Book to Film Adaptations

As this blog suggests, I love films! However, I also love books, and one thing that I've discovered is that films adapted from books are very rarely as good as their source material. The recent and very successful release of the Hunger Games is a rare adaptation as it also lives up to Suzanne Collins's dystopian trilogy, although I did read the books over a year ago so this could simply be a case of my memory of the books dwindling.
The main thing that i love about books is the characters, shove Sirius Black into a novel about Golf (one of the most boring sports of all time) and I will still love it, so when books are adapted into films I'm not bothered if they change the plot completely as long as my beloved characters are still the same. One example of this is the adaptation of Sophie Kinsella's 'Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic' or, as the film was known, 'Confessions of a Shopaholic', whilst the story changed significantly, transporting Becky Bloomwood from the British countryside to the Big Apple and making her millionaire businessman boyfriend her boss, but despite this Becky was still clumsy, naive and totally ridiculous so I still loved the film.
Only one book has ever inspired a better film, my favourite film of all time, a film so incredible that even the book's author, Chuck Palahniuk, said it was an improvement on his 1996 novel 'Fight Club'. Admittedly, I watched the film before I read the book which certainly makes a difference to the opinion formed about the adaptation, but Brad Pitt and Edward Norton bring their characters to life so perfectly that it's hard to believe the parts weren't written for them and David Fincher's near perfect direction begs the question "why has this man never won a frikkin' Oscar?!?"
Another film that is an excellent adaptation, although it could never match the original novel, is 'A Clockwork Orange', mainly due to Malcolm McDowell's mesmerizing performance as the iconic protagonist, Alex.
Most disappointing adaptations are typical 'weepy' films, 'PS I Love You' and 'The Time Traveler's Wife' spring to mind when thinking of books which are unique and beautiful but spawn distinctly average films which have barely half the emotion of the original story.The general consensus among book fans is that their celluloid adaptations are never quite as good, an opinion I completely agree with.

"People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden"