What’s that you say? The book is always better than the movie? Literature is a far superior medium for storytelling and the Lumière brothers can go straight to hell? Well, that’s a little extreme, but for the most part we at Book Marks agree with you. Having said that, sometimes even we take a beat to think about cinematic gems like Jaws, and The Godfather, and The Silence of the Lambs, and Blade Runner, and There Will Be Blood, and The Notebook—The Notebook, people—and it gives us pause. Perhaps it’s best not to view it as a contest, and instead to just sit back enjoy the novelty of seeing how a group of strangers have interpreted a beloved fictional world which, up to that point, has only existed on the page and in your imagination. If they do it well, the movie will draw more people to your precious book, which can only be a good thing; if they make a mess of it (I’m looking at you, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Dark Tower, The Cat in the Hat), well, it’s not really going to effect how people view the source material, and you can always have some fun tearing strips off the failed attempt on Twitter.
Alternatively, if you’re the kind of obsessive, completist soul who just has to have someone tell you which is superior, the book or its adaptation, we’ve compared the Rotten Tomatoes Film Ratings for 17 of 2018’s highest profile films and TV shows based on works of literature, with the Book Marks Book Rating of said works. How scientific is all this? How conclusive? How definitive? The answer to all is probably “not very,” but it sure is fun.
*
Annihilation (Paramount)
Based on: Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
Directed by: Alex Garland
Starring: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Lee, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac
Book Marks Book Rating = RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating = 88%
Book Review: “Annihilation, in which the educated and analytical similarly meets up with the inhuman, is a clear triumph for VanderMeer, who after numerous works of genre fiction has suddenly transcended genre with a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal … The apparent tragedy and freakish ecology of Area X’s blight are quite fascinating, and the solitary voice of its post-humanist narrator is both deeply flawed and deeply trustworthy—a difficult and excellent balance in a novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark.”
–Lydia Millet (The Los Angles Review of Books)
*
Crazy Rich Asians (Warner Bros)
Based on: Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan (2013)
Directed by: Jon M. Chu
Starring: Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding
Book Marks Book Rating: POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 100%
Book Review: “…[a] rollicking, often-riotous debut novel … As a way of educating the reader, Kwan provides myriad footnotes, which offer translations of Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin words, as well as further explanations of the high-end culture and society. The author’s wit adroitly penetrates the fine print … One of the few drawbacks of the narrative is the deliberate litany of name-dropping and designer brands, which grows a little wearisome. That said, with each chapter, Kwan skillfully moves the narrative forward with escalating tension … Crazy Rich Asians is an entertaining, engrossing novel. Kwan certainly knows how to tell a lively, generous story of shallow extravagance and human devotion.”
–S. Kirk Walsh (The Boston Globe)
*
Red Sparrow (20th Century Fox)
Based on: Red Sparrow, Jason Matthews (2013)
Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling
Book Marks Book Rating: RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 47%
Book Review: “Matthews keeps the trouble popping in Red Sparrow, but relentless drama is just one of the high points of this sublime and sophisticated debut … Red Sparrow may sound like some hodgepodge of the fantastic (seeing emotions?) and the prurient (‘an Upper Volga Kama Sutra’) amid a series of spy vs. spy shenanigans. But the novel is far more grounded. The stakes here are high, with agents on both sides desperately following streams of sensitive information, but Matthews focuses on the people and the intelligence community’s day-to-day routines … Red Sparrow isn’t just a fast-paced thriller—it’s a first-rate novel as noteworthy for its superior style as for its gripping depiction of a secretive world. While many former CIA agents and MI6 operatives have turned to writing fiction in retirement, Matthews joins a select few who seem as strong at their second careers as at their first.”
