what readers want

Is “Likeability” Only an Issue if the Character is Female?

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This post by Kirsten Reach originally appeared on the Melville House site on 11/18/14.

Asked whether she’d want to be friends with the protagonist in her latest novel, Claire Messud famously quipped in an interview with Publishers Weekly last year, “Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?” Nora, the main character in The Woman Upstairs, might be described as an “art monster,” a term Jenny Offill coined in Dept. of Speculation.

Nora devotes herself to her work with fervor, but she also behaves in a way the reviewer disliked, which changed her experience with the book. How much should that be discussed in a formal or informal review? Moreover, how deep does likeability go? Are readers at fault for not taking time to get further in the characters’ heads, or are authors supposed to be held responsible for the questionable behavior of their characters?

Messud’s interview seemed to kick off more than a year of authors reflecting on the way the women in their novels were received, especially if the reviewer assumed some traits in their characters were drawn from the authors’ own lives. Edan Lepucki wrote a piece for The Millions this week on the reception of her characters, especially the female protagonist, in her novel California:

 

Read the full post on the Melville House site.

 

Ebooks Can Tell Which Novels You Didn't Finish

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This article by Alison Flood originally appeared on The Guardian on 12/10/14.

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch put down prematurely by 55% of ebook readers, with self-published star Casey Kelleher holding most attention

The Goldfinch may have won Donna Tartt the Pulitzer, praised by judges as a novel which “stimulates the mind and touches the heart”, but the acclaimed title’s 800-odd pages appear to have intimidated British readers, with less than half of those who downloaded it from e-bookseller Kobo making it to the end.

New data from Kobo shows that, although The Goldfinch was the 37th bestselling ebook of the year for the retailer, it was completed by just 44.4% of Kobo’s British readers. Kobo speculated that it “likely proved daunting for some due to the length of the novel”.

Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s account from 1853 of how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery – “I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman’s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off” – was, according to Kobo, similarly overwhelming. Ninth on their British bestseller list, following the hugely successful film adaptation, the book was completed by just 28.2% of British readers.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Tips on Creating Reader-Friendly Books for Today’s Busy Readers

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on the Independent Book Publishers Association site in October 2014.

Today’s readers are much busier and more distractible than ever before. Their time is precious and fragmented, and they’re constantly bombarded with other demands on their attention. To grab nonfiction readers and keep them turning the pages of books you write and/or publish, it’s critical to make sure the writing is clear, concise, and vivid.

Here are some quick tips for you to relay to your authors or use yourself in revising the style and presentation of nonfiction to entice and engage readers. (Similar tips work for fiction, as you may be glad to know.)

 

STYLE
Use a clear, chatty, reader-friendly writing style

Use casual language and everyday words for immediate comprehension and inclusion. Don’t be pedantic or preachy, and avoid pretentious, show-offy words and flowery phrases. You’re writing to inform and engage, not to impress. Your goal should be clear communication of your ideas and immediate comprehension of your points. And of course, never talk down to your readers.

 

Read the full post on the Independent Book Publishers Association site.

 

Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Read Fiction

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This post by Gabe Bergado originally appeared on Mic on 11/21/14.

They tend to be more empathetic toward others.

It’s not news that reading has countless benefits: Poetry stimulates parts of the brain linked to memory and sparks self-reflection; kids who read the Harry Potter books tend to be better people. But what about people who only read newspapers? Or people who scan Twitter all day? Are those readers’ brains different from literary junkies who peruse the pages of 19th century fictional classics?

Short answer: Yes — reading enhances connectivity in the brain. But readers of fiction? They’re a special breed.

The study: A 2013 Emory University study looked at the brains of fiction readers. Researchers compared the brains of people after they read to the brains of people who didn’t read. The brains of the readers — they read Robert Harris’ Pompeii over a nine-day period at night — showed more activity in certain areas than those who didn’t read.

 

Read the full post on Mic.

 

The Missed Opportunities in Weakness

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This post by Elisabeth Lane originally appeared on Cooking Up Romance on 12/4/14.

