Dear Reader,

I don’t want to be THAT person. But someone’s got to be the bearer of truth: the book is always better. Well, almost always. I still think Me Before You was an exceptional adaptation in that the actors added layers to the characters, and that the Bridgerton TV show is superior to the books, and that I, Robot needed to be a movie because Isaac Asimov’s work was elevated on screen. You know what? Actually, I take it back. The book is not always better.

But it is always a slippery slope when a book gets adapted to the screen, whether as a TV series or a movie. Readers are imaginative people, and they use every minute detail shared in the book to visualise what the characters, story and setting would look like. Adaptations can often take liberties with these details, and that…hurts.

I will talk more about this today. But first…

What’s Lit this week?

In this section, I gather all the fun, juicy, and news-y updates related to books and publishing.

• Taylor Swift is back with her Literary References sh#t

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Taylor Swift has announced her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, on a 2-hour-long podcast on New Heights, alongside Travis and Jason Kelce. Among other things, she briefly discussed Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the podcast, noting that The Lion King was a loose adaptation of the play.

She has also shared the tracklist with her fans, and the first song on that list is titled Ophelia. In Hamlet, Ophelia dies by drowning, and the cover of the album shows Swift in a similar setting. The Easter Eggs are being cracked by the best sleuths known to us, Swifties. It might be time to revisit some classics.

• Amitav Ghosh in the Future Library 

Have you heard of the Future Library Project? It’s an initiative started by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who is deeply interested in human relationships with longer timescales and posterity. The team behind the project is commissioning manuscripts from 100 authors, and will continue to do so until 2113. In Oslo, Norway, a forest has been replanted to grow trees that will provide the raw material to publish 100 books in one go in 2114. Most of us will not be alive to read these books! That’s kinda…wild?

Amitav Ghosh has become the 12th author to offer his manuscript to the project, where it will stay sealed for 89 years. Other authors whose manuscripts have been added to the vault include Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, and Ocean Vuong.

While you think about Ghosh’s work, read my review of his verse poetry, Jungle Nama:

Book Adaptations

Look, I am not a purist when it comes to book adaptations. In fact, I’m a strong advocate for stories being reshaped across different formats. That’s why I’ll always defend audiobooks as a legitimate form of reading, and why I’m fascinated when a text comes alive as a film, a play, or even a podcast. Done well, adaptations give us the chance to experience stories in new dimensions: visceral, visual, tangible. But the key is that they need to be done with taste and with heart.

For me, the adaptations I love most are the ones where the creators clearly care about the characters. That doesn’t mean they have to make them “good” or “likeable.” A villain can be just as beautifully drawn if they are created with conviction. The point is that characters should never feel like filler: token stereotypes, placeholders, or half-hearted tropes. When an author or filmmaker truly cares about their characters, you feel it in how multi-dimensional they are, how consistent their choices feel, and how much weight their decisions carry.

This is where adaptations often falter. Most of the time, the plot survives the transition—it’s the conviction that gets lost. You can tweak settings, timelines, even endings, but if you dilute a character’s motivations or backstory, the entire emotional core of the story weakens. Case in point: My Oxford Year. The film stripped away much of the protagonist’s backstory: her grief, her hyper-independence, her ambitions as a political consultant. Those details weren’t just colour; they were the bedrock for why her choices in the book felt so profound. Without them, the movie’s version of her decisions came across flat, and the whole narrative was watered down. Worse still, it was marketed as a light-hearted romance, when in reality the book had more emotional resonance, akin to The Fault in Our Stars or Me Before You.

Read all about how the book and movie were different here:

On the other hand, we’ve seen how staying true to the source material, and involving the author, can make an adaptation thrive. The Summer I Turned Pretty is a perfect example: Jenny Han’s active role in the production has ensured that fans celebrate when episodes honour the books, proving just how much fidelity to character and story matters. It also gives me optimism for upcoming projects, such as People We Meet on Vacation, where Emily Henry is closely involved.

So yes, I’m excited when a beloved book gets adapted. I’ll always look forward to it with curiosity. But I’ll also be the first to call it out when what makes the story powerful: its conviction, its characters, is diluted for the screen.

