>>>>Lord of the Rings is a bit ambitious - the kids will be grown up by the time you finish reading all 3 books in installments :-)
>>>
>>>Furthermore, and this applies for lots of the books in the list, why reading a book when there is already a movie!! {Ducks}
>>
>>Harry Potters movies are quite good, IMHO.
>
>They've gotten better as they went, but in every case, the book is better than the movie, because it has time and space to explore things outside the main plot.
>

That's a general truism of books vs. movies, isn't it? A standard movie screenplay is about 120 pages long (one page per minute of run time). Most books, of course, are much longer than that. A novelist can also describe things (or let the reader imagine them) that would be difficult, expensive, or even impossible to film. So a novelist definitely starts with some advantages. Offsetting those advantages is the fact that film is a visual medium. Think of a favorite movie scene (it doesn't matter what one, just something what you really like). Visualize it. Then try to imagine how difficult it would be to create the same impact with only words and no pictures.