The Death of Books

Lilly Xie

Next week we’re watching Jane Eyre, and I couldn’t be more excited.

First off, I love the Brontë sisters. They were such talented young ladies who devoted their lives to writing beautiful poetry and novels. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are basically the sisters that I wish I had. Just in case you were wondering, Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Emily wrote Wuthering Heights (the novel we are going to read in class). By the way, if you’re ever near the Lexington Green, there’s this awesome place inside of Joseph-Beth called Brontë Bistro, if any of you want to check it out.

But even more than that, I’m excited because we get to watch a movie. I absolutely love watching movies, especially movie adaptations of books that I’ve read. I read Jane Eyre a couple of years ago, and I’ve seen both the 1996 film adaptation and the recent 2011 film adaptation. I loved them all: the book, the movie, and the new movie. Some people hate it when books are made into movies, but I beg to differ. People say the movies ruin the books, but I just think that it’s unfair to compare the book to the movie, because they’re just such difference experiences.

If you want to get really deep into a story and if you have a lot of time to kill, then you should probably read a book. But if you don’t have a lot of time, you can watch a movie. I think both the author of a literary book and the director of a literary movie have some merit. While the authors of books need to make important decisions with characters, mood, tone, diction and syntax, directors of movies need to make those same decisions and more, because they need to take into account actors to play the characters, background music to set the mood, camera angles to best express the scene, and many other cinematic details.

A lot of people complain that movies take away many of the small details that make books great. But think about it, how hard would it be to incorporate every tiny detail into a 2 hour time frame? It’s almost impossible. That’s why directors must make important decisions on what makes it into the movie and what doesn’t. It’s tough to make a movie, just as tough if not tougher than writing a book. And although reading a book is harder than watching a movie, does that really mean you get more out of the book than the movie? A literary movie can make you think, feel, and connect to the world just as well as a literary book can, just in a smaller amount of time. Movies are just a lot more efficient than books are.

In our world today, technology is everywhere. We take up a lot of information so quickly, and it’s almost impossible to get by without multitasking. We already know that paper books are going to become extinct with the advent of eBooks, but is that where the changes will stop? What if books just disappeared completely? People nowadays get bored very easily, and need a lot of action and movement and images to keep their attention. Movies seem more suited for this generation than books do. My question for you is, in this fast paced, ever changing society, will reading books eventually become outdated?