Ah, book-to-screen adaptations. Seems like there’s a new one every week, and with it comes the skyscraper highs of seeing your favorite stories brought to life, only rivaled by the seafloor lows of having your most cherished works of literature maimed, butchered, and blasted into Technicolor smithereens.

Therein lies the Advent calendar–esque surprise of literary adaptations: You never know what you’re going to get. For me, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk maintained the undying love between the two main characters, Fonny and Tish, and masterfully captured their ensuing tragedy with both empathy and a courageous cinematic eye. I felt the same about his visceral adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which is a devastating piece of work requiring the guidance of a deft hand deeply attuned to the hope that hums in our hearts rather than the ever-present heaps of hate around us, as well as real leadership, on and off set, to care for the actors and crew. These renditions did their source material justice, only enhancing my experience in engaging with them while never eclipsing the inherent power of the books.

But is the adaptation ever better than the real thing? Sometimes. Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere, based on Celeste Ng’s number-one New York Times bestseller, presented a fuller, more complicated narrative, piercing my core in a way the novel didn’t. I hear Emmy-nominated Normal People (also Hulu), based on literary wunderkind Sally Rooney’s sophomore novel, is also must-see TV that may be better than the book. Same with FX on Hulu’s Fleishman Is in Trouble, based on the novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (I swear Hulu doesn’t pay me for these mentions), Netflix’s Bridgerton, stemming from Julia Quinn’s series, and countless others I’ll likely never get to.

Then there’s the question of how faithful an adaptation is to the novel, short story, or article it’s based on. Some folks want to see dialogue, word for word, shooting forth from an actor’s mouth exactly when and where it was in the original material. Others don’t mind a slight diverging of the two: an expansion of the world, more time for secondary characters, a few new plotlines that make you scoot to the edge of your couch and say, “This wasn’t in the book, and I love it.” Personally, I couldn’t make it past episode one of The Handmaid’s Tale, because I mainlined Margaret Atwood’s story and thus became immediately allergic to even its slightest corruption.

Still, if you’re like me, you’re committed to reading the book before you see the adaptation. Though I’ve often found that sometimes reading the book curbs my cinematic appetite, and I never end up watching the adaptation. HBO’s The Plot Against America, based on Philip Roth’s book, comes to mind. And then there are the adaptations I haven’t been able to watch because their books are gathering dust on my bookshelf. Cough, Dune, cough, cough.

The thing is, even if we would sometimes rather these precious pages of ink and wonder to sidestep the world of pixels and sound, there is immense value in book-to-screen adaptations. And I’m not just talking about the cha-ching of La-La Land’s cash registers. How many people, regardless of age, would be reading Walter Tevis if not for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit? That show, which made chess cool—it’s always been cool, but you know what I mean—and on par with Russell Crowe fighting for his life in Gladiator, introduced me to a versatile writer whose works I’ve come to love. How many people who watched Netflix’s Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front actually read Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same name? These adaptations preserve and extend legacies, and show us that stories, the very best of our human ingenuity, always have, and always will, stand the test of time.

Below you’ll find a list of recent and upcoming film and TV adaptations. A list, just like that quilt you started last winter, which is by no means complete. Grab some popcorn, recline the La-Z-Boy, and let us know what’s missing, which adaptations exceeded or missed your expectations, as well as those that you’re looking forward to most.

Lights, camera, action!