–Art Taylor (The Washington Post)
*
The Yellow Birds (Cinelou Films/Echo Films)
Based on: The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers (2012)
Directed by: Alexandre Moors
Staring: Tye Sheridan, Alden Ehrenreich, Toni Collette, Jason Patric, Jack Huston, Jennifer Aniston
Book Marks Book Rating: POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 45%
Book Review: “The Yellow Birds is a rich chronicle of mendacity: men lie to each other and to themselves; ‘memory’ itself, the narrator observes, is half imagined … The Yellow Birds…achieves its most surprising and authentically obscene moments in a different register altogether. The book revives the World War I tradition that the late Paul Fussell called ‘war pastoral,’ a mode practiced by Owen’s soldier-poet contemporaries (Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, among others), who exposed the old lie by transplanting the pastoral imagery of the English poetic tradition to the wasted soil of the trenches … Powers’s brutal lyricism feels fresh because it recalls a mode so decisively eclipsed by the high-octane hyperrealism of so much contemporary writing about war. It is this tenacious lyric voice that sets his novel, heavy though it is with war’s silencing pain and shame, apart.”
–Elizabeth Samet (The New Republic)
*
We the Animals (Cinereach)
Based on: We the Animals by Justin Torres
Directed by: Jeremiah Zagar
Starring: Evan Rosado, Raúl Castillo, Sheila Vand, Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel
Book Marks Book Rating: RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 92%
Book Review: “…a slender but affecting debut novel … the kind of sensitive, carefully wrought autobiographical first novel that may soon be extinct from the mainstream publishing world … Telling incidents are described in simple language that occasionally rises to a keening lyricism … The scenes have the jumbled feel of homemade movies spliced together a little haphazardly, echoing the way memory works … From the patchwork emerges a narrative of emotional maturing and sexual awakening that is in many ways familiar (no prizes for guessing the nature of the sexual awakening in question) but is freshened by the ethnicity of the characters and their background, and the blunt economy of Mr. Torres’s writing, lit up by sudden flashes of pained insight … He does not always avoid the kind of overly cultivated eloquence that announces a writer staking his claim for literary achievement.”
–Charles Isherwood (The New York Times Book Review)
*
Ready Player One (Warner Bros)
Based on: Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (2011)
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Hannah John-Kamen
Book Marks Book Rating: RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 73%
Book Review: “Few novels set up an engaging plot as fast as this one. In the first three pages, Cline cleverly lures readers into the crux of the story … In its charmingly odd manner, this is Willy Wonka meets The Matrix. Wade Watts, a nerdy computer-wiz high-schooler living in Oklahoma City’s ‘stacks’ (ghettos), is the story’s narrator and unlikely hero determined to win Halliday’s contest…As the contest’s front-runner, he gains instant global respect, new friends and deadly enemies … OASIS brims with ’80s references, icons, trivia and nostalgia—Pac-man, WarGames, Zork, Duran Duran, AC/DC, Rush, Star Wars, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Dungeons & Dragons, anime. So does the entire novel, which in its quirky way is fun.”
–Don Oldenburg (USA Today)
*
Lean on Pete (The Bureau/Film4 Productions)
Based on: Lean on Pete, Willy Vlautin (2010)
Directed by: Andrew Haigh
Starring: Charlie Plummer, Chloë Sevigny, Travis Fimmel, Steve Buscemi
Book Marks Book Rating: POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 92%
Book Review: “Willy Vlautin writes novels about people all alone in the wind. His prose is direct and complex in its simplicity, and his stories are sturdy and bighearted and full of lives so shattered they shimmer. All of his novels are good, but Lean on Pete is his best … His prose is strong, his storytelling is honest, and he sticks to it scene by scene. By the time Lean on Pete reaches its sweet but unsentimental end, Charley Thompson isn’t a character in a novel, but a boy readers have come to love. Lean on Pete riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature.”
