As I watched the montage of the Best Picture films over the years during the Oscars Sunday night, I started thinking about all the great films that were first set down as words in a book.

The Best Picture winner this year, “No Country for Old Men,” began as a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Other nominated films – “Atonement” and “There Will Be Blood” — also were based on books. 

Every good book doesn’t translate into a good movie, though. The film version of one of my favorite books, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” was pretty much panned by critics and dissed at the box office. One person wrote it would’ve been a better movie if they just filmed someone sitting on stage reading aloud the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez…. Sometimes it’s not so much the story, but the way it is written; it’s hard to make that translate on film.

But there have been many books that make highly successful movies: Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Schindler’s List” by Thomas Keneally, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy base on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Micheal Ondaatje’s “The English Patient,” to name a few.

Of all the Best Pictures from books over the years, I’d have to say my favorite is “Out of Africa.” The cinematography, the music, Meryl Streep telling stories, Robert Redford washing her hair on safari… When I read passages from Isak Denisen’s memoir, I hear them in Meryl Streep’s ”Karen” voice.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…

What is your favorite film based on a book?