Did you know that some of the most popular recent streaming titles are adaptations based on books? We’ve put together a list of some of our favorite book-to-streaming adaptations, and we’ll leave you to answer… Which was better: the book or the movie/series?
All of the books featured here we have in our collection! To see if a book is available to check out or place on hold, click the image or the “Find it!” button under each book. A subscription may be required to watch the movie or TV titles below.
In the backwoods of Ohio, Willard Russell’s wife is at death’s door, no matter how much he drinks, prays, or sacrifices animals at his “prayer log.” Meanwhile, his son Arvin is growing up, form a kid bullied at school into a man who knows when to take action. Around them swirl a nefarious cast of characters–a demented team of serial killers, a spider-eating preacher, and a corrupt local sheriff–all braided into a riveting narrative of the grittiest American grain.
Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular, well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. When Connell stops by Marianne’s house, a strange connection grows between the two teenagers, one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they’re both studying in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while shy Connell hangs at the sidelines. Throughout the years, they circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Their case seems ironclad. But Maitland has an alibi, and it turns out that his story has incontrovertible evidence of its own. How can two opposing stories be true? What happens to a family when an accusation of this magnitude is delivered? When must reason be abandoned in order to explain the inexplicable? Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face?
The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. Chicago, 1954. When his father goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George, publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite, heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors, they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits. A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism, the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.
For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area. Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called ‘the Golden State Killer.’ Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.
In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America-and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.
In an inexplicable worldwide event, forty-seven extraordinary children were spontaneously born by women who had previously shown no signs of pregnancy. Millionaire inventor Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of the children; when asked why, his only explanation was, ‘To save the world.’ These seven children form The Umbrella Academy, a dysfunctional family of superheroes with bizarre powers. Their first adventure at the age of ten pits them against an erratic and deadly Eiffel Tower, piloted by the fearsome zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel. Nearly a decade later, the team disbands, but when Hargreeves unexpectedly dies, these disgruntled siblings reunite just in time to save the world once again.
With one week until the end of all crime in the United States, can the last heist in American history be pulled off? In the not-too-distant future as a final response to terrorism and crime, the US government plans in secret to broadcast a signal making it impossible for anyone to knowingly commit unlawful acts.
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