Books Made into Oscar-Nominated Films

Before they were nominated for Academy Awards, these stories were books. Which do you prefer, the book or the movie?

Updated March 17, 2025
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
12 years a slave /
Northup, Solomon, 1808-1863?
Paper Book
The astonishing memoir of a free man who was sold into slavery in Louisiana where he was kept for 12 years--a powerful, riveting condemnation of slavery, and a story soon to be introduced to a...

306.362 N819 2013

Lion /
Brierley, Saroo
Paper Book
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara, this #1 international best-seller tells the miraculous and triumphant story of a young man who rediscovers not only his childhood life and home...but an identity long-since left behind. ...

362.734 B766 2014

Nomadland : surviving America in the twenty-first century
Bruder, Jessica
Paper Book
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on...

331.398 Bruder 2017

Capote : a biography
Clarke, Gerald
Paper Book
From instant celebrity at age 23 to overweight, alcoholic loner in his 50s, Truman Capote streaked across the middle of this century on a comet of genius, self-destruction, and fame. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews with Capote and with nearly everyone who knew him, and with exclusive...

813.54 C17yc

Black Panther. Book 1A nation under our feet
Coates, Ta-Nehisi
Paper Book
MacArthur Genius and National Book Award-winner T- Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) takes the helm, confronting T'Challa with a dramatic upheaval in Wakanda. When a superhuman terrorist group that calls itself The People sparks a violent uprising, the land famed for its incredible technology...
Room.
Donoghue, Emma, 1969-
Paper Book
WINNER! 2010 Rogers Writers' Trust Award for Fiction SHORTLISTED for the 2010 Man Booker Prize SHORTLISTED for the 2010 Governor General's Award To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It’s where he was born and where he and his Ma eat and play and learn....
The curious case of Benjamin Button. [online electronic book]
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1896-1940
Ebook
Recently the basis for a major motion picture starring Hollywood golden boy Brad Pitt, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was written in 1922 by the golden boy of early twentieth-century American fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of such era-defining masterworks as The Great Gatsby and Tender...
Extremely loud & incredibly close
Foer, Jonathan Safran
Paper Book
ANew York Times Bestseller * NamedA Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,andRocky Mountain News   Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an...
Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI
Grann, David
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, "one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."--New York...

970.3 Osage Grann 2017

Travelling to infinity : my life with Stephen /
Hawking, Jane
Paper Book
Complete with exclusive photographs of the couple, this moving and engaging memoir written by Stephen Hawking’s first wife covers the turbulent years of her marriage with the astrophysics genius, her traumatic divorce, and their recent reconciliation  <...

530.092 H313yh 2014

Seabiscuit : an American legend /
Hillenbrand, Laura
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend. "Fascinating . . . Vivid . . . A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only...

798.4 H557 2003

Alan Turing : the enigma /
Hodges, Andrew.
Paper Book
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young...

510.92 T846yh 2014

Les miserables. [online electronic audiobook]
Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885
Audiobook
Set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, Les Misérables follows the adventures of Jean Valjean, originally an honest peasant, who was imprisoned for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family. A hardened criminal upon his release, he...
Hidden figures : the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race
Lee Shetterly, Margot.
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times bestseller -WINNER OF ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD FOR NONFICTION -WINNER BLACK CAUCUS OF AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NAACP IMAGE AWARD BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES,...

510.92 L516 2016

The big short : inside the doomsday machine
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine, and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and...

330.973 L587

The blind side : evolution of a game
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday,...
Moneyball : the art of winning an unfair game /
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
"You need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy . . . and incisiveness of [Moneyball]. Lewis has hit another one out of the park." --Janet Maslin, New York Times Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, is leading a...

796.357 Lewis 2003

The king's speech /
Logue, Mark
Paper Book
One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century - he wasn't a prime minister or an archbishop of Canterbury. He was an almost unknown, and self-taught, speech therapist named Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed 'The Quack who saved a King'...