Anyone who’s been following this blog for awhile probably knows that I’ll take a “beta” hero over an “alpha” hero any day, but that mostly I wish the distinction didn’t exist. Actually, I don’t think sociology upholds the dichotomy at all so outside of romance novels, the distinction really doesn’t exist. It’s arbitrary, unrealistic and damaging to everyone, regardless of gender. “Alpha” is shorthand for a certain kind of strength in heroes, an unambiguous, worldly, most often physical, but sometimes also economic power. And even when we talk about “beta” heroes, we talk about different kinds of strength: competence and kindness, for example.

But outside of sociological and feminist arguments against subscribing to socially-constructed and ultimately restrictive portrayals of masculinity, I think there are missed opportunities when we focus so intently upon strength. And it’s not just in heroes. I noticed the other day while perusing Amazon’s romance novel newsletter that whether in the blurb or the extent reviews, everyone is obsessed with “strong” heroines. I’m guessing this is code for all sorts of things: independence, smarts, competence.

But lately I’m also seeing ruthlessness, willingness toward violence, and selfishness. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. In nearly every other genre, women are most often cast in the caring, nurturing, selfless role so having access to another narrative is bound to be empowering for romance readers and writers.

 

Read the full post on Cooking Up Romance.

 

The Books Of Revelations: Why Are Novelists Turning Back To Religion?

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This post by Philip Maughan originally appeared on New Statesman on 11/27/14.

There is a sense that, in recent years, novelists have formed part of a rearguard action in response to Richard Dawkins’s New Atheist consensus. Philip Maughan talks to Marilynne Robinson, Francis Spufford and Rowan Williams about God in literature.

Close to the end of White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel about a professor of Hitler studies who will do just about anything to ease his fear of dying, an elderly nun reveals the secret truth about faith. “Do you think we are stupid?” she asks Jack Gladney, bleeding from the wrist at a Catholic hospital following a botched murder attempt. “We are here to take care of sick and injured,” the old nun explains in a halting German accent. “Only this. You would talk about heaven, you must find another place.”

All the crosses, devotional images of saints, angels and popes that line the walls of the ward exist merely as set dressing. “The devil, the angels, heaven and hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse,” she says. “As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Gladney moans. “This is terrible.”

“But true,” the nun says.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the unlikely popularity of religion in contemporary fiction. So far this year we have seen the strange sanctification of a thalidomide victim who died in childhood (Orla Nor Cleary in Nicola Barker’s dazzlingly manic In the Approaches), an avowedly atheist dentist lured to Israel by the leader of an underground sect (Joshua Ferris’s Man Booker-shortlisted To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), a high court judge, Fiona Maye, ruling on whether a hospital has the right to administer a life-saving blood transfusion to a teenage Jehovah’s Witness (Ian McEwan’s The Children Act) and, most recently, the voyage of a prim evangelical on a mission to outer space (Michel Faber’s Book of Strange New Things).

 

Read the full post on New Statesman.

 

Here's The Scientific Reason Why You Get Lost In a Book

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This post by Caitlin White originally appeared on Bustle.

Ever had that experience reading a novel when you become so absorbed that you forget to each lunch or you miss your subway stop? Or you’re turning the pages so fast when you look up the house has gotten dark around you, and you realize you’ve been squinting to see the words. You probably call it “getting lost in a book,” and we could all probably name a novel that has caused this to happen. No surprises here, but many people mention J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as making them victims of this absorption.

For the first time, bookish neurologists have looked into what causes people to get lost in a book, and they’ve used Harry Potter books as research. A team of researchers and scientists lead by psychologist Chun-Ting Hsu at Free University of Berlin in Germany studied brain reactions to particular passages in the Harry Potter books to see if certain types of excerpts facilitated the immersive experience.

The result was the ”fiction feeling hypothesis,” which the research team describes as:

 

Read the full post on Bustle.

 

Have You Ever Had a Relationship End Because of a Book?

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This post by Zoë Heller and Anna Holmes originally appeared on The New York Times on 10/28/14.

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Zoë Heller and Anna Holmes discuss the havoc books can wreak on relationships.

