For a literary spin on the movies, there’s But Have You Read the Book?, a compendium of 52 stories taken from print to screen. You won’t be surprised to discover titles such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Blade Runner here, but did you know Jaws was first a book? Goodfellas? The Social Network?
Author Kristen Lopez succinctly parses differences between the versions of each story, pointing out actor credits and box office facts for the movies and themes explored in the books. Rarely are the book and film notably similar; in the case of No Country for Old Men, Lopez writes that the Coen brothers “brought their patented blend of dark humor to [Cormac] McCarthy’s wild Texas landscape, transforming the book from a noirish, cynical take on the degradation of the country post-Vietnam into a melancholic look at the Western genre.”
So is But Have You Read the Book? for film buffs or book nerds? Both, I suppose, with its sweet spot in the Venn diagram overlap of the two.
