How did your favorite movies of the past year fare at this year’s Academy Awards? Critics and fans alike said this was an extraordinary year for excellent movies. To booklovers, it comes as no surprise that four of the nine Best Picture nominees were adapted from books. Those movies are Captain Phillips, Philomena, 12 Years a Slave and The Wolf of Wall Street. And the Oscar went to 12 Years a Slave. The books behind these movies are all non-fiction. In recent years, novels also were adapted into Best Picture winners. These included Slum Dog Millionaire (2008), No Country for Old Men (2004) and Million Dollar Baby (2003).

Once upon a time, it seemed that great books rarely transformed into great movies. Times have changed as plot lines and descriptions in books are more valued by filmmakers. Possibly this change has also been as authors have grown up with movies, their appreciation for that art form inspires how they write.

Some people are concerned that literacy is diminishing as people skip books in favor of movies. Why spend many hours engaged in the active reading of books when you can get the entire story faster and easier by sitting in a theatre being passively entertained for a couple of hours? But let’s remember that these movie adaptations are made because of books that excited enough readers to come to the attention of filmmakers. Conversely, some movies lead people to the books that inspired them. The Monuments Men did not get stellar movie reviews but the story line attracted new readers to a good book they had previously overlooked.

The social media website BuzzFeed offers a list of 16 books you should read that have been adapted into in films released, or to be released, in 2014.

There will always be room for various art forms to express a good story and we should celebrate all of them.