A couple of weeks ago, the redoubtable PG Forte and I had an extended debate on Twitter (as we’re wont to do) about the merits of True Grit. PG preferred the Henry Hathaway/John Wayne version. I’m a fan of the Coen Brother/Jeff Bridges one. I don’t want to rehash the entire discussion here, but the gist of my argument was that the Coen Brothers were more true to Charles Portis’s book than Henry Hathaway was.

Which is, of course, not much of an argument. Books and movies are two different genres, and movies are by no means required to be true to their sources. All of us can cite some terrible example of a movie that did violence to a favorite book (my mother could never mention the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh without grimacing). At the same time, there are movies that are actually better than the original book (The Godfather and Silence Of the Lambs leap to mind). So saying a movie did a good job of adapting a book is faint praise, although I still think it accounts for the different tone and look of the Coen Brothers True Grit.

The problem in adapting a book for the screen is obvious—books take place in your head, and movies…don’t. This problem doesn’t have to be insurmountable, but it’s always going to be there. And sometimes, for some people, the problem will be acute. My prime example of this is True Blood.

Now I’m a huge fan of Charlaine Harris’s work. In fact, I had already read books in two other series she wrote (her Aurora Teagarden books and the Lily Bard series) before I read the first Sookie Stackhouse. Harris always writes in first person and her voice is distinctive. Although all of her heroines sound different, they also sound faintly similar. And that voice conveys certain qualities—her heroines are frequently damaged or hurt in some way (Harris’s most recent heroine, Harper Connelly, develops the ability to find dead bodies after being struck by lightning), and they’re all survivors. After hearing Harris’s voice in the Sookie Stackhouse books, I’d developed a definite idea of Sookie’s character. She was tough but vulnerable, an intriguing mixture of innocence and hard-edged practicality.

I approached the HBO series with a certain amount of trepidation—would they present a convincing version of Bontemps, Louisiana? Would they be able to get Sookie right? The answers to these questions, at least for me, were yes and no. Bontemps looked and sounded right, and I loved some of the actors who managed to reproduce Harris’s characters effectively—Sam Trammell, Stephen Moyer, and Andrew Sarsgard in particular. But I just couldn’t buy Anna Paquin as Sookie.

It isn’t that Paquin isn’t a good actress—she is. And I’m sure she’s playing the role the way her producers and directors want it played. And I’m also sure (because I’ve been told repeatedly) that other Harris fans think she’s wonderful. But she’s not the Sookie I heard in my head as I read the books, that tough but vulnerable survivor with her mixture of common sense and yearning. To me, Paquin’s Sookie has a sort of Jessica Simpson quality, and I was thinking more Julia Stiles.

Is this the fault of the series? Nope. My guess is that everybody who reads Harris will come up with their own version of Sookie Stackhouse. And for many people, Paquin may be a close approximation of the Sookie Stackhouse who lives in their heads. But that’s the central issue with creating a visual version of something that’s not visual at all. Books are, after all, a medium that requires the reader to do the visualizing. And chances are we’re all going to visualize the characters somewhat differently. For me, Anna Paquin just isn’t the Sookie I knew.

And in case you’re wondering PG, I still prefer Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn to John Wayne.