–Cheryl Strayed (The Oregonian)
*
The Little Stranger (Element Pictures)
Based on: The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (2009)
Directed by: Lenny Abrahamson
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter, Charlotte Rampling
Book Marks Book Rating: POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: N/A (Release Date: August 31)
Book Review: “Sarah Waters’s masterly novel is a perverse hymn to decay, to the corrosive power of class resentment as well as the damage wrought by war. Hundreds Hall is crawling with blights and moulds, crumbling from subsidence and water damage … The reader of Affinity will know that Waters is creepily conversant with ways to scare us. The reader of Fingersmith will know how deftly she handles a plot twist. The Little Stranger is a more controlled and composed novel than her last book, the widely admired The Night Watch, which was set during the second world war. Here she deploys the vigour and cunning one finds in Margaret Atwood’s fiction. She has the same narrative ease and expansiveness, and the same knack of twisting the tension tighter and tighter within an individual scene … Waters manages the conclusion of her book with consummate, quiet skill. It is gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining.”
–Hilary Mantel (The Guardian)
*
Sharp Objects (HBO)
Based on: Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn (2006)
Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring: Amy Adams, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina
Book Marks Book Rating: RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Series Rating: 93%
Book Review: “Not often enough, I come across a first novel so superb that it seems to have been written by an experienced author, perhaps with 20 earlier books to his or her credit. I’m extremely excited to discover my first debut blowout this year, a sad, horrifying book called Sharp Objects … [Flynn] is the real deal. Her story, writing and the characters will worm their way uncomfortably beneath your skin…But this is more literary novel than simple mystery, written with anguish and lyricism. It will be short-listed for one or more important awards at the end of the year … Sharp Objects is a 2006 favorite so far. I doubt I’ll ever forget it.”
–Alan Cheuse (The Chicago Tribune)
*
On Chesil Beach (Number 9 Films/BBC Films)
Based on: On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan (2007)
Directed by: Dominic Cooke
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle
Book Marks Book Rating: POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 69% (nice)
Book Review: “This short novel takes place on the first night of their honeymoon, with many flashbacks, and at the end a great flash forward, and at the core an enormous misunderstanding … It is difficult to judge whether to give away the plot of this book…is to lessen its impact on the reader. McEwan writes prose judiciously; his books seem to depend on plain writing and story and careful plotting, with much detail added to make the reader believe that these words on the page must be followed and believed as the reader would follow and believe a well-written piece of journalism. On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end.”
–Colm Tóibín (The London Review of Books)
*
The Wife (Sony Picture Classics)
Based on: The Wife, Meg Wolitzer (2003)
Directed by: Björn Runge
Starring: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater
Book Marks Book Rating: POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: 95%
Book Review: “…a light-stepping, streamlined novel … rage might be the signature emotion of the powerless, but in Wolitzer’s hands, rage is also very funny … Wolitzer deploys a calm, seamless humor not found in her previous novels … they gradually accumulate, creating a rueful, sardonic atmosphere … The book represents a real step forward for Wolitzer, and its success lies in its reticence … if The Wife is a puzzle and an entertainment, it’s also a near heartbreaking document of feminist realpolitik.”
–Claire Dederer (The New York Times)
*
Bel Canto (A-Line Pictures)
Based on: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001)
Directed by: Paul Weitz
Starring: Julianne Moore, Christopher Lambert, Ken Watanabe
Book Marks Book Rating: RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: N/A (Release Date: September 14)
Book Review: “This is a story of passionate, doomed love; of the glory of art; of the triumph of our shared humanity over the forces that divide us, and a couple of other unbearably cheesy themes, and yet Patchett makes it work, completely … For in spite of the ripe emotionality of Bel Canto, Patchett proves herself from the start to be too unsentimental and honest to serve up a contrived ending. You can tell by the book’s host of tart observations…that this is one writer who won’t bullshit us.”
