'Films can bring whole worlds to life before our eyes, make characters into living, breathing flesh and blood, but books let you live everything'

Do you think books are better than films? Send us your thoughts - [e-mail] - or join the discussion on Facebook

Your responses

ABitCrazy
The thing is... most days people prefer to have a day sitting in front of the television watching the latest films and TV shows; some people even just watch TV for the sake of watching TV and they're willing to watch any old junk. And it's more common to find people that prefer to sit in front of the television all day than it is to find someone that wants to sit at home reading all day. I love reading with a passion; I love letting my imagination run wild and imagining what all these characters look like and how they're feeling. Films don't do that for you but books do! Almost all books that become bestsellers get turned into films and sometimes the films really please you and sometimes it can be soul-destroying!

Two of my favourite series of books have both been turned into films - The Hunger Games and Twilight.

And after watching the first Hunger Games it totally ruined the book for me forever. I can't imagine the Hunger Games the way I used to when I re-read the book. The Hunger Games was somewhere to escape to on a good or bad day; it made you forget where you were and start being a different person, even if it only lasted the length of a book. It felt like it was my life and not Katniss's but now that I've seen the film I no longer imagine how the characters looked and reacted to everything. But watching and reading Twilight didn't feel quite like that, because when Twilight first came out in cinemas I was to young to watch it so I wasn't interested in it but as we all know Twilight is now one of the most popular teen books and movies ever! So once I got to the age of wanting to watch and read the books it was too late to think up my own imagination of the book because by then I had seen and read so many things about Twilight I already knew most of what happened. So films in some ways ruin books for children. And if the Hunger Games turns out like Twilight - all the people that are too young to watch it now but might when they are older will have already seen all the trailers and read all the articles in magazines - the experience of reading the book will be totally ruined for them.

And then you have people that just skip the book and go straight to the film. I understand that some people actually don't like reading so they probably won't read the book but they might watch the film, but to just skip the book completely because they're desperate to watch the film is disappointing. I like to read the books first to know where it all started and why they decided to make a film out of it. I didn't read all of The Host (Stephenie Meyer's other novel) before I saw the film but I did read some of it and it was a great book from what I read but also a great film. And of course sometimes films seem to be the same idea as the book had but are not actually based on the book. So it's a bit like Twilight for instance; Twilight's inspiration came mainly from the American TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer but had its own little twist. And that's a bit like what films do to books. They make it seem like they've taken the idea from the book but switched it up so it's not actually anything to do with the book.

And for this reason that's why I prefer books to films. Films destroy really amazing books! And TV has changed books. Maybe some people only read books because they're the reason that the films exist and I think that reading a book because of TV and films is a bad way to read; I think people should read a book because they actually want to read the book and every book should be a new story. And of course there are films not related to books at all and books that films aren't based on, and sometimes that is exactly how it should be: sometimes it's best if the two things aren't connected.

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