Station Eleven: The time shifts, the interiority of the story...it's hard to imagine a way this turns out well.
A Tale for the Time Being: The delicate paralleling of the narratives just seems like it would be really tricky to actually make work on-screen.
Middlesex: There's just so much story here...not to mention material that would need an extremely delicate hand to render with emotional honesty and not for shock value.
Lincoln in the Bardo: This book is intensely weird, in a way that's just inherently unfilmable.
The Bear and the Nightingale: Vasya is a heroine for the ages and if it was done correctly, a movie could be just as magical as the book. But I have a hard time believing that the chyerti wouldn't get cuted up and the heart of it dumbed down.
The Butcher's Daughter: I loved this book about a novice nun living through the religious turmoil of Henry VIII's reign, but it's way too much in her head. Nothing "happens".
The Blind Assassin: There are time shifts, unreliable narrators, and a lovely story-within-a-story that I can't imagine coming off as anything but cheesy if it were filmed.
Prep: Lee is so very inside her own head, the book is so rooted in the small-in-scope-but-large-in-impact agonies of adolescence, that rendering it so it could be visual seems impossible.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: This has the sweep and scope of an epic and I don't know that I think the parts of the story which integrate the comic, so important to the power of it, could be executed well.
Life After Life: There are so many lives here, some of which change only in small details and still end the same way, that I just don't think this story could be told anywhere but on the page.
Your arguments make perfect sense to me. Not every book would do well on the big or small screen.
ReplyDeleteMy TTT.
I think plot-driven books do best onscreen. I usually go for character-driven ones though!
DeleteThe movie, no matter how hard they try, ends up being the tip a massive iceberg of plot and growth and character... yeah. Sometimes there's just no way it could go well, even as a tip.
ReplyDeleteBooks are so much richer, for sure! But there's something great about watching it all play out visually too...when it works!
DeleteMovie people have nothing on book people! Wasn't this topic fun?! My TTT is a date night wishlist!
ReplyDeleteDefinitely a super fun topic! I love movies, too, but sometimes the book is just better off staying on the page!
DeleteCouldn't agree more.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear about a book I love being optioned, it's always half excitement and half fear!
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