Take a moment to list the ten works of written fiction you most love. Feel free to mix short stories and novels if you wish. If you you can’t think of ten, five or so is fine; if you can’t stop yourself at ten, don’t feel obliged to. Don’t worry whether the list is full of what English teachers call “real” literature, pop fiction, or outright trash. The aim here is to find a representative sample of what you like in literature. I’ll wait a minute while you do that.
:: smokes a cigarette while putting the final touches on latest scheme to murder Aquaman ::
Finished? Okay, good. Now look over your list and tell us which of the following descriptions of its contents is most apt.
[ul]
[li] The stories I like best are mostly character-driven; they’re about the emotional growth of a single person or a very small group of persons. The stories’ plots are generally used to expose details of the main character’s soul.[/li][li] The stories I like best are mostly plot-driven; they’re about what the character does and undergoes more than what he is. There are plenty of twists, turns, betrayals, revelations, and so forth; the characters exist so that we can see the event through a given set of eyes, but their emotional development is not not really the point.[/li][li] The stories I like best are a pretty even mix of the above.[/li][li]There’s something else you left out.[/li][/ul]
No poll, so don’t bother waiting for one. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some giant electric eels to train.
I’ve thought about this before, because people tell me that I’m terrible to recommend books for.
I would say that neither of the above is what I most enjoy about reading. I like interesting plots and action (thrillers, hard sci-fi, mysteries) and I also enjoy learning about people’s innards (biographies, philosophical fiction).
What I would say is the most important trait that influences what I like is the ability to let me get away from where I am. I don’t want to be reminded that I’m reading a story (“dear reader” annoys the everliving shit out of me), I don’t want to have to think too hard about what’s going on and to whom (constant perspective shifts between times, places, or characters are usually not going to be big hits with me) - I just want to sit back and be effortlessly immersed in another reality for a while.
If you can manage to be immersive, I don’t care whether it’s about character or activity. I’ll follow along just for the chance to go somewhere or be someone that I’m not for a while. Bonus points for imaginative and illustrative use of language, interesting characters or plotting to keep me invested, and a sense of tension that isn’t obviously artificial.
Nowadays in the land of endless sequels and stories that never end, extra bonus points for a stand-alone story that doesn’t end on a cliffhanger or to-be-continued, or leave sixteen million plot-threads hanging around to conveniently be the hook to another dozen interconnected stories. Please, just let me read something that ends!
Night Watch (and all the other Diskworld books)
The Scar (and other bas lag books)
The City & The City
Neuromancer (and the other Sprawl books)
Imagica (also Books of the Art, Weaveworlds and Abarrat)
Player of Games (and the rest of Banks’ oeuvre)
The Wind in The Willows
American Gods
Orsinian Tales (and other Le Guin books)
Let The Right One In
I guess I like a mix. Plotting’s important, beyond just how it affects the main characters, but the character development side isn’t ignored, I clearly don’t like things that are just action and no character growth. But pure bildungsroman doesn’t look like my scene, either…
A mix, but not even. It has to be character driven, and I will tolerate a less than perfect plot for good characters. I won’t finish reading a book with a good plot but crappy characters.
I like crime writing. If it is all car chases and guns and action, then lose interest very quickly. Similarly in sci fi, I can’t stand all aliens and worlds being destroyed, I want character driven speculative fiction with a good plot.
I agree with a poster above that, most of all, I want to escape into the novel. A great story is one where I lose all track of time.
However, while I’m more easily entertained by plot-driven novels, the character-driven ones typically resonate more with me and stay with me afterwards for a longer period of time. So, I guess I’ll give the edge to character-driven.
I will add, though, that very, very, very rarely, I appreciate a book solely for the fact that it is well-written. I’m not a literature snob, I read across many genres, but occasionally I find myself re-reading sentences and paragraphs just because of how beautifully the author wrote them. A recent example is “The Book Thief” - the personification and imagery was just breathaking. Yes, I loved the story and the characters, but I was blown away by the author’s use of words, first and foremost.
