Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016: Read a book that was adapted into a movie, then watch the movie. Debate which is better. 
 Technically, I watched the movie first, then read the book, and my attempt to discuss went largely nowhere, but I tried. I had some good offline discussions with my sister. 
 I recently watched "The Shawshank Redemption" for the first time. It was compelling, if more intense than I usually watch. Because I knew the events that would unfold, I felt OK about reading my first Stephen King story, the novella from which the movie was adapted. While several plot points were changed for cinematic effect (and I wonder about the larger effect of changing the race of the character of Red, making him a "magical negro" trope in the movie), much of the movie dialogue was lifted straight from the book. It was interesting to hear those echoes. And I liked Stephen King's writing: the way Red was both a central character and an omniscient narrator; the way spare phrasing still painted a vivid picture and sense of the slow passage of time in prison; the certain "maleness" of this story (even in the movie, only two women had bit speaking parts). The way Andy was described and the way Tim Robbins played him matched to a T. This rarely happens for me when comparing adaptations. I don't know who to give more credit to for that -- the novel writer or the actor. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "What was right with him he'd only give you a little at a time. What was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside." 
 "But I don't think solitary was the hardship for Andy that it was for some men. He got along with himself." 
 "He was paid in what may be a prison's most valuable coin: simple good will." 
 "Time continued to pass -- the oldest trick in the book, and maybe the only one that really is magic." 
 "I've still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man can do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time." 
 "Shawshank is no Canon City, but in a rural area a man humping his ass across country in a gray pajama suit sticks out like a cockroach on a wedding cake." 
 "Because you DO get institutionalized. When you take away a man's freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He's like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill it. More often than not a con who's just out will pull some dumb job that hasn't got a chance in hell of succeeding...and why? Because it'll get him back inside. Back where he understands how things work." 
 "...the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it, Sam. And some don't, and never will." 
 "Andy told me once that all of geology is the study of pressure. And time, of course." 
 "But there's really no question. It always comes down to two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying."