I am by no means what one might call a film buff, but to my un-trained eye I did find this year’s Oscar nominations to be a bit lopsided. I'm not sure if it's just my memory but it seems that each year fewer and fewer films are actually recognized, meaning the bulk of the nominations are stacked on an ever shrinking set of films.
My wife suggested that perhaps studios are just pushing more and more
of their overall budget into trying to create a bigger blockbuster than the next studio (all eggs, one basket) and so all of the best performances come from the same films, however I think that there are just less good scripts being written and adapted leaving the judges to pick the couple gems out of the dregs.
I sometimes feel the same way about publishing, in that the bulk of the books I want to read were written decades ago. Why publishers keep pumping out half baked memoirs when there are so many cool out of print books in their back lists that could be whisked back onto the shelves for the poor souls who have not yet found BookFinder. I'm not suggesting a kybosh on new books but I KNOW there are some very cool old tales that
could happily be retold.
What got me on this rant was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It leads the way in Oscar nominations, and was first written in the 1920s. It was first published in Colliers magazine and subsequently in the AnthologyTales of the Jazz Age which came out in 1922 and then fall out of print (in English) until 1991 when Eastern Press published a collector’s edition.
This little tidbit of information prompted me to issue my highly personal, mostly
random, list of ten books from the 1920s that would be better than most new books.
Adam's Daughter by John Carruthers
Cover alone would sell the tale of this young girl trying to right the wrongs of her activities
Gabriel Samara Peacemaker by E. Phillips Oppenheim
A novel about Russian immigrants who are living in New York and
plotting about how to make Russia a republic. Oppenheim has written somewhere near 150 novels, and even graced the cover of Time in 1927. Stir in a little star power and this has blockbuster written all over it.
The House of the Three Ganders by Irving Bacheller
Bacheller was a writer and journalist who was responsible for bringing the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle to American readers though his Syndicate that provided articles to Sunday papers around the US. (Only OOP in the US)
Right off the Map by C.E. Montague
Montague was Guardian journalist before writing this Science Fiction
Novel involving a dystopic future in England.
On Doing What One Likes by Alec Waugh
Alec has been credited with inventing the cocktail party, offering his guests rum swizzles rather than tea, acts like that make me think I should read what this man has to say. Alec is elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh.
Sweard's Folly by Edison Marshall
He wrote The Vikings, Yankee Pasha and Treasure of the Golden Condor but Seward`s Folly has been out of print since 1924.
The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen
This book is about the interactions of several upper class Brits staying at a hotel on the Italian Riviera in the 1920s, the hotel did come back into print for a time in 2003 in the UK but has once again fallen out.
The Diamond Necklace by Fred Jackson
Jackson was best known as a screen writer. This was his first mystery novel, which has been out of print since 1929.
Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
Story of two women in the English Countryside dealing with love, suffering and the like...
The Girl From Hollywood by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Since Tarzan has been pretty much beaten to death, it would be nice to have someone look at some of Burroughs' other work
I highly encourage you to submit any out-of-print gems that you think could trump
current blockbusters.
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("on the sly" meaning standing in front of the shelf, casting surreptitious looks out for my mother.)
The only thing I remember of hers is Mom, the Wolfman & Me. Our library may have carried more, but I wasn't allowed to check out fiction, so I read her on the sly -- all the others were always checked out!
One of the branches I worked with had a community that intensely supervised reading thru teenage years. I always found "hidden" books in the library where kids had left them from reading on the sly and never reshelved them.
Meaning, I never reshelved them, not talking about the teens!
I haven't been able to get rid of her titles, even though they don't get checked out much. I always think of the 1970s when I read books set in NYC-- it seems to have been quite the fad.