Books vs Movies

The recent films are faithful in plot and extraordinary to look at, and they leave out the thing the novel runs on: everybody's private thoughts. Frank Herbert writes the scheming from inside several heads at once, often within a single scene, so you always know what each character believes the others are planning. Read that way it is less a desert adventure than a book about how power is held, and the films simply cannot show it.

One caveat: A dense first hundred pages, and a glossary you will end up using.

The 1980 film is a landmark and it is not this book. King's Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic whom the reader watches lose a fight he badly wants to win, the hotel itself is far more active, and the ending goes somewhere else entirely. King has said publicly for decades that he dislikes the adaptation, which makes this one of the few disagreements in popular culture you can settle for yourself over a few evenings.

One caveat: Long, and hard going on alcoholism and violence inside a family.

Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay herself, so the film keeps the structure, the twist and a great many of the lines. What a film cannot keep is the experience of reading two unreliable narrators in their own words, chapter after chapter, while you work out which one is lying to you and how long it has been going on. The passage everyone quotes is better on the page than on screen.

One caveat: If the film's plot is what they loved, the book holds few surprises for them.

The film keeps the jokes and trims the arithmetic. The novel is mostly Mark Watney's log, and much of its pleasure is watching him do the sums on water, calories and battery life before he does anything clever with them. It is also funnier than the film, because a log entry has room for a running commentary that a screenplay has to cut for pace.

One caveat: Long stretches of technical detail that some readers skim.

The television version is well regarded and it invents a great deal: characters make different choices, relationships are rearranged, and it does not end where the novel ends. Emily St. John Mandel's book is quieter and moves differently, circling one Hollywood actor's life through the people who knew him before a pandemic and the people performing Shakespeare after it.

One caveat: It is a pandemic novel, which not every reader wants now.

Greta Gerwig's adaptation cuts between the sisters' childhood and their adult lives, which is a filmmaker's answer to a book that runs straight forward in two parts. Alcott gives you what the film has to compress: the theatricals, the money worries, the long middle in which nothing dramatic happens and everything is quietly being decided. Read it and the film's structure looks like an argument about the ending.

One caveat: The moralizing chapters have dated badly.

Stephen Chbosky wrote and directed the adaptation of his own novel, which makes it one of the closest film versions of a book there is. The book is still worth reading, because it is written as letters from a fifteen-year-old to a stranger he never names, and that voice — hesitant, over-explaining, missing things the reader can see — is the whole point of it.

One caveat: Deals with sexual abuse, suicide and drug use.

The film keeps the premise and replaces most of the contest. The book's challenges are 1980s deep cuts — games, films and lines of dialogue that reward a reader who enjoys a footnote — and the adaptation trades them for set pieces that work better on screen. Read it for the hunt rather than the story, which is roughly the same either way.

One caveat: The reference-stacking is relentless and the prose is plain.