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass
Ray Bradbury’s short story, ‘‘All Summer in a Day’’
Stephen King’s ‘‘1408’’ and ‘‘That Thing, You Can Only Say What it is In French.’’
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Confusions of Young Torless
La Ciudad Ausente (The Absent City, surrealist novel about collective traumatic memory in Argentina.)
John Dies At the End
Small Gods
Now these don’t all fit the bill perfectly, but in general:
Surreal, character-driven, humorous, without all that prose bullshit thrown in. I like books that make me think differently about the world I live in, and I like my writing to be spare, direct, and full of dialog. I don’t want to read three pages about the shape of the bookcase in the main character’s master bedroom. I need things to be happening, especially things that bring out the emotional core of the characters they are happening to.
Ed McBain sold 100 million books - his 87th Precinct police procedurals. He basically invented the genre. The core cast of characters (most of them changing, with varying degrees of success, with the times) is as familiar to me as my own family. The books got bigger, longer, more convoluted and violent but the characters were going through all manner of mayhem right along with me. I thought, and still think, Ed McBain was brilliant.
Character-driven with a plot that rolls ahead (Lonesome Dove & English Passengers for example.)
I don’t have much patience for surreal (i.e. Paluniak although movies based on his books are good).
Historical fiction starts at an advantage with me but I’ll dump it if there’s too much modernism injected. I read that genre to get think about the ways people survived, thought, loved differently (or the same) as we do today but I am not really interested in a 1600’s feminist perspective.
A good horror read - usually Stephen King because I’m lazy about new authors. SK has characters I think about twenty years after I read the book (I’m thinking of you, Stu Redman).
Fantasy only works for me if the characters are interesting and act realistically (some may disagree but I’d include Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, and the first few books of Song of Fire & Ice series in this). Also, the fantasy world has to follow it’s own rules or at least not be completely random or I’ll get annoyed.
I prefer a balance of well-written characters with a good plot driven by those characters. I prefer transparent writing- when it is too finely crafted, it becomes a vehicle to showcase the writer’s ego rather than the story. To make the book a true favorite, however, it needs to have some spark of something bigger and beyond everyday. Mythic resonance, preferably metaphor rather than allegory
(eg LotR rather than Narnia).
I like books that are setting-driven–books that have a compelling sense of time and place, and a story that arises out of and is unique to that time and place.
So I love Melville’s Benito Cereno, a story that could only take place on a slave ship, and only when the cultures of New England, Old Spain, and Darkest Africa all clash–and you come out of the book understanding that, understanding those places and times. Huck Finn has to have the Mississippi and Arkansas and slavery. I love works of fantasy or SF that construct a new world that feels real and then put a story in that world that depends on the setting, that relies on it–Guy Gavriel Kay, Tolkien, Robin Mckinley, Diana Wynne Jones.
It’s not about having a huge detailed world, or a weird one, but one the drives the story–so “Song of Fire and Ice” falls flat to me because he has failed to develop the one unique fact of the world–generation long summers and winters–and instead packed the work with details that could have existed anywhere, that don’t drive the events of the story. Even if winter is later a major plot point, it’s too late: people that live in a world like that should be different. I don’t know how, but it shouldn’t be something that’s only hinted at, it should be the thrumming undertone of everything. Contrast this with Tolkien, where the layers and layers of detail are relevant. They shape how people act and react,they give meaning and context to events.
A great example of setting is in one of my favorite books,Flanders by Patricia Anthony. The setting is tiny–entirely the WWI French trenches and related areas, and a character shaped in a small east Texas town --but you get this amazing little gem of a story that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. None of the characters would have been who they were or changed how they did in any other place or time, and you come out of the book understanding that.
My favourites all have a romance I really like. I don’t know, for some reason I just have a hard time getting behind a story where romance and/or sex isn’t important to the characters. It’s such a huge part of human nature.
I also like direct writing that doesn’t feel like something you’d read for a high school lit assignment. I want to spend my brainpower on what the characters are doing, not decoding the words on the page.
I also prefer historicals and fantasy, I think it’s escapism. Any time in living memory isn’t enjoyable to me. It might be the element of having things that aren’t possible in this world.