Am I The Only One?

I feel conflicted when a book I love is adapted into a movie. As I’m reading, it’s relatively easy for me to imagine the characters in my mind and create my own visual rendering of what is happening on the pages. And if a book really moves me and stays with me, it’s as though I have a personal relationship with it - one that I wish to protect. I know it’s a natural consequence but I worry that in the translation from book to screen, the fabric of the story will be lost and Hollywood-ized and the story will be compromised and cheapened and hollow. This morning I discovered they’ve made an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. I thought this was a beautiful book, one of the best I’ve read in the last few years. It’s entirely possible the movie will be true to the story and faithful to the plot, but how can they possibly fit it all into a two-hour movie? I could maybe support a mini-series, but a feature-length film…I don’t know. Of course I’m sure I’ll end up seeing it, but with some amount of trepidation. On a positive note, though, maybe the movie will spark interest in the book for that handful of people who haven’t yet read it. It’s been a best-seller for ages, quite popular with book clubs and the like. We shall see…