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I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with books—with the stories and with the books themselves, with the binding and the paper they are printed on, with their aged, heavenly smell that wafts gently over you as you turn each page, with their texture and their weight in my arms as I hug them to my breast when the last page had been turned. They have always been fixtures in my life. As a young child, I had difficulty making friends, so I would often retreat to the far corner of the playground and curl up with my Nancy Drew books under the oak trees. As the strawberry hints of my hair glinted in the sun, I could almost be her, traipsing around old mansions and secret passageways, forever beautiful at eighteen and solving every mystery, getting out of every tight spot, and driving off into the sunset in my blue roadster with my well-deserved happy ending. In Blake Morrison’s book, Twelve Thoughts About Reading, taken from a recent collection of essays,said, “A hope of something beyond our place and time. This is what books — the best books — give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely.” Growing up, they gave me the one thing that makes the rigmarole of everyday life bearable—an imagination. Yet, there are people out there who believe other forms of media (i.e. movies) to be superior to books as a form of rewarding entertainment.

All books have something to offer (except Snooki’s memoir), but good books—the best books—are flirtatious. When we’re reading a good book, it draws us close and makes us feel special; reality seems to fall away and leaves us wrapped up in the intimate world that we have created. It feels as if it has only and will ever only be ours—that it is only we who can claim this kind of intimate ownership. By simply holding Harper Lee’s great novel, or The Sun Also Rises, or Great Expectations in your hands, can you claim to truly grasp and own the story? Have you really made it yours? Twelve Thoughts About Reading states that “beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there’s ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind — when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it’s ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us.” People can do this too; they can “speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we’re uniquely important to them — before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts.” And so books are flirts too, because “they seem to be ours alone when in reality they’re anyone’s.”  

Gone With the Wind was the first book that I feel head over heels in love with. And I guarded it with a near-paranoid jealousy, telling others about it, but never lending out my own copy, feeling it such a violation if my book could have the same, intimate connection with someone else.  But that very ability to affect every single individual is a book’s true beauty. A book can be “anyone’s”. It can truly and deeply belong to anyone. That’s what makes the best of them so versatile. When a great author writes a “flirtatious” book, he or she is not worried about bagging the highest sales or building the largest fan base—a great author writes for himself, and in doing so, achieves a sincere kind of poignancy lost to those who turn to a clichéd vagueness in order to cast a wider net. Unlike films, or even certain genres of writing, good novels do not need to be consciously created and tailored to a specific audience. As Anthony Doerr once said, a good book is written from such depths of the soul that as “you’re falling into [it], exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death.” As a reader, you withdraw in order to connect more deeply. Unlike a particularly funny YouTube video, “once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you” (stated so eloquently by Louis L’Amour in his Matagorda/The First Fast Draw). The best books are a lifeline, a reprieve, flirts—they have a power to affect the human soul. They wedge themselves deep within our beings and slowly, inch-by-inch, they change us.

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Imagine yourself in your daydreams. You’re strolling about in this world you have created—here, you can be everything you want to be. Your paintbrush moves across the canvas in broad, even strokes, and your imagination comes alive before you. Suddenly, another painter elbows past you. He stands before your unfinished canvas oblivious to your open mouth or the paint that drips streaks of blood red at your feet, his head cocked to one side and his brow furrowed in concentration, muttering something about daydreaming amateurs. With a sudden jerk he tears the entire thing down. He begins to paint, forming the image of a world that is not your own. He finishes and turns toward you—he tells you that this is where you must dream now. The world you live in and the person you are, are no longer your own. It looks different. Feels different. The emotions that your world evokes in you have changed. Nothing is yours. 

If this were to actually happen, if some self-important “expert” on daydreaming could hijack your imagination, it would be an utter violation of our God-given right to creativity that the entire world would be in complete uproar. And yet, Hollywood does it every day, except they don’t quite call it hijacking. In reality, it goes by the name of “film adaptation.” Edward P. Morgan said that “a book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” A film, as truly creative and controversial as a (small) number are, is severely limited in its ability to foster the seeds of imagination in a person’s mind. Throughout the years, great novels have been made into movies, with a few (To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Clockwork Orange, etc.) rising to a near equal standard with the book, but even so, those few still have their limits. All books deal with more than their basic plotlines—there is subplot and secondary meaning everywhere, from dealing with racial prejudice to the politics and economics of a future dystopian reality. A book allows for much more freedom and depth than a film does; a near endless amount of space is available to fully develop an author’s ideas and the freedom to delve straight into the mind of the characters, to know their thoughts and motives (something that a film cannot achieve without the aid of a distracting voice-over). Because they are highly public affairs and are far from free of the bonds of societal norms, big blockbuster films (especially ones that adapt a novel) simply are not able to be the kind of “haven” for provocative and imaginative thought that Morgan describes. Books are the only way.

