When is it best to try to read a book first before seeing the movie?  If you’ve seen the movie first, how likely is it that reading the book will enrich the whole experience?  What if a truly crappy film adaptation ruins your memories of a great book?

Before I’d considered Reggie’s conundrum, I powered my way through Revolutionary Road and the Benjamin Button short story just assuming it would ultimately improve the movie-going experiences.  I also picked up The Reader on a mad quest to finish off all the Oscar-nominated novels (and, let’s be honest, to bring into the theater some unspoken sense of superiority at having hacked my way through the underbrush of text).  Now I’m finally conscious of the real hazards involved here.

For one thing, even though I’ve mostly avoided reading reviews of the movie, I already knew Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes played the two main roles.  It was immensely distracting, then, to read the book and try to imagine what sort of old-age or youthful makeup would have to be applied in each scene to make these two actors look appropriate, or in which scenes younger or older actors might be playing their roles.  I know Ralph Fiennes is a hell of an actor, but I’m also pretty sure it would take some Benjamin Button-style special effects to put his head on the body of a 15-year-old German lad. 

Another obstacle is the almost clinically Germanic tone of the novel’s translation, which I can only assume is true to its original language.  By some horrible coincidence I had recently been in a car with a friend who had been listening to an Eckhart Tolle book-on-CD, so I had the German guru’s Sigmund Freud-sounding tones in my head as the voice of The Reader’s narrator–as if visualizing a CGI-ed, pubescent Ralph Fiennes wasn’t distracting enough. 

It’s a perplexing novel in any case, full of philosophical and moral paradoxes and powerfully evoking the ruined civilization of post-World War II Germany.  Beyond the immediate concerns of the plot, the question asked by a war crimes defendant to her judge in the courtroom, “What would you have done?” resonates powerfully even after the book is finished. 

One reviewer noted a later-20th century phrase commonly heard in Germany, “the lucky late-born,” referring to those too young to be held accountable for their behavior during the Nazi regime.  The Reader illustrates the paralyzing difficulty of coming to terms with not only personal guilt and shame but the culpability of a whole society, and I’m extremely curious if the movie is able to express those themes as memorably as the novel does.

The novel, as anyone who has seen the movie trailer will surmise, is filled with tense scenes of suburban misery and despair (much like My Bloody Valentine in 3D but with the graphic violence strictly limited to the dialogue).  From my current address in the heart of Suburban OKC, I could certainly recognize some of the factors that caused the 1961 novel’s characters to question their identities and the value of their existence.  I’ve already noted the criminal shortage of bookstores around here, for one thing.

New Yorker critic James Wood revisits the novel in this interesting piece, and the entertainingly irascible Christopher Hitchens discusses it and “The Suburbs of Our Discontent” in this Atlantic Monthly article. 

In order to catch up with the Best Picture nominees adapted from books, I should have tried harder to scrape the “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker off my used copy of The Reader.  If only I had noticed the blurb on the back cover heralding its “coiled eroticism,” I may have made it more of an immediate priority, but it is next on my list.

As for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I was excited to find the entire text of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story online, and it made for a quick and interesting read before I checked out the movie.  Fitzgerald’s story is pretty loosely adapted for the purposes of the film and the time period is necessarily different, but its twisted fairy-tale qualities make it well-worth checking out. 

Before watching the end credits, I hadn’t been aware that the amazing Slumdog Millionaire had been adapted from a book as well.  Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel, originally titled Q & A, was greatly streamlined for film purposes, but the general outline of the story is the same.  Interestingly, unlike the film, the novel’s protagonist was named Ram Mohammad Thomas, an attempt by the author to create an Indian everyman who could be seen as Hindu, Muslim, or Christian.

This Guardian UK profile of the author describes the origins of the novel and the adaptation choices made by the filmmakers.  Thanks to the popularity of the film and its impressive haul of nominations and awards, the novel has since been re-released with the same title as the film.  This Sunday Times audio interview with the author touches on the film’s success and the universal themes that have seen its story resonate across cultural boundaries.