–Laura Miller (Salon)
*
A Simple Favor (Lionsgate)
Based on: A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell
Directed by: Paul Feig
Starring: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively
Book Marks Book Rating: MIXED
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating: N/A (Release Date: September 14)
Book Review: “You are going to be hearing a lot about A Simple Favor. Debut author Darcey Bell manages to cram a lot of living, if you will, into a standard-length novel with some extremely contemporary, ‘right-now’ elements and enough sordid episodes and surprises to fill a couple of books … Bell sets things up nicely. You know these women, or ones similar to them. You may even be one of them, up to a point … You will come to doubt everything you know before the book reaches its conclusion … While it is tough to predict such things, it is a good bet that you will be seeing Bell’s novel stuffed in a lot of beach bags this summer. It is engrossing, fascinating in parts, and very real-world in spots.”
–Joe Hartlaub (20SomethingReads)
*
The Looming Tower (Hulu)
Based on: The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright (2006)
Directed by: Craig Zisk
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Jeff Daniels, Peter Sarsgaard
Book Marks Book Rating: RAVE
Rotten Tomatoes Series Rating: 94%
Book Review: “What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. The Looming Tower is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too—though you’d never know it—a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today.”
–Dexter Filkins (The New York Times Book Review)
*
Boy Erased (Focus Features)
Based on: Boy Erased, Garrard Conley (2016)
Directed by: Joel Edgerton
Starring: Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton, Russell Crowe
Book Marks Book Rating = POSITIVE
Rottom Tomatoes Film Rating = N/A (Release Date: November 2)
Book Review: “…[a] stunning debut memoir … Boy Erased is a gut-punch of a memoir, but the miracle of this book is the generosity with which Conley writes in an effort to understand the circumstances and motivations that led his family to seek the ‘cure’ … Conley writes vividly, with intelligence, wit, and genuine empathy. By embracing complexity and compassion, he reclaims his life and reminds us that a story rarely belongs to one person alone.”
–Steven Tagle (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
*
The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Columbia Pictures)
Based on: The Girl in the Spider’s Web, David Lagercrantz (2015)
Directed by: Fede Álvarez
Staring: Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, LaKeith Stanfield
Book Marks Book Rating = MIXED
Rotten Tomatoes Film Rating = N/A (Release Date: November 9)
Book Review: “Though there are plenty of lumps in the novel along the way, Salander and Blomkvist have survived the authorship transition intact and are just as compelling as ever … Mr. Lagercrantz’s efforts to connect unsavory doings in Sweden to machinations within America’s National Security Agency are strained and fuzzy—a bald attempt to capitalize on Edward J. Snowden … In Spider’s Web, Mr. Lagercrantz demonstrates an instinctive feel for the world Larsson created … Mr. Lagercrantz captures the weariness, even vulnerability, that lurks beneath these two characters’ toughness … Spider’s Web is less bloody, less horror movie lurid than its predecessors. In other respects, Mr. Lagercrantz seems to have set about—quite nimbly, for the most part—channeling Larsson’s narrative style, mixing genre clichés with fresh, reportorial details, and plot twists … Instead of pausing to parse the implausibility of some of the interlinking conspiracies in Spider’s Web, the reader quickly turns pages to see how Salander and Blomkvist will put together the puzzle.”
–Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)
*
Dietland (AMC)
Based on: Dietland, Sarai Walker (2015)
Created by: Marti Noxon
Starring: Joy Nash, Julianna Marguiles, Mya Taylor
Book Marks Book Rating = POSITIVE
Rotten Tomatoes Series Rating = 81%
Book Review: “…the novel doesn’t rest with a predictable message of sugary self-acceptance: Dietland swerves suddenly and powerfully from chick lit to revenge fantasy … Dietland resonated with the part of me that wants, just once, to deck a street harasser. At the very least, I wish an incurable itch upon everyone who has catcalled me on the street. I wish food poisoning and public embarrassment on everyone I’ve heard make a rape joke. I wish toothache and head lice and too-small shoes upon every stranger who has told me to smile. Which is to say, sometimes I forget I’m angry, but I am. Dietland is a complicated, thoughtful and powerful expression of that same anger.”
–Annalisa Quinn (NPR)
