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If it's a book I think I might want to read, then I will put off watching the film/series until I've read it.
It's fairly rare for an adaptation to live up to my favourite books. Even something like The Prestige is not quite there, for me, despite being decent in its own right.
But there are plenty of things that I am not that interested in reading that have made excellent TV. Slow Horses and Magpie/Moonflower Murders, for instance. Sometimes they will send me back to the source material, but in the case of Slow Horses I think that might end up ruining the TV version.
Sometimes the TV version is different enough that I can enjoy it without worrying too much about the source material. Wheel of Time, for example. Not popular with the fandom, but I have enjoyed it. You can't really be sure what's going to end up being a spoiler, even then, so I do still try to read the books first. I didn't watch the movie versoin of Annihilation until I'd read the whole trilogy, even though it's not a close adaptation. And the (not great) Ghibli versoin of Earthsea contains quite a major spoiler even though it's the loosest of loose adaptations.
And sometimes the books aren't all that great in the first place, and the adaptations are better. Sometimes you feel the books are pitches for movies.
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