Book-to-Screen Adaptations That Are Worth the Read

I came to the HBO version of Sex and the City before the Candace Bushnell book, binge-watching the series in my friend Alexa’s barn while drinking frozen margaritas. When I bought the book that had inspired the show, I was surprised that it was a collection of essays rather than a fictional narrative. But rather than diminish my appreciation of either work, that only enhanced it. I admired how Darren Star had created the dramatic arc of the series from Bushnell’s meditations on life in New York, and Bushnell’s essays give depth to the HBO adaptation. Coming at the material from both directions, Sex and the City is more than the sum of its parts.

Many of us have seen the ineffably beautiful Ang Lee film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, but how many have read the Annie Proulx short story that was the basis for it? Originally published in The New Yorker in 1997, this elegant literary work manages to convey the magnitude of the film in very few pages—and is a revelation for those who believe the short story too narrow to contain multitudes. If you love this story, you'll want to read the original story collection, Close Range.

"Friday Night Lights" sounds like the kind of show that I would hate: small-town Texas (not my turf), all about the guys (not my gender), and football (blech). But once I was hooked, I devoured the series—yeah, I was in love with both Coach AND Tammy—and then went back and ripped through both the book and the very different, but still fascinating, Billy Bob Thornton movie. When the original theme is this rich, it can inspire a number of complementary adaptations.

The Game of Thrones and Harry Potter series are both masterworks of imaginative literature that have been thrillingly translated to the screen, but for my taste, I’ll go with Gone with the Wind. Like the Stark family and the residents of Hogwarts, Scarlett and Rhett are such vivid characters on the page that you can’t imagine them being portrayed adequately on film—until suddenly, there they are, each work only enhancing your enjoyment of the other.

I didn’t really get into Orange Is the New Black till the second season when the stories began to feel more like fiction and less like reality. Maybe that’s because I prefer novels over memoirs. But Piper Kerman’s look at her own life behind prison walls has inspired the most diverse, relatable, and compelling cast of women to come along in years.

I watched the classic Hitchcock film of Daphne Du Maurier’s gothic masterpiece starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine for the first time in years the other night, and in loving it was reminded of how much I also loved the book. Is there a first line of a novel more evocative than “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”? Only Hitchcock could do justice to the moodiness and plot twists of Du Maurier’s genius work.