Yeah even my trashy-genre-fic loving friend who's read all or nearly all the novels says only a couple are OK, and IIRC he said only one was really decent enoug

Yeah even my trashy-genre-fic loving friend who's read all or nearly all the novels says only a couple are OK, and IIRC he said only one was really decent enough that he'd recommend it to others, versus the films, of which he likes a bunch. And he likes some bad novels (as he'll readily acknowledge) and plenty of older "classic" genre fic, plus some not-so-trashy British classics (Austen, Dickens, et c), so it's not a recency bias, or difficulty with the settings, topics, author's culture, or writing style. Seems the film-makers largely agreed that it wasn't worth trying to preserve much from the books.