Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Top Ten Tuesday: Good Books That Would Not Make Good Movies

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a page to screen freebie. I'm not one of those people who think that a movie made of a book is necessarily going to be bad...sometimes, I think the movie even manages to be better! That being said, some books, even ones I love, I cringe to think about as a movie. Here are ten books that I think should stay on the page.



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.

8 comments:

  1. Your arguments make perfect sense to me. Not every book would do well on the big or small screen.

    My TTT.

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    1. I think plot-driven books do best onscreen. I usually go for character-driven ones though!

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  2. The 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.

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    1. Books are so much richer, for sure! But there's something great about watching it all play out visually too...when it works!

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  3. Movie people have nothing on book people! Wasn't this topic fun?! My TTT is a date night wishlist!

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    1. Definitely a super fun topic! I love movies, too, but sometimes the book is just better off staying on the page!

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  4. Replies
    1. When I hear about a book I love being optioned, it's always half excitement and half fear!

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