Posted by Courtney O’Gorman, GD reader for 3.1
I have never considered myself to be someone who only reads a novel because it will be adapted into a film. However, last spring, when the trailer for The Fault in Our Stars, based on John Green’s YA bestseller was released, I found myself rushing out to my favorite Barnes & Noble to grab a copy off the shelf. Afterwards, I spent the majority of my traveling on spring break, obsessed with devouring the love story of two cancer-stricken teens before the film was released in June. Several friends of mine had already recommended the book to me as a must-read when it was published in 2012, but it wasn’t until I saw the trailer when I felt a sudden urge to get my hands on a copy. This notion made me begin to question my incentive for reading the book in the first place. Questioning my motivations led me to examine the film industry’s popular paradigm of adapting literary works into movies.