Read the Book Before the Movie

Every adaptation makes a series of decisions about what to keep, what to compress, and what to translate into a different register. The best adaptations are not faithful; they are equivalent — they find a cinematic technique that does what the literary technique did, even if the two look nothing alike. This is harder than it sounds, and most adaptations don't fully manage it.

The seven books here have adaptations that are worth seeing. None of them is on this list because the adaptation is bad. They're here because in each case the book contains something that the adaptation's medium cannot hold: unreliable narration (Never Let Me Go, The Handmaid's Tale), prose style as emotional instrument (The Road), the specific experience of reading a philosophical argument inside a narrative (Story of Your Life), a child's angle of vision with its specific distortions (To Kill a Mockingbird), or sustained interiority across a long duration (Gone with the Wind).

Reading the book before you see the adaptation gives you the book's version first — which means the film will either confirm or diverge from what you've built in your head. Reading after gives you the film's visual rendering as a baseline and then lets the book expand or complicate it. Neither order is categorically better. But if the book's prose style is central to its effect — as it is for McCarthy and Ishiguro — read first. If the book's ideas travel reasonably well across the adaptation — as Orwell's do — the order matters less.