Books and Cinema: A Love Story

Library and librarian depictions in film and television are well-documented, from Beauty and the Beast to Orange is the New Black to The Shawshank Redemption. Meta alert: these stories are often based on books (Beauty and the Beast was born a fairy tale, OITNB a memoir, Shawshank a novella).

Beyond overt library scenes and well-known film adaptations of novels, visual and conversational nods to literature abound within film and TV. Yet these less-documented hints, sometimes momentary, are tougher to find packaged in one neat IMDb location.

To that end, below are two brief book lists inspired by some recent cinematic allusions to libraries and their troves.

Marvel's Luke Cage

Black Nerd Problems bloggers Omar Holmon and William Evans give us a "Luke Cage Syllabus" (part 1 and part 2) featuring Black literary classics tucked into scenes of Marvel's Luke Cage. Don't miss bonus recommendations from Holmon and Evans to fully appreciate the series' riches of cross-disciplinary Black cultural expression spanning literature, film, and music.

Here are the highlights:

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches by W.E.B. Du Bois

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society If you're contemplating the potential beginnings of your own book club, consider grabbing an analog alarm clock and selections from Pie Society's bougie compilation of classic British lit, as seen and heard throughout the film and novel of the same name. Beyond the stacks, the hits below are also available from Google as free eBooks, replete with digitized library stamps and scribbles from nostalgic print versions (accompanying pie optional).

Mind the gap:

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

And now, for your consideration: if American lit and British lit competed in a wrestling match, who would win?

You decide.

Here's to cinema, stories, and the libraries that take us there.