Books into movies

November is proving a pretty dull month at the cinema with the main interest for book lovers being the incoming adaptations of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener and Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, both of which arrive here on a tail wind of great reviews. Of most interest in October was a disappointingly unrevealing teaser trailer for The Da Vinci Code, The movie is not due for worldwide release until 19 May 2006. Appearing eight months early should give those still complaining about the festooning of the city in Christmas decorations something to really moan about. Whether we actually get to see Tom Hanks and Ian McKellan in Dan Brown's next step towards world domination is currently under examination in the London High Court. Last year we mentioned Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh author's of non-fiction work The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The court will judge their claims of plagiarism and indeed whether or not a fiction work can plagiarised factual work. Certainly, eagle-eyed readers will note that one of Dan Brown's characters, Leigh Teabing, has a name which is an anagram of the defendants' surnames, Leigh and Baigent. Some of the UK press are getting carried away in suggesting that the outcome might impact the arrival of the movie but there is little doubt that siphoning off even a small percentage of the book's profits would make the plaintiff's very rich.

It may make us look like a movie column rather than one for books but one of our favourite writers is back on celluloid and consequently back on the international book charts this autumn. Book News bunked off work for a day in 1989 to finish Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the book that invented the 'true crime' novel. Capote became close to the two murderers who carried out the 1959 massacre of a Kansas country family in the titular style. By placing himself at the centre of the story the reader became closer to the action than ever before while Capote's narration had a chilling proximity to both motive and motivation. The style was repeated just as successfully in Handcarved Coffins allowing Capote room to grow in reputation as more than the socialite author of fiction like Breakfast at Tiffanys. There are few who could ever have portrayed Capote, dilettante, wit and dandy realistically but we'll wager that Philip Seymour Hoffman will give it as good a shot as any. The biopic is based on Gerald Clarke's 1986 book Capote: A Biography, the acknowledged definitive work on the author. Both are now enjoying a further lease of life on the back of attention generated by the movie.

TIME magazine published their top 100 books since 1923, the year they first were published. It makes for fascinating reading even though they sadly avoided ranking the books chosen to give us something to fight about. Many of the books and authors one would expect like Tolkien, Harper Lee and Hemingway are present, just as they are when lists like this are published over here. Several authors like Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Evelyn Waugh have two entries on the list. Many modern classics one saw on the BBC or Waterstones' lists are missing like Birdsong, The Secret History, or The Shipping News. Popularity in the book charts has not excluded serious recent American contenders like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. There are a number of recent books on the list with Zadie Smith's White Teeth , Ian McEwan's Atonement and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children reflecting the Booker Prize influenced state of modern British fiction. Village was particularly pleased to see two nods to modernity in the selection. A brave choice was evident in The Watchmen, Neil Gaiman's graphic novel whose inclusion will have had many commentators sniffing disparagingly.. The only book chosen from the last two years was our pick for this year's Man Booker prize, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. A list dating from post-Ulysses times ran the risk of leaving us without an Irish entry on the list but happily there are two, Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds and Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart.

Book Notes is inclined to award a Publicity Whore of the Week award to those authors we see everywhere, plugging their wares at the slightest provocation. How many times must we endure the same gurning smiles as they trot out the same tired anecdote? Last week would have belonged to el Drico, Brian O'Driscoll had he not stumbled at the last and missed a public signing gig on Grafton St. (He was pretty much everywhere else). Instead we offer our inaugural honour to Margaret Atwood for debasement in support of her new classical fable The Penelopiad. She did Kenny, did Parky, did all the papers and still managed to act in a once-off adaptation of the work on the West End. She seems to have seen every one except one Guardian writer who wrote of a seven month odyssey of her own trying to interview Atwood. And all this by the woman who wanted to computerise book signings! Margaret, we salute you…