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

Are books better than films?
'Films can bring whole worlds to life before our eyes, make characters into living, breathing flesh and blood, but books let you LIVE everything'

I went to see Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters with the Spinebreakers. We all needed to write something on the film and our views on it. I did my research first. I re-read the book, made numerous notes, wrote down everything I wanted to see in the film and brought a notebook into the cinema with me, ready to jot down my thoughts as the film played out before me.

The film was amazing – seriously, it blew me away. It was so, so much better than its prequel, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and stuck so much closer to the book – something that obviously made me exceptionally happy.

The people who worked on the film... they got a lot of things right. They got the characters, the world, the creatures, the feel all right. They changed the plot, of course, and missed various things out, adding others in their place. But this didn't matter – Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters was absolutely stunning.

So why am I so obsessed with the things they changed? Why am I so much more in love with the book than with the film?

The same thing happened with The Hunger Games. They got almost everything exactly right, but it still... it didn't have the same feel to it. The suspense and emotion just didn't project from page to the screen.

Films... they can do a lot of things. They can bring whole worlds to life before our eyes, make characters into living, breathing flesh and blood. They can have us on the edge of our seats as vicious battle scenes are fought right before us, have us sobbing over a death, a heartbreak or smiling with joy. Films can make us see a lot of things – sometimes things that even books cannot do so well. They are a pure escape – there's nothing like sitting in the cinema, devoid of any other distraction, focused completely on the story playing on the screen.

And yet...

Films are great, but they just don't have the same...inclusion that books have. You're merely an observer: you aren't feeling everything the character feels, aren't reading every single one of their innermost thoughts, all of their doubts and fears and hopes. Films let you observe everything. Books? Books let you feel everything, know everything and LIVE everything. With a book, you can be the hero who kills the demon with one twirl of your blade. You can be the girl who battles cancer, along with all the pain and uncertainty that comes with it. You can be a demigod, you can be an alien, you can be an angel, a god, a villain, a hero. You can be in love, you can hate, you can triumph, you can lose. You can be anything and everything. There are no limits. No restrictions. Nothing is impossible, nothing is out of reach…

And that… that is why books are always better. When you read a book, nothing else exists and you can be a whole other person in this completely new and amazing world. You can live as someone else, free of your own troubles, even if only for two hundred pages.

Books are magic. Which is why I'm telling you all to forget about movie magic and get back to the pure magic that lives upon your bookshelves. Because while the movies are good… the books are ALWAYS better.