All Booked | Read Before Viewing

This edition of All Booked was originally emailed to subscribers on July 4, 2023. To receive our literary newsletter in your inbox, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Greetings, Fellow Book Lovers,

Hi, I’m Leslie Dinaberg, the Independent’s Arts & Culture Editor. I’m filling in this week for Emily Lee on the newsletter, as she enjoys her maternity leave with baby Vincent.

Watching your favorite characters come to life off the page can sometimes be a discombobulating experience, as A Gentleman in Moscow author Amor Towles told me in an interview last spring, when he was about to travel to watch the filming of the miniseries of his book (starring Ewan McGregor and coming soon to Showtime): “It’ll be fun to go see how that team imagines that story. And without a doubt it will be a different story.”

Different is the key word when it comes to adaptations, as Elinor Lipman told us last month at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, speaking of her experience having her novel Then She Found Me adapted in a film starring Helen Hunt: “It was a movie suggested by my book.”

Pro Tip: The book is almost always better than the movie, but with so many different cinematic options these days, book-to-screen adaptations are getting better and better. As readers, we get to create worlds right alongside the authors, using our imaginations to decide exactly what the characters look like and sound like in our heads, which is why, as much as I love adaptations, I do think it’s almost always better to read the book first.

Here are four books I’ve read and recommend, all of which will be coming to a screen of some sort soon, if they’re not already available.