Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.
August 25th: Book Adaptations
Prompts: What makes a good film adaptation of a book? With book to film adaptations, do you prefer to see movies or shows? What about other kinds of adaptations, like musicals? What are your favorite adaptations? Your least favorites? What upcoming ones are you most excited for?
Oh this is a fun topic! I think a good adaptation knows exactly what to leave in and what to take out. It has an understanding of the source material, but a willingness to change things to help it come across more visually. You cannot, for example, take pages and pages of detailed worldbuilding about everything from religion to how magic works to why this particular city looks the way it does, and have it on screen. What you can do, however, is show the city with its unique peculiarities, have a character who represents the religious aspects and shows the rituals involved, and maybe have the MC witness magical feats and have a discussion with someone after about them. In books we can have every single thing filtered through one single character’s eyes, but if we only followed one character on screen and never got to see anything else, things might get a bit boring!
With movies vs shows, I think it really hugely depends on the book. If you’ve seen my Book Casting series, I think it’s clear I fall right between for preferences. A show can be great for something that’s a longer running series and needs more time for character development, or something like Bridgerton where you have a lot of different characters and storylines to set up, and each book focuses on a different couple (seriously though – more book romance TV shows please!). With fantasy, a TV series allows you to spend more time building up the world. But I think the majority of horror lends itself to film so well, especially as it’s so much based on tension it’s not always something you can stretch out over 2 – 3 hours!
Similarly, other types of adaptations can be really effective – depending on the book! Podcast adaptations have been around a long while, and there are some great full cast audiobooks out there that breathe a different kind of life into a book. Musicals I think is another great avenue to explore, but it takes someone very skilled to go that route for adaptation.
Favourite adaptations is hard, largely because I find I have different reactions based on how I heard the story first. The first version I saw of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, for example, was the 1979 animated version, before I ever read the books. It’s far from the best animation, but it holds a special place in my heart! I found reading The Duke & I after seeing Bridgerton, I’m not enjoying the book as much as I might if I had read it first. Recently, I’ve been so impressed with the TV show of Good Omens, and I really loved The Sandman, both of which I had read first, and think are incredibly well written books. Stardust, again, I love both book and film equally, though I saw the film first, but they’re both very different beasts, with the film being angled towards a younger audience. But maybe it’s because Neil Gaiman’s writing is so cinematic in itself, it just makes for good TV!
I Am Legend and World War Z are both books I absolutely loved, but adaptations I haven’t actually watched, largely because in both cases everything I’ve heard indicates they absolutely mangle the original source. I Am Legend I did try to watch, but couldn’t get through the first ten minutes and knew the changes to the impactful book ending beforehand. World War Z should get another chance at an adaptation, and this is a hill I will die on, it should be a mockumentary. It should make me feel like these are interviews with actual survivors of the zombie apocalypse, just as the book did. Or maybe it could be released as a podcast series, instead – that could be quite interesting!
As for least favourite adaptations I’ve seen…maybe The Dark Tower. Which I actually thought was an enjoyable film, but the first Dark Tower film should have maybe gone a bit differently? Actually, talking about Stephen King, I don’t think The Shining was a great adaptation, though again, a decent enough film, I just feel like the book had more depth to the characters. I don’t think I can think of any more least favourites, though there are a load I think could have been done better, starting with the Narnia films and The Golden Compass. (Thankfully, we had a much better adaptations of those books more recently!)
I could go on with this topic – it really is an interesting one! – so I’ll stop there, but I would love to hear what your favourite adaptations are!
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