When I first saw The Russia House I really enjoyed it.
So I sought out LeCarré, and wound up loving him so much that I’ve now read all his books.
This in turn led me to the incredible BBC TV miniseries of Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy and Smiley’s People, with Alec Guinness utterly NAILING the role of George Smiley, among many many other acting treasures. I recommend it to anyone on Netflix. Thread with much detail here.
Strangely, this is the only time I can recall seeking out a book after seing the movie, but it worked out well.
Heh, I read the book a few months ago. It occured to me that some things that I liked about the movie just irked me to no end in the book, such as the repeated bits in the narration. That said, I DID like how the book did more to compare the unfulfilled white middle class members of Project Mayhem who were apparantly unhappy beacuse their fathers didn’t love them enough, and the people suffering from tuberculosis, cancer, and various other interesting and very bad diseases who were just coping with it.
That said, the one bit of repeated narration I DID like in the book, given the ending, was the one about how some people use parafin, but the narrator never does.
Oh, another book I read because of the movie: Patriot Games, and I gotta say, the movie made SO much more sense than the book, but I loved some of the over-the-top stuff that happened towards the end of the book, especially regarding a patrol boat crewed by Annapolish midshipman along with a college professor and a British naval officer.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The book and the movie are utterly wonderful. The movie wisely takes paragraphs of narration from Wharton’s delicate text. One of the rare circumstances where I can recommend both.
I also read A Beautiful Mind after watching the movie and found the book much, much, much better than the movie.
Me too, and I’m so glad it did. I haven’t finished it yet – I got mired down with schoolwork around “The Surgeon’s Mate” – but for a few months I was tearing through them as fast as they’d come from the library. And now, when I’m rereading the last few I read to catch up before plunging ahead, I’m catching so much that I didn’t when I was seventeen. Jack’s as endearing as ever, but Stephen and Diana are inventing new and interesting ways of ripping my heart out. It’s a ball. And I wish Barrett Bonden were my brother.
I haven’t read the Sharpe series yet, but I’m looking forward to it!
You should read the Hornblower books too, starting either with “Mr. Midshipman Hornblower” or “The Happy Return / Beat To Quarters” (alternate titles depending on the markets the books were sold in).
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower is the first chronological Hornblower book, but Happy Return was the first published book, and follows Hornblower’s career starting with his being Captain of the HMS Lydia. Either book you start with, read them chronologically forward from there. The books starting with Happy Return and ending with Lord Hornblower have a much more tied-together plot than the books taking place earlier in his career.
Of course, also watch the recent Hornblower TV movies, available on DVD, they’re very good.
I generally don’t buy a book unless it’s an established classic or otherwise promises to justify its place on my bookshelf (in terms of re-reading frequency, reference value, or literary merit). Thus, the Lord of the Rings movies inspired me to buy the books, but The Constant Gardener movie only prompted me to borrow the novel from the library for a few weeks.
Remember Diva? I found out later there was a whole series of books featuring the French master criminal and the Vietnamese girl (Alba?) by a guy named DelaCorta, IIRC. Wonderful short, quick reads.
(emphasis mine) True, because Ben Affleck was not in Starship Troopers.
Unless that was a whoosh…
OP: Here’s one that I don’t think has been mentioned: All the President’s Men. I must have seen that movie when I was quite young, because I feel like I’ve been fascinated by Watergate since I was a small child.
The Shipping News I loved both the book and the movie of this. However, I thought Annie Proulx acted like a baby when Brokeback Mountain didn’t win best picture.
My brother’s like that, and to be honest I don’t blame him. It’s aggravating when you find a good book and no one seems to have read it, then all of a sudden there’s major hype over it because a movie of it is made and everyone you meet is suddenly a fan, usually only because it’s the latest trend. The biggest case for him was with LOTR.
I was like that myself when Howl’s Moving Castle came out. Diana Wynne Jones had long been one of my favourite authors. I own a number of her books, including HMC. When the Hayao Miyazaki film was released last year (which was nowhere as good as the book IMO), one of my friends decided she was the movie’s biggest fan and therefore an expert on the movie, which was obviously superior to the book because she liked it. She also fell in love with Howl. That’s the kind of thing that annoys me. I also hate it when people act like the movie is the “default” version of a story when talking about it because it’s more hyped up than the novel. I thought the HP movies sucked, too.
Anyway, as for the OP. I like reading novels before seeing the movies so I can get my own perspective on them initially. The only book I can think of that I read after I saw the movie was Chocolat. I also started reading Cold Comfort Farm after seeing the film but never got around to finishing it…
Like I need another Age of Sail series to lose myself in! Thanks for the rec! Forester, right? I remember reading an autobiographical story of Roald Dahl’s in which he described the influence that Forester had on him as a budding author. Forester’s been on my “when I have the time” list for a looooong while, is what I’m saying.
Oh, man, me too. My mom made us watch the movie, and when I found the book at the library, I started to browse it, and man, that was a freaking awesome book.
Also, I second CalMeacham; Orson Scott Card’s novelization of The Abyss is the best novelization I’ve ever read, and when I read it after I watched the movie, it really added to the movie.
I was a science geek teenager. In 1975 after seeing Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, a great British-made history of Western science, technology, and intellectualism, I got the hardcover book with the text of all the shows and lots and lots of pictures. It included the opening lines from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake, which deeply impressed the visionary mystic me when I first heard the poem on the show, and frames of Bronowski kneeling in the mud at Auschwitz and sticking his hands in it because that was all that remained of his relatives’ ashes, making a plea for rational thought against fanaticism and mysticism as the only way to prevent Holocausts from happening. Bronowski’s simultaneous approval of and warning against mysticism certainly whetted my appetite for intellectual paradox and irony, foretelling much of the rest of my existence.
Monty Python drag skit: “Dr. Bronowski knows everything!” "Oh, I’d hate to know everything! It’d take all the mystery out of life!
Success The Ascent of Man got it to be the prototype of Carl Sagan’s similar but much more expensively and glitzily produced Cosmos — and I know practically all you Dopers of a certain age had that Cosmos book, admit it.
A Clockwork Orange - Bonus chapter and all. I love it, but I can see how it wouldn’t have worked as well for the movie.
Chocolat - I liked the movie better, actually. The movie’s “villain” seemed to have a decent heart; he wanted to do what he thought was right. The book “villain” was just a nasty piece of work all around.
In Cold Blood - Meant to read it, never did, watched Capote, and realized I had to read it. Good book.
I loved the PBS miniseries “The Jewel in the Crown” - hadn’t heard of the Raj Quartet books before the series but finished them before it was over. and I’m still recommending them.
I also read “The Forsyte Saga” books way back when in high school after seeing the original miniseries on PBS. Still amazed I plowed through them. Don’t know who I’d recommend these to.
And I wish Barrett Bonden were my brother.
