I started reading something new last night and realized that I prefer physical descriptions of characters that come from other characters rather than from the writer.
I like the description to be part of a scene or in dialogue. Like “Gordy, damn but you’re tall!” or “Gordy ducked as he passed through the doorway.”
There’s something pedestrian about getting physical description of a character when you first meet them. It’s like reading the writer’s outline. “Gordy is tall.”
And speaking of pedestrian, Gordy ducking reminded me of something I don’t like in a book – to-ing and fro-ing, telling me every step a character takes.
Can we talk about things we like and don’t like in what you read?
I like learning about a culture–where I’m defining culture kind of broadly and maybe a little oddly. Such that Last Bite by Nancy Verde Barr taught me about the culture behind the scenes at Good Morning America’s food segments–especially those involving Julia Child. (Who appears in slightly fictionalized form as Sally Woods).
And Tubby Meets Katrina by Anthony P. Dunbar showed a slightly fictionalized (and slightly convenient) first person view of life in New Orleans starting just before Katrina hit town.
But I also count The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold, where the cultures described are entirely fictional.
And I love it when I recognize minor characters in books written in series, or not so much series as just co-existing in the same universe. Like in one of Mary Jo Putney’s booksRiver of Fire, where one of the characters is a portrait painter, and the people in one of the portraits he paints are described in such a way that if you’ve read the book in which the people in the portrait meet, fall in love, and get married, they are unmistakable.
A dislike–books, especially young adult novels, in which the author finds it neccessary to have characters address a large number of hot button topics or horrible situations.
Example: Chris Crutcher novels frequently touch on child abuse, bullying, teen sex and/or pregnancy, death of a parent or friend, divorce. A couple is ok, all of them in one book can get to be overwhelming.
Other example: I recently read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and it’s two sequels (technically, there is a fourth book, newly out. I’ve not read it yet. Partly because it’s too new to be accessible at the library, and partly because I was annoyed with the author.) OK, I understand that each of the 4 girls needed at least one “major life-changing experience” during the first summer. (And the first book worked.) The second seemed a bit more contrived/forced, and the third just ticked me off.
“As you know, Bob,” is a form of infodump, in which the info is dumped through dialog – specifically, dialog in which one character goes over knowledge he and the other character know. Infodump by itself can be pages of explanation of how an engine works, or detailing the Admiral’s china pattern.
Foreshadowing – well. I dislike the older technique of (for example) “Barbara closed the door in John’s face, not realizing that two nights hence, he would return to cut out her heart.”
But if there’s a little bit now that I remember later when a bigger version of the same bit happens, that’s fine. And I can’t think of any examples at all to explain what I mean by that, sorry.
Oh, I hate those infodumps as well. Colleen McCullough used “As you know” so much in her Masters of Rome series that I stopped reading after book two. Picked up book three much later and finished the entire series eventually but winced everytime I came across another infodump…and there were a lot.