Maybe you've heard this once or twice, that the original novels are better than their movie adaptation? Many successful novels are adapted into movies, and more than often the films don’t quite live up to the expectations of the source material. But, is that always the case? Here’s a list of five books and movies, where the movies just might be a little better:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One of a series of fiction titles for schools. Scout, the keen-eyed narrator, and her brother Jem interrupt their games to champion their lawyer father when, in a hostile, racist town in the American South, he battles to defend Tom, who is black and accused of murder.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
In 1949 four Chinese women - drawn together by the shadow of their past - begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died. When her daughter comes to take her place, she learns of her mother's lifelong wish, and the tragic way in which it has come true.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads, the novel tells the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the story through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Book
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Movie
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.
So, what did you think? Are the books better?
All of the books and movies on this list can be found in your library.