Over the past few months, I’ve written a total of ten posts that have pitted a novel against its movie version to try and determine which one I feel is superior to the other. By no means was this any kind of science experiment or definitive answer; it was merely my own take on some of my favourite book and movie combos that I’ve seen over the past several years (and in some cases, longer ago than just a few years). Nor did I use any prescribed criteria to determine which I thought was best. It simply came down to revisiting each and deciding on the merits and demerits and what each medium brought to the table and was most appropriate to the effective telling of the story.

Here are the ten novels and movies that I decided to evaluate:

  1. The Sisters Brothers
  2. Ready Player One
  3. The Martian
  4. American Psycho
  5. Into the Wild
  6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
  7. Shutter Island
  8. Red Sparrow
  9. Rum Punch (film name: Jackie Brown)
  10. The Giver

Overall, I ended up choosing the novel version six times and the movie version 4 times. Here’s a breakdown of my choices.

Books:

  1. The Sisters Brothers
  2. American Psycho
  3. Into the Wild
  4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
  5. Red Sparrow
  6. The Giver

Movies:

  1. Ready Player One
  2. The Martian
  3. Shutter Island
  4. Jackie Brown

As can be seen, it’s a small sample size that slightly favours the book over the movie although if I’d gotten to a larger sample size I wonder if a ratio of 6:4 would have continued. My suspicion is that it probably would as I think that I do tend to like the book on slightly more occasions than the movie. However, it would also depend on which books and movies I decided to include. Some on the list above were quite easy for me to make a choice —American Psycho and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, were clear winners in my mind–whereas others, like The Martian, Jackie Brown and Ready Player One, were genuinely harder to decide as I truly love them in both mediums.

In thinking further about this free inquiry project that I’ve maintained over the past three months, I do see some obvious benefits to it. First, it was nice to engage with WordPress and embed things like YouTube links, images, quotes and more so as to be confident showing a group of students how to maintain a site/blog like this. Even though I’ve administered a blog like this before, it was quite a few years ago so it was nice to have a reminder. Second, there is a certain amount of satisfaction that comes with being able to see the tangible results of your labour. As someone who enjoys writing–both fiction and non-fiction–this was a nice chance to work on a low-stakes, informal writing project as a break form the lesson building and academic writing required from our other courses.

Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

Perhaps my only regret with this assignment is that I didn’t actually try to go after something new. Instead, I stayed in somewhat comfortable, familiar territory so as not to create work that was too challenging for myself. This had both merits and demerits. On the good side, it allowed me to get into a routine where the work I had to do was structured and clear. As someone who works well with built-in routines, this was an ideal approach for me. On the downside, I didn’t really get to expand on my writing style too much. Seeing as I’ve written a movie blog in the past, this was easy to accomplish. That’s not say I didn’t put any work or effort into it; I spent a good chunk of time on each post fleshing out some of the ideas and trying to balance the good and bad points of both the book and the movie. So overall I’m quite happy with how it turned out and it gives me a template for a blog should I ever decide to have students do it themselves.