Book Adaptations I am looking forward to:

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

When I read the book earlier this year, I was blown away by how prescient Ishiguro’s writing and story was. We are all talking about how Artificial Intelligence is changing our lives and minds now, but Ishiguro had the vision to deal with this back in 2021. Taika Watiti is directing the adaption, with Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Mia Tharia, Natasha Lyonne, Simon Baker, and Steve Buscemi starring.

• People we meet on vacation by Emily Henry

Emily Bader and Tom Blyth are excellent choices for Poppy and Alex, the protagonists. And even though this essentially summer movie is being released in January, I am willing to look beyond the mistiming, because Henry shared, “I also think there's something really cool about them getting to see content that is not directly from the book, but could be from the book. I think it's sort of an expansion of the universe in a way that's really fun.”

• You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle

Penn Badgley and Meghann Fahy will star in You Deserve Each Other. It follows the story of Naomi and Nick, a couple who are engaged, but they’ve fallen completely out of love. Now both of them are resorting pranks and sabotage to force the other to call off the wedding. It reminds me of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

• Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Chloé Zhao will direct, Paul Mescal will star in it. If you haven’t read any O’Farrell books before, take this as your sign.

Hamnet is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of his wife Agnes. it deals with the grief that comes from the loss of their child to bubonic plague. In this retelling, Agnes gets a voice and intelligence that have been missing from most of the original renditions of Shakespeare’s life.

• The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Lili Reinhart will play Olive Smith, the Ph.D. candidate, and Tom Bateman will play Dr Adam Carlsen. Casting doesn’t get better than this: TLH was originally a Star Wars fan fiction about the "Reylo" ship between Rey and Kylo Ren. Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, is Tom Bateman’s real-life spouse. The universe is having a laugh over this.

Bookings of the week

This is the section where I discuss my book escapades and adventures from the week. 

• Likeness by Samsun Knight

This year, I promised myself to try to read and talk about more books from independent and University presses. So I jumped on the opportunity to review Likeness, a novella at around 120 pages, and it did not disappoint.

It’s literary fiction in the best sense: any sentence might offer a crucial insight into a character, and nothing feels accidental. The elliptical narration and intellectual interiority of the writing are heavily reminiscent of those found in the works of Katie Kitamura and Jenny Offill. The wild restraint in voice, the exploration of absence and presence, intimacy, and the detached yet sharp narration offer fertile ground for interpreting the ideas of motherhood and marital concord. If those writers or this style of writing is your jam, be sure to check it out.

• I read a book that felt so 2025, and I am worried for its life beyond this year

Well, Actually by Mazey Eddings follows Eva Kitt, an aspiring serious journalist whose dreams are derailed by the harsh realities of the media industry. Instead of hard-hitting investigations, Eva finds herself hosting Sausage Talk, a quirky show where she interviews B-list celebrities over hot dogs, a setup that cheekily nods to formats like Chicken Shop Date.

From the very first line — “I always expected my career would revolve less around wieners than it does,” Well, Actually makes its irreverent tone loud and clear.

And as the story progresses, there is a lot to love about seeing characters with semi-public lives being scrutinised. But maybe, the book leans too much into the zeitgeist. This is not a story trying to be evergreen: it is rooted in the now, packed with references, career trajectories, and digital-age dilemmas that feel ripped straight from 2025. From its premise to its banter and dialogue, the book thrives on being sharply in tune with the chronically online. This is both its charm and its potential limitation. For readers immersed in internet culture, familiar with the chaotic hustle of media jobs, podcast personalities, and the cutthroat world of content creation, it will feel instantly relatable. However, its relevance is deeply tied to its moment, trading longevity for a kind of cultural immediacy that may not hold the same appeal a few years from now.

Thank you for signing up for Kritikal Reading! It’s a pun! On my name! 

A small introduction: I am Kritika. I have been writing and talking about books online since 2013 (when personal blogspot blogs were a thing; I am ancient!) Professionally, I am a freelance content marketer for tech companies and nonprofits. 

I’m as hooked on coffee as I am on books. I’m doubling down on my book advocacy because I firmly believe that “I’m not a reader” is a temporary phase; you just haven’t found your perfect book. Kinda like love? I hope I can introduce some people to their book-lomls. 

Stay connected with me on my Instagram. More fun updates to follow!