Even now a new George Lucas or Robert Zemeckis or James Cameron blockbuster opens, and within a week everyone has seen it, is eager to argue about its plot and dissect favorite scenes. Sure, most people are able to balance more than one activity in their lives, to read, attend concerts, visit art museums, stroll through the zoo, etc., etc. Hollywood is a jealous god. More and more, the movies even validate our books. Fiction is now so fast-paced and scripted that you know the book is merely the larval stage of the movie.
Kids prefer novelizations to novels.
Masterpieces by the more refined English and American writers are regularly gutted by set designers, who transform Gilded Age drawing rooms into fantasy catwalks for retro-costumers. In the dark no one can take his eyes off the screen. Serious books, by contrast, ask the reader to pause, think about an idea, reread a favorite passage, argue with the author, mark up the margins, dog-ear pages. A reader absorbs the pages, not vice-versa. While books invite, movies impose.