Discuss @ Carroll County Public Library discussion

Some of the best movies started out as truly awesome reads. This month we suggest reading a book that inspired a movie. If you like, watch the movie too. Let us know what you read and how the book compared to the movie if you viewed it.

I am going to "cheat" a little on this topic as I am going to mention an older novel and movie. This would be To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I think I have read this book at least 6 times in my lifetime as yet and watched the movie as many or more times. This is now fresh in my mind as I just recently re-read TKAM for a book club where we also read Go Set a Watchman and compared the two books. An interesting topic indeed. However, back to the topic. I believe that in all of the books that I have read that were then made into a movie, TKAM had the closest screenplay to the book! There are only two small things in the book that were not in the movie that I can think of but it wasn't anything that impacted the movie in any way. There have been more recent novels made into movies that I have both read and watched and I always seem to be disappointed in the movie. I remember watching the movie The Shining and came away from it totally confused; I hadn't read the book by Stephan King yet. So, I read the book - LONG BOOK - and realized that the screenwriters had to leave so much out of the movie due to the length of the book compared to the length of the movie that left the movie wanting more clarification. There are few books into movies that I can recall that are as close to the book as TKAM.

I found your post very interesting Toni. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

This spring, for personal reason, I viewed the movie WHISKEY TANGO FOXTRKOT based on the experiences of journalist Kim Barker in her book, THE TALIBAN SHUFFLE. Hoping to gain a deeper perspective of the war in Afghanistan, both the movie and the book show the problems that we face in this culture. Dottie Wolf