KM Explains It All

When Books Come To Life!


Just so we have a little bit more consistency with my posts, I've decided to make the last Tuesday of every month the day where I talk about books turning into movies.  I also forgot to mention after Jen Biff talked about Gulliver's Travels she said that she hadn't seen the new Jack Black version so she wasn't sure how that compared...let me tell you it's horrible so just don't even waste your time with it.  Anyways here's this months picks!


The Outsiders

Barnes and Noble overview can be found here (photo taken from google.com)

I'm a pretty big sucker for anything with Rob Lowe in it so I had to see the movie after I read the book.  It's one of my favorite books and has some really great characters with pretty awesome names (Ponyboy, Sodapop, Two-Bit, etc).  S.E. Hinton did an amazing job describing how the differences in social class can be in certain areas and how it affects the children and teens in those areas.  Granted it may have been an extreme outlook on how these classes might have behaved but it is a book that I think everyone should read.  The book isn't very long so I couldn't imagine anything being left out when it was turned into a movie so I was pleased with the adaptation.


Dracula

Barnes and Noble overview can be found here (photo taken from google.com) 

As I've mentioned before I LOVE horror movies and have been reading classic horror books in between some of my other books.  Dracula was number one on my list not only because of the vampire craze that's taken over the world but also because I was always interested in this story.  I've seen a few movies based off of this book and let me tell you they are all pretty horrible.  The one with Gary Oldman was particularly memorable because of how terrible some of the scenes were.  There's one scene where, Jonathan Harker sees Dracula climbing down the wall of the castle and describes him as a lizard.  In the movie they attempt this but go a little too far with the lizard description.  Gary sticks his tongue out like a lizard and just looks ridiculous.  The book is written as diary entries from the different characters so the one thing I liked about this was that they used this for the narration.  Since this is a classic, and let's face it I would say this no matter what, you should definitely read the book instead of the movie...especially that version.


The Vampire Diaries

Barnes and Noble overview can be found here (photo taken from google.com) 

This series is the basis for the CW show The Vampire Diaries but I must say they are very different.  The thing that bugs me about the CW is that they will show a few episodes of a show then not show them for a few weeks leaving me wondering what's going to happen.  Since I'm so impatient I picked up one of these books to see if I could get ahead of the game.  I didn't really want to read them since I read enough books like this but I was pretty determined to know what was going to happen before the show came back from it's mini break.  Come to find out the only real similarities between the show and the books are the characters names.  Every now and then while I was reading I would find something that reminded me of the show but it was nothing like the Game of Thrones adaptations where I could read the first book to go with the first season and the second one to go with this season.  While I was slightly disappointed that I wasn't going to find out how the season ended before it actually did I was also pleased because it was another good story.  The books include more magic and supernatural elements that would just be too difficult to put on a show.  Since both are so different I recommend checking them both out!


What books are you excited to see come to life?  Let me know!!!