Reading List
The Best Book to Movie Adaptations
Some books are so tightly constructed around a single character’s interiority that you wonder how they could ever become a film. Then a director manages it, and the result is something that couldn’t have been a book either — it needed both. Below are the adaptations I keep returning to, as a reader and as someone who thinks a lot about why certain stories survive translation from page to screen.
These are not necessarily the most faithful adaptations. They are the ones where the film and the book are each worth your time.
Best book to movie adaptations
The best book to movie adaptations include Poor Things (Alasdair Gray / Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023), Killers of the Flower Moon (David Grann / Martin Scorsese, 2023), Oppenheimer (American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin / Christopher Nolan, 2023), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald / Baz Luhrmann, 2013), Educated (Tara Westover, not yet on screen), Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens / Olivia Newman, 2022), and Lord of the Flies (William Golding / Peter Brook, 1963). Each is listed in full below, with notes on what survives the adaptation and what doesn’t.
12 books that became movies — and are worth reading first
Poor Things — Alasdair Gray (1992) → Yorgos Lanthimos (2023)
Bella Baxter is brought back to life by an eccentric Scottish surgeon using the brain of her unborn child, and spends the rest of the novel navigating a world that was designed to contain women like her. Gray’s novel is formally strange — unreliable narrators, footnotes that undercut the main text, a Victorian pastiche that keeps puncturing itself. Lanthimos kept the strangeness and added colour and Emma Stone. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and four Academy Awards.
Read the book first. The film is more legible, which is not entirely a compliment.
Killers of the Flower Moon — David Grann (2017) → Martin Scorsese (2023)
The true story of the systematic murder of Osage Nation members in 1920s Oklahoma — a conspiracy so vast and so brazen it is hard to believe it was ever suppressed. Grann’s book is meticulous investigative journalism. Scorsese’s film, three and a half hours long, centres on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), making it a story about complicity and self-deception as much as about greed. The book gives you the full structural horror; the film gives you the human cost of it.
American Prometheus — Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin (2005) → Christopher Nolan (2023)
The biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that took twenty-five years to research and write, covering his physics, his politics, his personal life, and the security hearing that destroyed his career. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is the rare blockbuster that demands the audience keep up. It is also, in several places, simply the book on screen. The chapter on Trinity is one of the best passages in recent American biography. Read it before or after the film — either works.
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) → Baz Luhrmann (2013)
Jay Gatsby throws parties in West Egg hoping Daisy Buchanan will eventually walk through the door. She does. It goes how it goes. Fitzgerald’s novel is short enough to read in an afternoon and rich enough to sustain a lifetime of re-reading — the prose is doing something that looks like decoration but is actually architecture. Luhrmann’s film is loud where the book is precise, but it is genuinely committed to the material in a way the 1974 version wasn’t.
Where the Crawdads Sing — Delia Owens (2018) → Olivia Newman (2022)
Kya Clark grows up alone in the North Carolina marshes after her family abandons her one by one, teaches herself to read, becomes a naturalist, and is eventually tried for the murder of a local man. Owens’s novel is a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a sustained piece of nature writing, sometimes in the same paragraph. The film is faithful and competently made. The book is better — but the film is a reasonable way in if you are unsure whether the book is for you.
Tell Me Who I Am — Marcus & Alex Lewis (2013) → Ed Perkins (2019)
After a motorcycle accident leaves Marcus Lewis with total amnesia, his twin brother Alex reconstructs his life for him — and leaves out everything that happened in their childhood. The book is a memoir. The documentary is more confrontational: it puts Marcus and Alex on screen together, asking questions the book only implied. One of the rare cases where the film version adds something the written form genuinely cannot.
Lord of the Flies — William Golding (1954) → Peter Brook (1963)
A group of boys stranded on an uninhabited island attempt to govern themselves. It takes less time than you might expect for things to go wrong. Golding’s novel is a thought experiment about human nature disguised as an adventure story — he was writing it in the shadow of World War II and did not believe in the adventure story version of what boys would actually do. Brook’s black-and-white film, shot with real children and no professional actors, is quietly extraordinary.
