I would much rather watch the action in a movie than scale the mountains of my mind trying to image what the characters in a story looks like.

When I’m compelled to sit down, relax and get a taste of my favorite character’s life, I don’t want to be plagued with what I have been doing all day at school: reading.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of a good book, the intellectual benefits and the aesthetics of pulling out a hard copy, but a book just can’t reach the dramatic twists and tear-jerking moments that a movie can.

Without the crisp audio that fills a theater, do we actually know the voices of our favorite characters? Without the hyper-detailed pixels that AMC has perfected, do we actually know the shade of the antagonist’s hair color?

Books and movies can be as deep or as shallow as the consumer wants them to be. Books give long monologues of the character’s past, while movies fill the screen with Easter eggs and symbolic items that the viewer needs to find to get the full picture.

Books give detailed descriptions, but a movie can use sound and visuals to portray this. No adjective or description of the world can truly beat the movie-watching experience.

The movie “Wonder”  is a perfect example. On the first day of real school, Auggie Pullman is nervous, and his dad talks to him about the two rules he should follow: don’t raise your hand more than once in class, and you’re not alone even if you feel you are. If I read through this exchange instead of watching it, I wouldn’t have noticed the melancholy tone of the scene or the noisiness of the children around them.

This is not to say that books hold no weight in our modern world. In fact, books are archives of our past — but so are movies. Movies are a history of the development of technology, sound equipment and culture. If you don’t know a language you can’t read that book, but if you can sit down and watch the mannerisms and facial expressions of actors not in your native language, you still have something to gain from it.

So, if you choose the book, all power to you. But by picking a movie, the life that was once a fantasy in a novel is a reality on a screen.