Stuck for reading inspiration? You could always turn on the telly. The hit television show Lost has spawned an online book club where fans discuss the books which either appear on, or are said to have inspired, the show.
They've already tackled Lord of the Flies ("Simon, like Locke, is the only character to confront the beastie and find out the truth"), Alice in Wonderland and Moby-Dick, amongst others, but Ulysses is proving a bit of a sticking point for some – although others are struggling manfully through.
"We pick the books with a great deal of meticulous thought and specificity and talk about what the thematic implications of picking a certain book are, why we're using it in the scene and what we want the audience to deduce from that choice," executive producer Damon Lindelof told the LA Times. (I especially like his point about Watership Down, which Sawyer was reading in the show's first series. "It was sort of an obscure book, but thematically it was talking about all the same things that were happening to our character on the island except with rabbits.")
And Lost isn't the only show with a virtual book club: there's also Mad Men, which last year boosted Frank O'Hara's sales after the lead character Don Draper was seen reading Meditations in an Emergency.
Why shouldn't the book trade benefit from the interest of obsessive TV fans? It might even work the other way round. I gave up on Lost in the first series, but might just be tempted to give it another try – I want to see how similar it is to Watership Down for myself.