Bad Blood — John Carreyrou (2018) → Adam McKay (announced)
The definitive account of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes — how a 19-year-old convinced Silicon Valley, the US military, and major supermarket chains that she had revolutionised blood testing with a machine that didn’t work. Carreyrou broke the original Wall Street Journal story. The book is the full version, built from hundreds of interviews with employees who risked their careers to speak. The film adaptation with Jennifer Lawrence has been in development for years. Read the book now; it will still be the better version when the film eventually arrives.
Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov (1955) → Stanley Kubrick (1962) / Adrian Lyne (1997)
Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor, becomes obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl. Nabokov’s prose is so precise and so beautiful that it has confused generations of readers about what the novel is actually doing — it is not asking you to sympathise with Humbert, it is asking you to notice how he uses language to evade responsibility for what he does. Both film adaptations handle this problem differently. Neither fully solves it. The book is the only version that contains Nabokov’s actual argument.
The Lottery — Shirley Jackson (1948) → Larry Yust (1969, short film)
In a small American town, the annual lottery takes place. The ending is not a surprise if you know the story, and yet it still lands. Jackson’s short story is six pages and has been banned, taught, and argued about ever since it was published in The New Yorker in 1948. The film adaptation is minor. The story is not.
Educated — Tara Westover (2018) → not yet on screen
Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho with no birth certificate, no schooling, and no medical care. She taught herself enough to get into Brigham Young University and eventually Cambridge, without ever fully leaving — or being allowed to leave — her family’s version of reality. Educated is the best memoir published in the last decade. Any adaptation will face the same problem all interior memoirs face on screen: the most important things Westover is describing are thoughts, not events.
One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez (1967) → Netflix (2024)
Seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, where the miraculous and the mundane occupy the same sentence. García Márquez said for decades that the novel was unfilmable. Netflix’s Spanish-language series, produced with the author’s sons after his death, is the first serious attempt. Whether it works is a genuine question. The novel remains one of the few books where the prose is the point — translation to any other medium changes the experience fundamentally.
Frequently asked questions about book to movie adaptations
What is the best book to movie adaptation of all time?
Most film critics point to The Godfather (Mario Puzo / Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) as the standard answer — a case where the film is widely considered to exceed the source material. Other strong candidates include No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy / Coen Brothers, 2007), Schindler’s List (Thomas Keneally / Steven Spielberg, 1993), and Blade Runner (Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ridley Scott, 1982). The honest answer is that “best” depends on whether you mean most faithful, most cinematic, or most improved by the translation.
Should you read the book before watching the movie adaptation?
Usually yes, for one specific reason: books give you access to the interior of a character’s mind in a way film rarely can. Once you have seen an actor play a character, that image tends to overwrite your own version. Reading first means the story belongs to your imagination longer. The exception is when the film is genuinely doing something the book cannot — Tell Me Who I Am is one example, where the documentary format adds confrontation the memoir format avoided.
Which book adaptations are better than the original book?
The Godfather is the most cited example. Jaws (Peter Benchley / Steven Spielberg, 1975) is another — the film removed subplots that weaken the novel. Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk / David Fincher, 1999) is often argued to be cleaner than the source. These are cases where the director’s formal control exceeded the novelist’s, or where the film’s constraints forced a discipline the book didn’t have.
What makes a book adapt well to film?
Books that adapt well tend to be plot-driven rather than prose-driven, externally rather than internally focused, and structured around clear visual set pieces. The books on this list that translate best — Killers of the Flower Moon, American Prometheus — are investigative narratives where the events are already cinematic. The books that resist adaptation — Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude — are ones where the prose is doing most of the work, and the prose cannot be filmed.
More reading lists
If this list interests you, you might also like:
- Books like The Great Gatsby
- Jane Austen books in order, with the main adaptations of each
- Books like Lord of the Flies
- My favourite absurdist books
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Browse the full bookshelf →
