Imagination is a lost art

"I thought the first Harry Potter was great,"

"I liked the second one better," someone said.

"I never saw any of them," someone else said.

In that moment I realized everyone but me was talking about the movies, not the book. Later in the conversation, someone brought up Twilight.

"I haven't seen it," was the response.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

It happens all too often. I'll mention Stephen King and find myself surrounded by people talking about movies based on his books. It gets worse than that, though. When you start talking about To Kill a Mockingbird or Pride and Prejudice and the person says, "Oh, Keira Knightley was GREAT in that," you know they rather see the movie than...READ.

We're a visual society. It seems, if you want your book to be read, you'd better get a movie deal out of it, pronto. THEN the world will rush out to buy the book, reading it AFTER they've seen the movie.

"I like to be able to picture the characters in my head," someone once told me. "If I've seen the movie, then I know how the characters look."

Imagination is a lost art, I guess. In fact, after the movie comes out, usually the book covers are revised with the film's actors, like this:

Or this:

I understand the power of cinema, but isn't part of the fun of reading being able to make up your OWN mental image of the characters and scenes? Isn't it the author's job to bring it all to life for you?

I remember as a kid, loving to read. I remember being told by the grown-ups that I needed to be outside playing rather than cooped up inside reading. Good point, but all of that reading paid off handsomely later in life. Even reading commercial fiction enriches someone. I visited places in my imagination I'd never visited before. I learned about things...and I developed a vocabulary and writing ability that I notice many non-readers lack. In fact, if I hear one more person saying words like "irregardless" and "a whole nother" I'm going to start handing out books on the street.

What do you think? Are we raising generations of couch potatoes who have no idea A Christmas Carol was a book before it was a movie? Who think Charles Dickens was a famous actor and William Shakespeare was "a great character in that Gwyneth Paltrow movie."