Sunday 7 July 2013

A change of reading habit

Perhaps it's because I'm busy these days, and between work and parenting and gaming I just don't have time to read books like I used to.  However, there is one rather embarrassing thing that I HAVE noticed about my reading habits..

... and that is that I read a book AFTER I have watched a movie.

Take Harry Potter, though that was what started it all, I think.  I watched the first movie and then after that I read the books as they came out.  That was well before I had children though.

More recently, there was Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.  I read the books after I watched the first movie.  I actually quite enjoy the movies, and I liked the last one especially as Bella came into her abilities.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - I watched both versions of the movie and then I read all three books.  The Swedish version is very good, I thought.  Though Lisbeth was annoying towards the end, but it was still a good read, and a good watch.

The other day I saw my sister watching Beautiful Creatures, and I only saw the end.  I didn't know what it was about but she told me it was a book, so I read the book.  I read all the books, actually.  Another teenage romance with a supernatural.  It was not a BAD read, but it was a teenager's book, really.

Hunger Games was another that I read after I watched the movie.  I haven't even read the second book yet, but probably because the book did not engage me as much as I thought it would.  Weird, since it was so popular and I managed to read through Beautiful Creatures, so why can't I get through this teenage book?

The latest one was World War Z.  Zombie movies are generally not my thing, but I watched this one because I had heard good things about it.  Then when I was talking about it, a World of Warcraft guildmate told me that he refused to watch it because it was nothing like the book.  So I was curious, I read the book.  And it really was different.  So different that it has been on my mind for days, that I thought I would write about it in its own post.

I even have a reading list of books to read from the movies I've watched!

  • The Big Year.  I quite enjoyed the movie - it's about birding and competition, which is already something that interests me - so I would like to see how the book pans out.
  • We bought a Zoo is another one which was a cute movie, and I wonder how it reads as a book.
  • The Help - I really really enjoyed that movie.  My sister says it's a good book.

2 comments:

  1. My youngest, age 16, watched the Lord of the Rings series, then read the books. Having done it the other way around, I thought it might help. The books had a lot of extraneous stuff that bogged it down. He was very happy to read The Hobbit before the movie came out.

    He got us to read Hunger Games before the movie. I'm not sure whether that made a difference. They have a lot of differences.

    We started the Harry Potter books before the movies started to arrive.

    I can also tell you that James Bond movies are different from their books!

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    1. Oh I need to go finish reading those Hunger games books!

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