We all have favorites.  Favorite movies, favorite songs, favorite foods.  And to each of these, we hold a certain amount of fanatical loyalty.  We love them, we don’t care who knows and if everyone else doesn’t understand, that’s fine.

But when it comes to books, the intensity of that fanaticism raises to beyond a fever pitch.  Avid readers seem to consider their favorite books as akin to parts of their heart and soul.   It goes beyond fandom into something much, much more complete: zealotry.

Despite my less than serious tone, I don’t consider this a bad thing at all. Books are easier to become emotionally invested in than songs or movies. Movies are over in a couple of hours, songs in a few minutes.

Books can take days to complete. You have to find time to fit them in. If you work full time, you almost have to schedule your day around them in order to get any reading time in. In these days, especially, reading is a commitment.

So it makes sense that the characters and stories held on pages hold more weight to people than most films do to moviegoers.

Noting this, I have to wonder how often film executives take any of this into account when deciding what books to adapt to film.  The answer is pretty clearly never.

There are some books that probably should never be adapted to film.  This list varies depending on who you talk to, but its clear – sometimes a literary work is so encompassing or beloved that making a movie out of it will do nothing for it’s legacy, but will only serve as an abridged version of what made the book so great in the first place.

And with some books, that’s akin to a crime against art.

Below, I looked at some of my favorite books and plays (which can be accessed in the menu above, under Books) to determine which of them should be adapted, which should never be attempted, and of the ones that already have been adapted, which succeeded.

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