Thursday, August 28, 2008

Booking Through Thursday


If you’re anything like me, one of your favorite reasons to read is for the story. Not for the character development and interaction. Not because of the descriptive, emotive powers of the writer. Not because of deep, literary meaning hidden beneath layers of metaphor. (Even though those are all good things.) No … it’s because you want to know what happens next?

Or, um, is it just me?

At a library conference this past spring I had the privilege of attending a talk given by librarian extraordinaire Nancy Pearl, who spoke about the four general appeal factors that books have for readers- character, plot, setting and language. In other words, most readers, most of the time, will prefer books that emphasize one or two of those aspects of storytelling. Some people like strong, page-turning plots; some people like rich characters; some people like to armchair-travel to exotic places and some people like gorgeous or particularly stylized writing. For me, books appeal that are strong on character or strong on plot, and are written in a literary style. So if my reading preferences were to be expressed in Boolean terms (yeah, I'm a nerd) it would go like this:

(plot OR character) AND (language)

So it's not just you! But sort of.


6 comments:

SmilingSally said...

I think I'd vote for plot AND language.

Anonymous said...

I do love a good plot and characters, but I also enjoy a book that takes place somewhere I'm familiar with. It's like visiting an old friend for me.

Anonymous said...

I think I like characters and setting the best. I like the other two, but those can really suck me in like nothing else.

Susan Helene Gottfried said...

Plot and characters. The two are pretty entwined.

Hmm. Maybe I should answer this at my own place; I think it's about to get long...

Anonymous said...

I love your answer. You're exactly right.

Candy Schultz said...

It is definitely for the story but beautiful writing is icing on the cake and, for me, character development is a must.