The race to read a book before the movie comes out

Yesterday a friend bemoaned the fact that she only had about a week left to read The Great Gatsby before the movie came out. (Luckily it is a short book.) (Have you read The Great Gatsby? It's one of my favorites. It's really good! If you haven't read it since you were forced to in high school, you should definitely give it another look.)

I have another friend who only buys books that don't have the "Now a major motion picture" badge on the covers, or movie posters for covers. If a book was released as a movie years ago, she will still seek out original versions of the book cover before she buys. This quirk has led her to pay exorbitant prices for non-movie-cover versions of books she really wanted to read.

Personally, I'm not bothered by movie tie-in book covers. Although I totally understand people who are. (And in the case of The Great Gatsby, it seems like sacrelige to ditch the gorgeous original cover.) I get that it can be a vexing annoyance, to be constantly reminded that there is a movie version of the book you are reading. Particularly since the movie version will (of necessity) erase all of the depth, complexity, and subtlety of the book in its haste to bring it to the big screen for the mass audience.

I almost never prefer the movie version to the book version. (One rare exception being the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which glossed over all the boring bits of the book series which, I must confess, even as a fantasy geek I barely had the stick-to-itiveness to get through the entire trilogy.)

If I hear that a book has been made into a movie, that makes me more interested in reading the book. After all, they rarely make boring books into movies. Being turned into a movie isn't necessarily an indicator of quality, but it does indicate a certain level of interestingness, to use Flickr's word.

Here's hoping the new Baz Luhrmann movie won't destroy Gatsby too badly… and that it motivates some people to read the book (even if they have to do some hunting to find a non-movie-cover version).

Image copyright The Great Gatsby/Warner Bros. Entertainment