"The Rotten Tomatoes" web site is a good sourse for getting a variety of movie reviews. But I wish there was a way to filter out the reviews by the people who read the book"

"Why would you read the book when they'll just make a movie out of it?" This question comes out of my son's mouth at least once a month. He's not alone. I know several adults who feel the same way. I think they're missing something though. Movies show us someone's point of view about a story. It's their ideas of what the characters look like, how they act, how they think, how they handle situations, and even how they sound and move. A book on the other hand gives you so much more room for finding your own creativity. That's right, I said your creativity. I know a book is written by someone else with their own ideas and descriptions but we all interrupt things differently. It doesn't matter that the author describes a character or a room down to the very last detail we still have the freedom for our minds to shape the story. Even if an author describes a curved cherry side board down to the brass lion head hardware, our minds still pick the shade of the cherry lacquer, the exact location and depth of the curve, the exact tone of the lion's mane, even the length and width of the spindly legs that jut up from the floor. Now what I see and what you see will no doubt be two incredibly different images in our heads and truth be known, we could never convey that exact image out to anyone else. Those little details shape a story in our minds. Each word adds to the mental imagery that paints its way across our minds as the story progresses. That's what makes great fantasy stories great and what makes historical fiction so real. Our minds create things that couldn't possibly be reproduced in as great detail in the actual realm. At least not as we see them in our mind's eye.