Which is better, books or their adapted movies? This is a topic that has always been strongly disagreed upon. It has always been the books.

Movies can differ from their correlated books in many ways. It can be anything from a missing character, interrupted plotlines, missing details, added information, etc. The movies never seem to catch everything. This makes the books better.

For example, one of the most popular movie adaptations is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. During the movie, there is a scene where the Weasley’s Burrow (the Weasley family’s house) is set on fire by the Death Eaters (the enemy). Nothing like this happened in the book. 

This scene was added because that part of the book was distinctly boring. In other words, it didn’t have enough action. In order to keep the movie audience intrigued, they added this scene. Almost immediately after, though, more scenes show the Burrow in pristine condition.

Though the movie creators seem to think otherwise, this part of the book includes a lot of important scenes and details.  This also happens in so many movie adaptations!

“The Mysterious Benedict Society books are better than the adaptation because the books evoke more emotion in readers. The books are written to be suspenseful and scary but the adaptation is too fast-paced for these feelings to be translated well. Overall, when books are better than the movie[,] it is because of inaccuracies in the plot, character changes or removals, and difficulty conveying the same emotions as the books they’re based off of,” said an anonymous sophomore.

There are so many books that many claim are better than their movies, or vice versa. But books that were made into movies are a whole different topic. Hunger Games, for another example, does a really good job with the graphics details, but it misses many important, emotion-evoking scenes.

So here’s a list of 35 books that Liberty students think are better than their movie adaptations:

• Pride & Prejudice 
• Harry Potter 
• Hunger Games 
• Divergent
• Where The Crawdads Sing
• Love & Gelato
• The Fault In Our Stars
• Twilight 
• Percy Jackson
• The Nightingale
• The Book Thief
• A Wrinkle In Time
• Looking For Alaska
• The Mortal Instruments
• To All the Boys I Loved Before
• Speak
• Little Women
• The Hate U Give
• Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda
• Everything Everything
• All The Bright Places
• The Sun Is Also A Star
• Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
• One Of Us Is Lying
• The Summer I Turned Pretty
• Crazy Rich Asians
• Me Before You
• Princess Diaries
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
• The Golden Compass
• The Mysterious Benedict Society
• Eaters of the Dead
• Timeline
• The Da Vinci Code
• Donnie Brasco

Of course, there are many more. It can be as simple as not catching an emotion, to changing the entire theme of the story based on the director’s beliefs, to being as simple as characters not fitting their standards. The Percy Jackson series is a great example of this. Not only did the characters not match their personalities, but entire scenes and sub-plotlines were changed to become more ‘modernized’. Some characters weren’t included, key buildings and places were diminished or changed, plus the enemy AND the main plot were completely different than the books.