I might not be writing as many reviews as normal over the next few weeks due to moving house which as I'm sure folk know is a very stressful time. Packing, tidying and sorting to be done, so that's taking up a lot of time, taking away my precious reading time (insert crying face here!)! So I thought I'd do an opinion post.
A lot of the big budget films get a novelisation. An adaptation of the book written for young adults/younger kids to enjoy. When I was younger, I really used to enjoy them, but by the age of 13, when I became a complete book worm and decided that I wanted to be a writer, I changed my mind. Now I find them to be completely dire!
Take for example the novelisation of Spider Man 3, which my cousin brought me as a gift, and I found today amongst my things. I adored the film, watched it only the other day infact. But the novelisation didn't seem to feature half of the film. How can you condense a 2 hour film, to just 138 A5-ish pages with what must be at least size 20 font? It's diabolocal! I get leaving things out of a film when adapting a book for the big screen, but leaving stuff out of the film... It just doesn't seem right?
And the font size is another thing. Now, I like long books, but not overly long. 200-300 is brilliant. Then there are your Harry Potters coming in at nearly 700 pages every time. But the font is regular, standard size. It's easily readable but it also doesn't make you feel like a 5-year-old reading for the first time with words nearly as big as the page. Novelisations just seem to be so poorly designed and thought out.
So what do you think about novelisations of your favourite films? Yay, or Nay? Please leave a comment. Interested to see what other people think.
To be honest, I never knew there were movie-to-book adaptations. Hold on, I think I'm lying, I heard recently that there will be a book for The Last Airbender, so maybe - but I don't know if there was a book beforehand.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I would want to read them though, I'm not sure. Simply because, sometimes, I tend to be disappointed with a book if I've seen the book-to-movie adaptation before. Nothing beats being disappointed by a book. The other reason is, I think to myself I already know what's going to happen, there won't be any surprises, so why bother? Saying that, I do re-read books, so it's not really a valid argument. I'm not sure.
Hope your move isn't too stressful and you get settled in soon! Look forward to your reviews when things are all sorted!
To be honest, I don't really like movie-to-book novelizations.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the transition from book to movie, where the director reads the original and takes liberties to make it a high-quality movie, novelizations tend to take all the action in movies and string them into a narrative, without caring whether it would make a good book or not.
I can see why publishers make novelizations-- they are almost guaranteed to sell because of the movie. However, marketing/ repackaging a book because of a movie makes the publisher less of a sell-out xD Like what they did with Pride and Prejudice, or with Brideshead Revisited.