As summer reaches its apex I look at my list of "Summer Reads" and find I have started a few, but not finished a one. Choosing instead to pick an old favorite off the nightstand and re-read the "good" parts. I didn't used to do this much, but as I get older I find I'm not so interested in making new "friends", but prefer quality time with old pals. Perhaps this is how classics came into being.
And so I've been perusing my shelves, reacquainting myself with friends. Valen, Verall, Vetch, Vlad (V named characters make very nice friends) Constantine, Terrant, Galen, & Deomon Sadi (some nice characters aren't always "good" guys). Characters are the heart of a novel for me. If the characters are not the main focus than the story will never hold me. Characters a also the main reason I drop a book like bad leftovers. When an author betrays a character's personality for plot...Bad. When a character is killed for no reason...Bad. Then characters read like cardboard standees...bad.
Take Harry Potter. A number of people I know have been plugging into the Harry Potter final mania of late so why not me. I really did enjoy the first three books. In fact I remember reading the first one when most people had no idea who Harry Potter was (the joys of being a librarian) and thinking this was a character set with potential. I adored book three the most. The crazy "uncle" Sirius who I hoped would become Harry's family and offer him a new and exciting view of the wizarding world. And Harry, in turn, would help his "uncle" clear his name and perhaps come to think of the wizarding world with less cynicism and more child like wonderment....then Book 4 happened. Poison in the heart for me. But I kept hoping something good would happen....Nope. Characters dropping by the wayside like flies and for no good reason, predictability, and then there was all the hiding in a tent and whining while the interesting plot went on "off screen" and we never got to read it! I came to dislike Harry a lot and wished he wasn't the focus of the story.
Perhaps this, and I'll admit a few other literary disappointments in the last few years, are to blame for my lack of wanting something new to read. I wait eagerly for the novels my few favorite authors throw like bones to readers ever year or two. Quality over quantity. I have also come to terms with the fact that, while I was an English major and a librarian, I prefer flights of fancy. Oh, I'll peruse the "fiction" sections now and again or even the Mystery area, but in the end I want magic, dragons, rough and ready heroes that are not knights in shining armor (see Romance for those), but know their way around a sword. And most of all I want my adventurers not to be whiny.
*****
If you really want to know what I'm reading...
Black Jewels Trilogy
Exile's Honor
Breath and Bone
Last Herald Mage
King of Attolia
Reader and Raylinx
