You bring up a good point that I had not previously considered, which is movies from books. Let's face it though...very seldom does a screenplay accurately capture the essence of any book. So my selections here are solely based on comparing the remake to the original and how it was able to work.

Here's another thing...

I am not 100% in disfavor of remakes. I think that sometimes a re-working of a classic can be beneficial, but not all the time. PSYCHO for example is a film that has never diminished in it's accessability over time and therefore shooting a remake shot-by-shot doesn't make sense. There was no need for it. However, let's take SOLARIS for example. Very few American audiences are going to sit through a 3 hour Russian Sci-Fi epic, but Steven Soderbergh's remake starring George Clooney is going to be more accessible to newer audiences. Was it a good remake? Well, at times. It did keep some of the original content together (also this is based on a book) and there are moments where it becomes too Americanized, but more-or-less it was a fairly good remake. Hopefully more people want to see the original because of it.

Sometimes a remake can capture the feel of the original and just have fun with it as well, take for example OCEANS ELEVEN, which is different in nature than the original and combines star power together to make a film that stands on it's own fairly well, the sequel....not so much.