I’m about to write a book review for a book that I read after seeing the movie version. Before doing so, I need to pull out my old soapbox and lecture on the importance of reading a book before watching a movie. Back in the day, when I pulled this soapbox out, I would carry on in an “absolute” manner, as in there were no exceptions. I’ve become more reasonable with the passing of time and now I will say, in most cases, it is the better course to read a book before watching a movie.

When you read a book, the author speaks to you. Much can and should be said about that, in and of itself, but for this article the point I want to make is that in reading, you discern what the author is saying and picture the information the way you interpret it. I don’t think it is generally advisable to let somebody else interpret the author. I want to learn for myself what the author says.

Movies (and plays) take a large body of writing and condense it or abridge it in order to tell the same story in a short amount of time. To do this, they must leave out significant amounts and often they also have to rework aspects of the original to make the story fit the shorter time frame. If you’ve already read the original story, you automatically fill in these gaps, but if you don’t know the original you are left without important pieces of information. You might enjoy the story, but your enjoyment is so much less then it could be. A great example of this is Treasure Island done by our local First Stage Theatre. I’ve been privileged to see this play at First Stage twice and I highly recommend it because it’s one of the most amazing stage sets I’ve ever seen. I read the book out loud to my children before we saw the play and as a result we didn’t miss a thing. On the way homeå, as we reflected on the play, as good as it was, we were saddened for the large number of students that we suspected had not read the story and missed out on so much.

Another example that I frequently pull out comes from my childhood. When I was a fifth grader, my teacher read Where the Red Fern Grows to our class. I love that book! Growing up in Colorado, I didn’t have experience with coons and coon hunting. I had no clue what coon hounds looked like. It was long enough ago that I couldn’t Google it and we didn’t have the mindset to go look up those types of things in the Encyclopedia so I just pictured what made sense to me, at the time. Irish Setters! Yes, in my young romantic mind, Irish Setters perfectly pictured Old Dan and Little Ann. To this day, when I read the book I picture Irish Setters even though I know they are completely wrong and don’t make any sense at all for the story. Imagine my surprise when the movie came out and and Billy went to get those two dogs! They were all wrong!!! I laugh at it now, and of course the movie producer was right to use coon hounds, but I think it illustrates my point. The movie producer reads the book and interprets it through his lens. So when I see the movie I don’t necessarily get what the author wanted to communicate to me. I get what the producer interpreted or wants me to interpret from the book. This may be accurate, as in the case of the coon hounds or it may be skewed to match the producers world view and/or goal in producing his movie.

The first time I attempted to read Pride and Prejudice, it just didn’t connect with me. I read the first few chapters, put the book down and didn’t pick it up again for years. I don’t know why it didn’t connect. Years later, I watched the movie (the long BBC version). I loved it! As I was watching the movie, the story line at the beginning seemed familiar to me. I thought on it quite a bit and eventually picked up my copy of Pride and Prejudice with my bookmark still in place. In rereading the beginning I quickly realized that this was the story I was remembering. I read the whole book and enjoyed it so much. Somehow, in this case, the movie made the story come alive for me. I will also tell you, that there are places in this story where I much prefer the book version to any of the movie adaptations I have seen thus far. I can’t be certain that it was the movie that made the book come alive. That doesn’t actually make sense to me. It is possible that there were other reasons I did not get into the book when I first attempted to read it.

Because of my Pride and Prejudice experience, I can no longer say you should always read a book first. I do, however, recommend it in most cases. Sometimes I watch a movie and then discover that it was based on a book. If I really liked the story, I try to also read the book and many times I’ve been so sad that I didn’t know about the book first. Having seen the movie, it is impossible for me to have a completely honest interaction with the author. The characters have already been pictured for me. The biases have been formed. The movie producer had put his slant on the reading. It’s unavoidable.

Don’t short change yourself. Read the book first!