Movies Sell More Books

Kerry and I are members of a book club. Currently we're reading Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. It is a non-fiction, women's studies book, that while interesting, takes me straight back to that basement classroom where I my first women's studies course. Not that it's a bad thing, I loved my college women's studies and women's literature courses. The book makes a good refresher utilizing that oft-used motto as a framework of women in history.

Yesterday, I went to the bookstore to pick up the next two books on our list. The February book, Trailerpark, by Russell Banks looks interesting. It is a series of short stories about the lives of people in a New England trailer park.

I am looking forward to reading our March book, as well, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for literature for this book. I had to search a bit around the book store to find this one, as it had been moved off its regular spot on the literature/fiction shelves to create a display that capitalized on the books' upcoming movie release.

Purposefully, I selected a copy of The Road that did not look like the movie poster. I generally appreciate books as books, not movies. After I bought my book, I noticed a large gold seal proclaiming "Now A Major Motion Picture." No worries about that, I would just peel it off. Which I did. Underneath the Motion Picture sticker were the remnants of the Winner of the Pulitzer Prize sticker. How sad. What does it say that book sellers would peel off the sticker proclaiming the book had won one of the top prizes in literature and replace it with one that advertised a not yet released movie? What does it say about us? Sad, but true, movies sell more books.