The One Time the Book Wasn't Better

      You have to believe me when I say that it was physically painful for me to write the above title. As I said in my previous post, books are always better than movie adaptions. Always. Always, always always.

     But, my friends, there is an exception to every rule. And this exception is the TV show Pretty Little Liars.

     This melodramatic, poorly acted teen-drama is based off of the Pretty Little Liars book series written by Sara Shepard. There are fourteen Pretty Little Liar books, plus two companion books. I've only read the first four books.

     I read the books because my friend lent them to me. These four books make a complete story-arc, however at the conclusion of the fourth book there are still unanswered questions.

     I like the Pretty Little Liars books. They are certainly no works of literature, but they are entertaining. They are fast-paced and suspenseful; the kind of books that you start reading after breakfast and finish the same night, curled up in bed. The type of book that you for fun and because, for whatever reason, you just have to know what happens to those silly but strangely lovable characters.

     So as much as I wanted to know who killed Alison DiLaurentis, I stopped at book four. Why? Because I started watching the TV show and, for whatever reason, could not stop.

     I became addicted to the show; the cliffhanger endings to each episode kept me coming back every Tuesday night. But why didn't I keep  reading the books?

     The first reason that comes to mind is sheer laziness. My friend only has the first four books, so I'd have to make the effort to get off my butt and get the other books. And why do that when it would be much easier to watch the plot unfold on TV?

     But as I think about it, I realize that laziness cannot possibly be the answer. If I had really wanted to finish the series, I would have happily gone to the library or coughed up the money for the next few PLL novels. Rather, the reason I did not finish the books is that I was not missing anything.

     As I mentioned in my previous post, the book To Kill a Mockingbird is superior to the movie adaptation because the beauty of the prose is missing. There is no play of syntax in the TKAM movie, but there are also no great syntactic moments in the Pretty Little Liars novels. Not to say Sara Shepard is a bad writer, but she is certainly no Harper Lee. Her books are entertainment, not literary revolutions. And for whatever reason, I find the TV show more entertaining than the books.

     Why the TV show is more entertaining than the books, I'm still not sure. Maybe it's because I am able to find humor in bad acting and bad screenwriting, while mediocre prose just makes me cringe. Maybe its just because Wren's British accent sounds better on TV than in my head. Whatever the reason, Pretty Little Liars is the first (and most likely only) time I was drawn more to the movie/TV adaptation than the book.

     But other than Pretty Little Liars, books always win.

     Always.