What about books from films? Star Wars comes to mind (never read it but remember my geeky cousin reading it v soon after the film, I only recall the spellings "Artoo Detoo" and "See Threepiyo").
In my (admittedly limited) experience, novelisations are very hard to do well. A film isn't long enough to make a good book without serious changes, and in more recent years, marketing deadlines mean that they tend to be rushed and/or based on an early version of the film that doesn't necessarily hold with the final product.
My brother had some of the TNG-era Star Trek ones, which I ended up reading on holiday at one point. They were dire.
See also: The Jurassic Park sequels. But the films were rubbish too, so low expectations. I suppose it's the nature of films that get novelised tending to be popular blockbusters, where good stories are optional, and authors are chosen according to their ability to work to deadlines.
Never cared enough about Star Wars to read them, but my understanding is that they primarily function as a stepping stone to the Expanded Universe. I believe there's something similar going on with Doctor Who. No doubt there are some cracking stories in among those universes of fanwank.
2001: A Space Odyssey is good, in as much that it expands on the film in a constructive and compelling way. It's not really a novelisation, though, as AIUI it was written as a sort of first draft of the screenplay.
One that I stumbled upon by accident was Orson Scott Card's novelisation of
The Abyss. I grew up on James Cameron action movies, and I've always had a soft spot for that one as a triumph of the fuckit-let's-just-build-a-real-one school of special effects. It's faithful to the (extended cut) screenplay, with a few extra chapters added on at the start to provide back-story to the main characters, a decent epilogue, and some explanation to make the technology portrayed in the film make sense. It's surprisingly good.