dan Brown. Or Nicholas Sparks. Oy. Totally painful, for completely different reasons. But they both make Gutenberg cry.