By Zoë Heller:

Do you want to be one of those dreary couples who are always delivering their identical cultural opinions in the first person plural?

Many years ago, when I was in my 20s, I went on vacation with a boyfriend to a remote Scottish island. We spent the days going on long, wet hikes and drinking in the pub. At night, we huddled in our freezing house and read aloud to each other. Neither one of us, it turned out, cared much for the other’s choice of book. I had come with “A Legacy,” by Sybille Bedford, which my boyfriend found mannered and pretentious. He had brought “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson, which I thought was tiresome and unfunny.

These differences of opinion did not strike me as a big deal. It was mildly disappointing, perhaps, that my boyfriend should be impressed by the drug-brag of Hunter Thompson and oblivious to the genius of Sybille Bedford. But it wasn’t as if I was auditioning him to be my literary adviser. Chacun à son goût, I thought.

 

Read the full post on The New York Times.

 

I Buy Your Book, You Owe Me A Good Read

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This post by Ally Machate originally appeared on Shelf Pleasure on 2/17/13.

It’s so easy to download an inexpensive ebook that I’ve become much more willing to try self-published titles than when I had to pay $14, $15, or even upwards of $20 for the print version. Digital technology has broadened the possibilities for people to express themselves and for us, as readers, to find more books to enjoy. The downside, however, is that this new marketplace has created a troublesome reality for all book lovers: Almost anybody who wants to publish a book can. And frankly, too many of these books aren’t ready for public consumption.

I sat down one Saturday with my Kindle and my coffee, envisioning a lovely relaxing morning read. But here’s how it went: I started and stopped four books in about an hour. With a couple, I only read a few pages, but the other two I gave more of a chance. I knew the author of one and I’d read something good about the other in a blog roundup.

And yet, with all four of these books, the authors had not polished their skills, nor had they sufficiently polished their manuscripts. I’m not just talking about misplaced punctuation or bad spelling, either. I’m talking about basic plot holes; two-dimensional, clichéd characters and situations; unnatural and awkward dialogue; and unbelievable, contrived scenarios that didn’t arise naturally out of the events of the story.

 

Read the full post on Shelf Pleasure.

 

Why Don’t Men Read Romance Novels?

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This post by Noah Berlatsky originally appeared on Pacific Standard on 10/23/14.

A lot of men just don’t read fiction, and if they do, structural misogyny drives them away from the genre.

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Why do women read romance novels? It’s a question that’s often been asked, explicitly or implicitly. Two groundbreaking 1980s studies, Janice Radway’s anthropological Reading the Romance and Tania Modleski’s more theoretical Loving With a Vengeance, suggested that romance novels provided women with compensatory fantasies. Patriarchy is depressing and oppressive for women, and romance novels understand that and provide a salve.

Other commenters have been more vicious. William Giraldi declared: “Romance novels—parochial by definition, ecumenical in ambition—teach a scurvy lesson: enslavement to the passions is a ticket to happiness.” He concluded that the success of 50 Shades of Grey shows that, “We’re an infirm, ineffectual tribe still stuck in some sort of larval stage.” Since the main readers of 50 Shades have been women, the conclusion seems to be that women read this sort of book because they are stunted. If reading romance is seen as deviant or pathological, then the attitude toward romance readers is either condescension or contempt: Romance readers are either poor souls who need help, or they’re debased fools who should be scorned.

 

Read the full post on Pacific Standard.

 

Grown-Up Things: On Adults and YA Fiction

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This post by Lyn Miller-Lachman originally appeared on her blog on 6/17/14.

Last week the child_lit online discussion group, of which I’m an active member, was consumed with responses to Heather Graham’s Slate article, “Against YA: Adults Should Feel Embarrassed to Read Children’s Books.” Timed to coincide with the release of the movie adaptation of John Green’s bestselling The Fault in Our Stars (apparently one of the shameless adults’ favorite YA novels) Graham’s article characterized even so-called “literary” realistic fiction as “uncritical,” “wrapped up neatly,” and generally simplistic. In her view, “even the myriad defenders of YA fiction admit that the enjoyment of reading this stuff has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia.”

