I liked the movie better than Andrew did, but there's a lot I winced at as well, surely for some of the same reasons that led New York Times film critic A.O.

Salon's film critic, Andrew O'Hehir, who has not read the book, hated the movie, but even he concedes that its best bits were Hazel's voice-overs, all taken directly from the novel. I didn't then and I don't now believe that the finest aspects of Green's novel - the voice of its first-person narrator, Hazel Grace Lancaster, and the intimate perspective it offers of her psyche - could ever adequately be captured on film.

Having read, loved and reviewed the novel when it was first published, I remember feeling some trepidation when the news of the movie deal first leaked out. A film version of the book, directed by Josh Boone and starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, has just opened. It just so happens that this week both of these notions of literature have converged on a single object: 'The Fault in Our Stars,' a bestselling YA novel by John Green. If you're Ruth Graham, author of a recent essay in Slate titled 'Against YA: Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Children's Books,' you might assert that real literature (for adults, at least) consists of 'stories that confound and discomfit,' featuring an 'emotional and moral ambiguity' that's 'nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.' Or you might decide to define the essence of 'literature' as residing in everything a written text can do that other forms of storytelling cannot. What makes a novel, or any other piece of writing, 'literature'? There are at least two ways to answer that question.

The fault in our stars movie vs book