mac_d wrote:
Just finished Lord of the Rings.
Honestly, thought it was hideously boring. Tolkien needed some editting... One of the few cases where, for me, movie(s) better than book.
Also recently read To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it because, along with Catcher in the Rye, it is often on those lists of Top 25 books etc. Catcher in the Rye was absolute bollocks. Nothing happened. Nothing bad or dodgy occured. It was just Holden bumming about for a bit. Okay, a teacher tried to touch him up but seriously, why was this ever banned?
Anywho, To Kill a Mockingbird. Brilliant. A truly brilliant book. I was surpised how much I enjoyed this. After a slow start, it really picks up and in the end I was sad to finish it.
Sidenote: I generally don't read fiction. I don't really like fiction books. I like auto/biographies and science/pseudoscience type books. I liked Harry Potter, I liked To Kill a Mockingbird... Dark Materials was decent. I liked Lord of the Flies. I thought all Shakespeare was overrated and mostly pretty pish. Especially Hamlet. How do we wrap up the plot? Kill everyone! Dickens was kinda boring, but entertaining enough.
Tolkien himself, wasn't a typical fictional writer and the way he wrote TLOTR was very different to how anything would be written today. It was also written with him using his unpublished made up history of middle earth which he only invented for his own pleasure and was never supposed to be published, as such a awful lot of TLOTR has an unmentioned back story so readers have no clue as to what is being mentioned! I was one of the people who read it when I was 12 and loved it so much that I went about finding out about Middle Earth and all the cultures and history and such which has added to my enjoyment of TLOTR when re-reading.
The films have obviously been altered a fair bit to keep the plot relevant to the main story and move the story along as best they can using only the relevant information for the main characters, which I would say is a fair enough reason for changing the story when writing a screen play. The Hobbit on the other hand, they have really extended the book a lot in the first film and included little bits of the history of Middle Earth (although again altered slightly for the screen) that are neither in the book nor needed to progress the story! I'm guessing this is largely down to wanting to milk it for all it's worth in 3 films when the book could easily have been made into one single film!
Generally, I like to read a book as well as seeing the screen play as I usually find tv and films to be more of a accompaniment to the books. The exception there being The Color Purple, I saw bits of the film and it seemed ok although not my kind of film. But when I read the book some years later for a literature course at college - my God, it was a awful book! (my opinion obviously). I have to say the same about Frankenstein as well, seeing a few cheap horror adaptations and then reading the book, I just found it sooooo boring and nothing horror like at all, but I guess when it was written it had a much bigger impact.