941.084 L829yL 2010

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West.
Maguire, Gregory.
Paper Book
This is the book that started it all! The basis for the smash hit Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire's breathtakingNew York Times bestseller
Life of Pi.
Martel, Yann.
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE One boy. One boat. One tiger.    After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a...
Atonement.
McEwan, Ian
Paper Book
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the...
The master of disguise : my secret life in the CIA
Mendez, Antonio J.
Paper Book
Tony Mendez led two lives. To his friends, he was a soft-spoken, nondescript bureaucrat working for the Department of Defense. To the leaders of the CIA, he was their master of disguise--an undisputed genius who could create an entirely new identity for anybody, anywhere, anytime. Combining the...

327.1273 Mendez, Antonio Mendez 1999

War horse.
Morpurgo, Michael.
Paper Book
The book that inspired Steven Spielberg's Hollywood blockbuster movie and an internationally acclaimed stage show . . . it can only be Michael Morpurgo's War Horse. In the deadly chaos of the First World War, one horse witnesses the reality of battle from both sides of the trenches....
A beautiful mind : a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, 1994
Nasar, Sylvia.
Paper Book
In this dramatic and moving biography, Sylvia Nasar re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose brilliant career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize. "A Beautiful Mind" traces...
Desolation Island [sound recording (CD)] /
O'Brian, Patrick, 1914-2000
Audiobook
True grit. [large print]
Portis, Charles.
Paper Book
.".. published in the year 2010 by arrangement with Simon & Schuster"--T.p. verso.
The revenant.
Punke, Michael
Paper Book
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A thrilling tale of betrayal and revenge set against the nineteenth-century American frontier, Michael Punke's The Revenant is the astonishing story of real-life trapper and frontiersman Hugh...
The silver linings playbook.
Quick, Matthew, 1973-
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller, The Silver Linings Playbook was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. It tells the riotous and poignant story of how one man regains his memory and comes to terms with the magnitude of his wife's betrayal....
Push
Sapphire, 1950-
Paper Book
The acclaimed book that inspired Precious, the Sundance Film Festival winner from Lee Daniels "Even though the film Precious packs quite a wallop, the gritty realism of the novel upon which the movie is based is even more intense." --NPR
The reader.
Schlink, Bernhard
Paper Book
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER *  Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. "A formally beautiful...
Black Klansman : race, hate, and the undercover investigation of a lifetime /
Stallworth, Ron
Paper Book
The extraordinary true story of the black detective who goes undercover to investigate the KKK, the basis for the major motion picture written and directed by Spike Lee, and produced by Jordan Peele. When detective Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in the history of the...

322.42 Stallworth 2018

The help
Stockett, Kathryn.
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times bestselling novel and basis for the Academy Award-winning film--a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't--nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Aibileen is a...
Women talking.
Toews, Miriam, 1964-
Paper Book
A FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD: A transformative and necessary work--as completely unexpected as it is inspired--by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness. The sun rises on a quiet June...
The fellowship of the ring.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1892-1973
Paper Book
The opening novel of The Lord of the Rings--the greatest fantasy epic of all time--which continues in The Two Towers and The Return of the King.   Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read...
The return of the king.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1892-1973
Paper Book
The awesome conclusion to The Lord of the Rings--the greatest fantasy epic of all time--which began in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read ...
The two towers.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1892-1973
Paper Book
The Two Towers is the second volume in J.R.R. Tolkien_s epic adventure, The Lord of the Rings, voted Book of the Century in major polls.The Company of the Ring is sundered. Frodo and Sam continue their journey alone down the great River Anduin _ alone that is, save for a mysterious creeping figure...
Brooklyn.
Toibin, Colm, 1955-
Paper Book
It is Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to...
The Nickel boys.
Whitehead, Colson, 1969-
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Awards Longlisted for the 2019...
Winter's bone : a novel
Woodrell, Daniel.
Paper Book
When Ree Dollys father skips bail, the 16-year-old knows if he doesn't show up, her family will lose their home. Her goal had been to leave her life of poverty and join the Army, but first she must find her father, teach her little brothers to fend for themselves, and escape a downward spiral of...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.