Welcome to Booking Through Thursday, a weekly bookish meme about books and reading for everyone who loves both. Booking Through Thursday was first hosted by Deb. With permission, I’ve restarted it in 2026.
This week’s prompt:
It’s also summer blockbuster movie season! Do you enjoy book-to-movie (or series) adaptations? Believe the book is always better? Can you think of an instance when that wasn’t the case? Let us know!
Page to screen adaptations: Is the book always better? Is there a movie version you liked better than the book?
How to play:
- On your blog: Copy the question/image for your blog, answer it there, and post a quick comment here with a link or trackback to your post so we can read it.
- On social media: Copy the image, answer the prompt, and post a quick comment here with a link.
- Right here: Answer in the comments and start the discussion here. No need to have a blog to play.
Note: If it’s your first time here, your comment may end up in moderation. (My spam filter is aggressive.) I’ll be in after my writing sprints to set it free.
P.S. The prompt is always open, and you don’t have to play on Thursday. Comment whenever you like!
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Most of the time, I like the book better. There are things prose can do that a screenplay can’t, the main one being interiority of the characters. Too much voice over is … too much.
On the other hand, there are things movies can so so much better. It’s hard to describe say, the Imperial Fleet from Star Wars that inspires the same kind of awe as watching it on the screen.
One book where I think the movie was (mostly) better was Bridget Jones’s Diary. The last quarter or so of the book was … confusing (for me, at least). I even re-read it, thinking I was skimming or not paying close attention. Nope. Still didn’t understand. Apparently, it was not for me to know.
However, there is a scene in the movie where Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fight while It’s Raining Men plays in the background and … how do you convey *that* in prose.
Well, you don’t, that’s what. There are always trade-offs.
I know that I read Bridget Jones’s Diary, but I don’t remember much of it, except for her notes about weight, smokes, and alcohol units at the beginning of each chapter, so I’m not sure if I found parts of it confusing or not. The movie, though? That’s a classic, and we watch it at least once a year, and every part of it seems crystal clear to me, though. Until today, though, I had no idea that the music playing during the fight between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant (“it’s a fight — a real fight!) was a song that people might know. So thanks to you, now I do. If you haven’t seen the official video, it’s worth a look (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5aZJBLAu1E).
The fight scene in the movie lives rent-free in my head.
Here, again, I fall on the side of “it depends.” Sometimes I prefer movies made from Shakespeare’s plays over trying to parse out the script. Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V made me understand the story far more viscerally than any close reading of the lines ever had. Coppola’s Godfather series felt like grand opera, where Mario Puzo’s novels felt like vaguely sordid books I had to hide from my mother. And Ang Lee’s Sense & Sensibility was brilliant (with many thanks to Emma Thompson’s script).
Hitchcock’s Rebecca, though, felt melodramatic and overdone. Likewise, Reese Witherspoon’s Wild. Felt like they had missed the soul of these books — that interior monologue that you get in a novel that provides moral tension to the external circumstances.
I think, for our generation, Mario Puzo’s novels were vaguely sordid books we hid from our mothers.