Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a page to screen freebie. I’m not one of those people who think that a movie made of a book is necessarily going to be bad…sometimes, I think the movie even manages to be better! That being said, some books, even ones I love, I cringe to think about as a movie. Here are ten books that I think should stay on the page.
Station Eleven: The time shifts, the interiority of the story…it’s hard to imagine a way this turns out well.
A Tale for the Time Being: The delicate paralleling of the narratives just seems like it would be really tricky to actually make work on-screen.
Middlesex: There’s just so much story here…not to mention material that would need an extremely delicate hand to render with emotional honesty and not for shock value.
Lincoln in the Bardo: This book is intensely weird, in a way that’s just inherently unfilmable.
The Bear and the Nightingale: Vasya is a heroine for the ages and if it was done correctly, a movie could be just as magical as the book. But I have a hard time believing that the chyerti wouldn’t get cuted up and the heart of it dumbed down.
The Butcher’s Daughter: I loved this book about a novice nun living through the religious turmoil of Henry VIII’s reign, but it’s way too much in her head. Nothing “happens”.
The Blind Assassin: There are time shifts, unreliable narrators, and a lovely story-within-a-story that I can’t imagine coming off as anything but cheesy if it were filmed.
Prep: Lee is so very inside her own head, the book is so rooted in the small-in-scope-but-large-in-impact agonies of adolescence, that rendering it so it could be visual seems impossible.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: This has the sweep and scope of an epic and I don’t know that I think the parts of the story which integrate the comic, so important to the power of it, could be executed well.
Life After Life: There are so many lives here, some of which change only in small details and still end the same way, that I just don’t think this story could be told anywhere but on the page.