I know you didn’t mean this, but I’m now imagining your reading a kid’s book to a bunch of people in their 30s.
I’ve already read the Phantom Tollbooth. Been a long while, but I remember most of it. Did see the movie too. Pretty sure I preferred the book.
But I’m with LSLguy that, as a middle aged man, I want to read the Phantom Toolbooth. That sounds like a fun story that I could relate to.
Now that was a great book. Read it at least a half dozen times.
DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE.
But if you want your kids to be traumatized for life, let them watch it.
“Hey kids, you want to watch a movie about a bunch of cute bunnies?”
I love The Phantom Tollbooth. It’s one of my favorite books. I even kinda like the movie, though not as much. It leaves out the part where Milo meets Alec Bings, and the kid who’s half a person who drives, like, two-thirds of a car.
I just got a annotated copy of TPTB, and it is as lovely as ever.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress caused me to stop re-reading recently. Yes, the “Man my only friend” parts are still great but the long, boring and wrong political diatribes ruined it for me this time. I now know better.
I still like both The Hobbit and LotR.
I liked The Hobbit as a child. Not so much as an adult.
I’ve tried reading LOTR at various ages, and never managed to get into it. Even the movie didn’t interest me.
The Hobbit is written as a children’s book.
Interestingly, the first few of chapters of LOTR have a similar style - talking foxes, fun at parties, jolly wizards etc. By the end of LOTR all characters are declaiming deathless prose more suitable to Epic Theatre.
I guess Tolkein wanted to establish the Shire as this magical, kid-friendly fantasy world rather like Wonderland or the 100-acre wood - a refuge from the serious world outside.
(The Phantom Tollbooth is great, and I pulled out my copy yesterday to check the Chroma-Toscanini connection).
That and the fact that he changed his mind about what he was writing not long into the work but never went back to change the tone of the opening chapters because it worked as a loss of innocence thing.
Jules Feiffer pretty much taught me to draw with that book. I remember very little of Juster’s plot but I can probably draw Officer Shrift from memory 45 years later.
IMO that applies to every book/movie ever made. Whichever one you encounter first, don’t ever do the other.
IMO no movie can do justice to a book. And no book can do justice to a movie. The two narrative mechanisms are just too different. Either one can tell a story well, but they can’t tell the same story well.
There are famously only 7 actual plots in all of human literature, and yet there are millions of books and thousands of movies for each. The only reason humanity didn’t write the first 7 books or plays then quit for good is that the details matter. And the kinds of details that fit a movie are anathema in a book & vice versa.
Or at least that’s my take.
There are a few exceptions.
Jaws & Jurassic Park are both better than the books. Gump also. I read Jurassic Park first for the record.
The Godfather is a great movie from a good book.
To Kill a Mockingbird is as good as the book. I read the book first.
Many would say Gone with the Wind the movie is better.
The Phantom Tollbooth is the last book I read to my kids before they ceased being tweens. I have a soft spot in my heart for that book.
Right alongside the Great Brain series–I have read those books to multiple kids over the years and everyone loves them. Boy I miss reading to children at bedtime.
Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It is, in my view, a classic of American literature; spare, poetic, haunting.
Robert Redford’s film version is just short of being equally good.
I’d say the TV versions of The Magicians, The Umbrella Academy, and The Boys have all outdone the source material.
I dunno I thought the film was fine, and the film version of Holes (written by Louis Sachar) was true to the book.
I find JP to be a perfectly enjoyable movie, but the book is superior. One of the few examples where I can enjoy both.
In my experience, @LSLGuy generally has it right though- if you enjoy one, it tends to tarnish your view of the other.
The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption are both quality movies that are also equally good novels/novellas.
I freaking love this book. I own several copies and have multiple tattoos of the book’s illustrations namely Chroma and The Terrible Trivium
The Shawshank movie takes a lot of narration word for word from the novel. I have managed to get people who otherwise would not read a book to read this one by telling them that they would hear Morgan Freeman’s voice in their head when reading the book. It worked, although perhaps that will still be the last book those guys ever read,
Well, yeah. I can’t think of a movie that didn’t disappoint me after I read the book.
But this wasn’t just disappointing, this was a crime against humanity to create and then market as a kid’s movie.
The book could be a bit traumatizing, I suppose, as it describes genocide and then predation and even fights to the death among rabbits.
But watching it, with cute cartoon rabbits being slaughtered and beaten and shot, that’s a bit much.
Gotta disagree with the latter there. I read JP as a kid, and it was my favorite book at the time. When I heard the movie was being made, I was beside myself with excitement.
Then I saw it, and it was one of the bigger letdowns of my young life at the time.
The rest of the franchise was even worse.