10 Booker-nominated books for fans of Wes Anderson
If you were to write a checklist of what makes Wes Anderson’s film style so distinctive, it would have to include books. They’re a big deal in almost all his movies and many of his characters are writers or storytellers of some sort.
Books are often in the background in Anderson’s films and regularly feature in the foreground, too. They’re usually made-up ones, celebrated as beautiful objects as well as a source of stories. One of Anderson’s go-to graphic designers, Anne Atkins, has said that her ‘most prized prop’ is the The Grand Budapest Hotel book, which opens and closes the film. Its sugary pink jacket and red lettering is a perfect example of Anderson’s beloved style.
The Grand Budapest Hotel isn’t the only Anderson film to take its shape from a fictional book or the life of an obscure writer. The Royal Tenenbaums opens with an eponymous library book and the film is presented in chapters, while books are some of Suzy Bishop’s most prized possessions in Moonrise Kingdom. In Rushmore, Rosemary Cross is seen reading Diving for Sunken Treasure by Jacques Cousteau, the book The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou goes on to explore, while The French Dispatch has been called a love letter to long-form journalism.
Besides books, also on the Anderson checklist would be specific kinds of characters – eccentric oddballs, often exceptional in some way, and specific kinds of stories – tragicomic adventures set in whimsical locations and confined doll-house-like spaces, such as hotels and schools.
If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson’s films – and as The Phoenician Scheme opens in UK cinemas – we think you’ll love these Booker-nominated novels. Among their pages, you’ll find precocious children and dysfunctional families, murder mysteries and crime capers, teenage angst and sibling rivalries, love stories, and, of course, plenty of aesthetically pleasing objects.