Book News, In Brief

The Coen brothers, who did a bang-up job adapting Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men for the screen, have just announced their next book-based film: Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

Via The Beat: "The Tolkien Trust, which represents the estate of JRR Tolkien, has filed a lawsuit against New Line Cinemas, claiming they are owed $140 million. Charging "unabashed and insatiable greed," the plaintiffs said...that New Line...had failed to pay anything despite a...contract that entitles the trusts and the publishers to 7.5 percent of the films’ gross revenues, less certain costs. The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy has earned some $6 billion worldwide."
What does this mean for you and me? No Hobbit films by Guillermo Del Toro until this mess is settled.

Porn goes legit. Via The Guardian UK: "The stock market is to provide its first listing for a pornography publishing group as the adult magazines empire founded by Express owner Richard Desmond next week seeks a listing on the junior Plus Market." The best thing about this stock is that it doesn't really matter whether it performs 'bullishly' or 'bearishly'. Either way, it still sounds perfectly pornographic!

"Harlequin Enterprises Limited is challenging its e-community members to read 100,000 books in one year. When the challenge ends on December 31, 2008, Harlequin will make an unprecedented donation of an equivalent number of books to the National Center for Family Literacy." Okay, so I've got two problems with this "challenge." One, all 100,000 books read have to be Harlequin romance novels. Two, all of the 100,000 books donated to the NCFL will be -- you guessed it -- Harlequin romance novels. Why should the NCFL get punished for the crap taste of others?