Pictures and Words
Soli Gustafson
Honors English
Mr. A Lee
Period 3
11/16/13
Major Essay: Compare and Contrast
Pictures and Words
Movies have long been struggling to capture a book in pictures and sound and have long been failing. So much more can be put into a few pages of a book than ten minutes of a movie, and books can be much longer without the author worrying about the reader losing interest. Anyone who has read and liked the book before going to see the movie will automatically find the book to be far better than the movie simply because the movie is forced to leave out many of what the reader considers to be key aspects in the book. This doesn’t mean that the movie is bad, only that it can’t portray the story well enough to suit the avid reader. Unfortunately, movies will never be able to portray a book with any sort of competence or inspire the same sort of devotion in the reader.
A good book can capture the attention and keep the reader flipping pages long into the night. It can speed up the clock until suddenly the end of a chapter jolts the reader back to reality and she looks over her shoulder to see that it is five hours since she started reading at nine o’clock. There is a reason they split Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two parts. A five hour long movie would lose most people’s attention before the movie was half done. Isn’t it funny, then, that the book takes longer to read than both Part 1 and Part 2 take to watch, yet it captures the attention of millions of readers worldwide and they stay with it until the very end? A good book has an aura that surrounds it, drawing voracious readers like a mother is drawn to a toy shop around Christmas time. Each word is a hand that grabs the reader and a mouth that says “read on.” The imagination is what keeps a book alive. When we can’t see the characters and scenery, when we can only take the words and use those to set the basic structure, our imagination fills in the empty spaces and the story becomes
Honors English
Mr. A Lee
Period 3
11/16/13
Major Essay: Compare and Contrast
Pictures and Words
Movies have long been struggling to capture a book in pictures and sound and have long been failing. So much more can be put into a few pages of a book than ten minutes of a movie, and books can be much longer without the author worrying about the reader losing interest. Anyone who has read and liked the book before going to see the movie will automatically find the book to be far better than the movie simply because the movie is forced to leave out many of what the reader considers to be key aspects in the book. This doesn’t mean that the movie is bad, only that it can’t portray the story well enough to suit the avid reader. Unfortunately, movies will never be able to portray a book with any sort of competence or inspire the same sort of devotion in the reader.
A good book can capture the attention and keep the reader flipping pages long into the night. It can speed up the clock until suddenly the end of a chapter jolts the reader back to reality and she looks over her shoulder to see that it is five hours since she started reading at nine o’clock. There is a reason they split Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two parts. A five hour long movie would lose most people’s attention before the movie was half done. Isn’t it funny, then, that the book takes longer to read than both Part 1 and Part 2 take to watch, yet it captures the attention of millions of readers worldwide and they stay with it until the very end? A good book has an aura that surrounds it, drawing voracious readers like a mother is drawn to a toy shop around Christmas time. Each word is a hand that grabs the reader and a mouth that says “read on.” The imagination is what keeps a book alive. When we can’t see the characters and scenery, when we can only take the words and use those to set the basic structure, our imagination fills in the empty spaces and the story becomes