Books > Movies

Authors note: I got the idea for this when a friend was talking about the movies Divergent and Insurgent and claiming that they were better than their respective books. That statement is false by the way.

Movies are never better than their respective books. This is a fact of life and anybody who argues against it is either illiterate or plain old stupid. Occasionally a real gem of a movie comes along every now and then that comes close to or even matches a books quality, but rarely if ever has movie surpassed the book that it was based on.

There are many excellent reasons for this phenomenon, the primary of which is that unlike movies, books don’t have a size or length constraint. This leads to books being able to have as much content as the author wishes to put into them. To expand on this, when was the last time you saw a movie that was longer than four hours? Probably not recently if at all. Now, when was the last time you read a book that was longer than say, four hundred pages? If you're anything like me then it was most likely yesterday or the day before that. As far as books go four hundred pages really isn’t even that much, Eragon had well over a thousand and that was just the first book in a four book series, heck, even Artemis Fowl books had over four hundred pages and those were puny books.

Some people would argue that a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a million. I would argue against this with passion. If the author is of any quality they can easily give you a vastly detailed landscape in less than a paragraph by taking advantage of your imagination. While it is true that this scenery might be a bit different for each person that reads the book, it will certainly be just as detailed and beautiful for everyone.

Certain parts of most novels also don’t translate very well to movies, such as thoughts and emotions. Regardless of how good the movie director is they have to find a way to portray what a character is thinking, books don’t have this issue, if it is desired a quality author can easily tell the reader exactly what a person is thinking of by pressing ctrl+i or having a simple lead-in. Emotions are also just as easy to show in books as thoughts are whereas a movie has to linger on the face of the actor who is having such emotions.

So what say you reader? It’s very clear that books are a notch above movies, however, it is human nature to take the easy way out and movies certainly provide that. I will concede the point that reading takes effort, everyone knows that. So my challenge to you is to read a good book that has a movie and then watch the movie. Everything that I have said will be much clearer to you then, and in the meantime you will have read a great novel. It’s a win-win for everyone, actually really just for you but hey, that’s good enough.