Always...

On a very long ride from Kentucky to New Jersey my younger daughter asked my older daughter if she could borrow the DVD copy of The Great Gatsby.  The older daughter responded with, "Have you read the book?"  To which the younger daughter replied, "No." Big sister told little sister she couldn't watch the DVD. "After you read the book," she said. Inside I chuckled and thought, "Hooray."

I cheered at my daughter demanding a reading before watching, because as good as some movie adaptations have been, none have been better than the book.

When we watch a movie without reading the book, we have to settle or concede to someone else's reading experience each time we sit down to a screen adaptation. Before I saw the movie The Hunger Games but after the casting was done, I thought the casting for the male leads was all wrong:  Liam Hemsworth would have made a better Peeta and Josh Hutcherson a better Gale - at least in my mind. (I still wonder about these choices, as a matter of fact.)

Once I've read the book, it becomes part of me. These characters are my friends. I can anticipate what they might say or do in situations.  I know their friends and their family, their loves and their fears. Their towns are places I have been to.  I can imagine their rooms, their dinner tables and their favorite places to eat.  I have lived with them and loved them. The truth is I don't like anyone messing with them (even their creators sometimes, but that is for another time).

Please don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to books being made into films.  Not at all.  As a reader, I celebrate such success.  I wonder if those responsible for the adaptation will get it right? Some of it? None of it? Dare I hope, all of it? I get excited, watch trailers, share trailers, go see the movies with my students, and then show clips from those movies for years to come.  If I haven't read the book and I wish to see the movie, the impending release of a book-turned-movie usually spurs me (my students, and my family) to read the book if I haven't, and then I spend hours comparing the two with my family, friends, students, and people I have never met.  Perhaps I may even write essays, letters and blogs on the two. Sometimes it helps me to know the characters better, to see a side of them that maybe I hadn't noticed before. Many times seeing the movie enhances my reading experience.

But it is important to read the book first.  Reading the book enables me to know when the movie makers captured the essence of the characters I know so well, placed the emphasis on just the right problems and created just the right setting. And when they don't?  Then I haven't really been cheated at all because I have my book experience to carry and cherish within me. I can rest knowing Tris is still Tris even if she didn't seem so tough and brave in the movie version of Divergent.

So not my idea of Tris Prior

So, no matter how many tears I cried during the movie The Fault In Our Stars, or how much I laughed at Haymitch's antics in The Hunger Games movie or even how much I adored Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is, was and always will be better.

Gregory Peck was definitely the right choice for Lee's Atticus Finch