The imprint that a good book always leaves upon us is why no other form of media, film or animation can ever replace a book. In movies, the characters are simply thrust at us; we are told what they look like, sound like, how they hold their forks and how they move their mouths when they speak completely and without question—Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch and Audrey Hepburn is Holly Golighty—no room for interpretation. Some say that this is better—that having all that imagining done for you makes it easier to get to the “meat” of the story. In books the author also describes the characters to you, characterizes them with their actions and dialogue and such, but how you see them…that’s up to you. You build the world around the characters, decide just what shade of blue Atticus’ eyes are, see the shimmery lights on undulating water at sunset, feel the night breeze on your skin as Holly does, crawling out her window onto the fire escape. You use your brain to place yourself in the story, rather than having it done for you by a visual effects department. When it comes right down to it, reading is as much of a creative act for the reader as writing is for the author. The author gives us a baseline, a foundation of characters, setting and plot, but we are the ones to give them life and substance and color.

Reading is an act. A reader does not sit before a book as they would a screen, staring open-mouthed and absorbing the words as they would an image; they are alert as they take in each word, the personality of the characters, the nuances of the setting, and they put their mark upon the story, just as the story puts its mark upon them. A reader can make a book completely their own, while the film belongs to the collective. A book can be your flirt—it can belong to you. I see my Scout Finch as a short mite of a girl, while my mother sees her as gangly; Harry is taller in my mind, while my best friend feels like Hermione’s hair is more of a brunette than a dirty blonde a la Emma Watson. A reader puts more than ten percent of their brains to good use forming these images, seeing these moving pictures in their heads as they wish to see them—in a way that stimulates the mind and creates something that never existed before and will never exist again.

The main complaint I always hear exiting the theatre after seeing a book adapted into film is “that really was not how I imagined it.” Because on some level, you feel violated, betrayed—as if you were a photographer who took a beautiful picture, which someone else promptly downloaded, photoshopped, and reproduced as their own. When the director makes a choice to cut your favorite scene from the final edition, or when the makeup artist doesn’t give Harry his mother’s green eyes, you feel cheated, like something was stolen from you. No matter how well done the film may be, or how impressive the costumes or witty the dialogue, you cannot bring yourself to like it.

On the several occasions that I have seen a film adaptation of a book I’ve read, (particularly from the sixth installment of the Harry Potter films) I emerged from the theatre so angry with the screenwriters and the director that I could spit nails. So much has to be cut in order to squeeze over three hundred pages of plot, subplot and contextual material into a two and a half-hour time frame. As Steven Pressfield, author of book-turned-movie The Legend of the Bagger Vance, so aptly states, “a movie is experienced in flow… it must have a rhythm and a momentum. It has to hook the viewer…build his expectations and then satisfy them in a dramatic or comic climax that wraps up the whole show and sends him out the door replete” in less than three hours. In order to achieve this, the complexity and nuance of a novel’s plotline “must be sacrificed in the service of momentum…detours don’t work; digressions are out of the question. The story in a movie…must keep building in intensity and in the stakes of the conflict.” It is impossible for a film to include every small detail contained within a novel’s pages if it hopes to stay under a few days in length. You cannot, in any way, get more from a movie than you can from a book. Books are bursting with information, description, subtext, secondary meaning, small characters, nuances of scene and setting. It is an “overflowing chalice” that is “more than the shot glass of film can contain.” A chalice is emptied over a shot glass—what is in it tastes fine, but “a lot of good booze gets spilled onto the floor.” Chalice or shot. Which would you pick?

A book can change you in ways that a film cannot. It contains all the complexities and nuances of real life relationships and stories. Books provide you with worlds that you directly interact with, that flirt with you, draw you close and lift you up. They give you the hope of a different time and place and truly belong to you in a way a film never can. Films are monogamous. Books love everyone and can be loved by anyone.