Movies or Books?

Pretty much as long as movies and books have coexisted, people have been making movie versions of books. As a result, the obvious question comes to mind: which is better, the book or the movie? For me, it's almost always the book.

I was recently prompted to rethink my opinion regarding this question after finishing the novel, The Great Gatsby. As I often like to do when I finish a book, I watched the trailer for the movie version. Regardless of the impressive list of actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, after watching the short trailer and reading several negative review of the movie saying: "Just because a film looks like it was dipped in 18-karat gold doesn't mean it's rich in quality" (US Weekly) and calling the movie "A failure…" (Miami Herald), I am doubtful that the film lives up to its novel counterpart.

For example, one of my favorite books of all time, The Lightening Thief, was made into a movie in 2010, which I found to be an incredible let down mostly because I felt that the book did a much better job of "transporting me to another world." According to an article from The Guardian, "Films are great, but they just don't give you the same…inclusion that books have. You're merely an observer…" I could not agree more. The best part about a book for me is that you can become another person and live in a totally different place for a few hundred pages. I know my opinion about books is kind of cliché, but I truly believe that a movie can never be as great of an experience as a book.

So, what do you think are better? Books or movies?