[Fozzybear]

The Shawshank Redemption I thought worked much better as a film, though I did enjoy the book immensely and would rather like to read it again some time.

Lord of the Rings is a tricky one - the films (...has to be the extended editions!) are superb, though a touch cheesy in some places. I think the books are better but definitely lean towards a bit too much poetry (which I also tend to skim through after reading some of it) and exposition - you can really tell that Tolkien was an English professor! The books give much more of an impression of scale of the lands and the task at hand than the films do but the films are excellent and keep the important aspects of the story intact - trying to fit the sheer scope of the books into three films must have been a herculean task. I've watched the extra material on the extended editions (in all there are 9 dvds of documentaries on the blu-ray set!!) and the amount of work and attention to detail they put into the films is quite astonishing - they had people working for years making chainmail!

Oh, and I saw the Fellowship of the Ring before I'd read the books - I certainly prefer the flow of the first book, even though I'm not actually terribly keen on Tom Bombadil.

I agree about High Fidelity too, I saw the film and thought it was fantastic but the book just left me cold. I've read another of his books and quite liked it but that one just didn't work as well as the film did for me.