In addition to the child_lit participants, most of whom are teachers, librarians, and authors and editors of books for children and teens, many bloggers have weighed in with posts mostly critical of Graham. And my first reaction, as someone who works with and writes for teens, is that no one should be made to feel ashamed of what they read — not adults who read YA fiction, nor kids who read comics, nor readers of any age who prefer any kind of genre fiction. Shaming people for their reading choices is a reliable way of guaranteeing that they will not read, period.

 

Click here to read the full post on Lyn Miller-Lachman’s blog.

 

You Can’t Be Too Careful With That Precious First Page

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 6/30/14.

Authors, you can’t be too careful when crafting that precious first page for your tour de force. This is a case study.

Since he retired, my husband has read a lot of books. He tends to like crime, thrillers, mystery – that sort of thing. And he often picks up free books from Smashwords. As I explained in a previous post, if he enjoys the read, he’ll go and buy whatever else that author has on offer. Sometimes, he’ll share his new find with me. “Read this. I think you’d like it.”

So, feeling at something of a loose end, I sat down in my reading chair and opened the book on my tablet. It’s a crime novel, written in first person. I’ll say no more at this stage, because all I’d read was the blurb. In the first few sentences I met the protagonist, and a rather scruffy stranger. The exchange was very different to the usual polite frippery. He says, “Pleased to meet you.” She responds with, “No you’re not.”

So far so good. I’m interested. But then we meet a new character who is this lady’s boss. And this is where the author lost me. Not because a new character is introduced, but because I am immediately derailed into a far too long exposition of this person, his background, her background… All presented as her inner thoughts.

 

Click here to read the full article on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

Write Relatable Characters

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This post by Ksenia Anske originally appeared on her site on 6/25/14.

Why? Is the first question you ask. Why should I write characters that are relatable? What about villains? The bad guys? The killers? The perverts? The awful awful people that do bad bad things? Well, here is the deal. Even the awfulest people are human. And by human I mean, we all simply want to be loved and to love. We may have a ton of shit piled up from the past, a ton of fear and anger, to the point when we want to kill somebody. Still. Killers feel too. They kill because they feel. Pain. A tremendous amount of pain. So much pain that they don’t know it’s pain anymore. They’re human, not robots. They have feelings. Think about the last book you read with a really evil character. Somebody so horrible, you couldn’t possibly root, but you did. I can tell you one. I read AMERICAN PSYCHO and even though I should’ve felt hate and disgust, I rooted for Patrick Bateman. Why? Because he was human. He doubted himself, he tried to find love and beauty in things, albeit, the wrong way, but you could feel it, see it, identify with it, perhaps think about that time you squished a bug to see what’s inside and realizing you killed it and feeling bad and sorry and…you know. All of us had these moments.

Because the characters are relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ksenia Anske’s site.

 

7 Things the Most-Highlighted Kindle Passages Tell Us About American Readers

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This post by Jospeh Stromberg originally appeared on Vox on 5/30/14.

Conventionally, the most common way of gauging the most popular books in America has been looking at the New York Times’ bestsellers list.

But as we shift from reading on paper to screens, there’s an interesting new option: Amazon’s lists of the most-highlighted passages and most-highlighted books on Kindles around the world.

When you read on a Kindle, you can highlight passages, the same way you might highlight text in a physical book. The passages you highlight are all collected in one place, accessible either on the reader or a computer.

But Amazon also collects data on what its readers highlight most. The resulting most-highlighted lists are a fascinating record of reading as a whole.

There are some limitations to the data: it’s only for people who read on Kindles, and use them for highlighting. The data is extremely heavily skewed towards American readers (Amazon isn’t saying whether they include international data, but it looks like they don’t). And some books don’t lend themselves to highlighting quite as much, which is why many of even Amazon’s bestsellers don’t appear on the lists.

But it’s also true that some books get bought and end up on bestseller lists, but aren’t actually read — whereas these lists are a terrific record of what we might nowadays call reader engagement. They reveal not just what books are read, but what part of books are read — and even tell us a little about what people are thinking about as they do their highlighting.

Here are seven things the lists tell us about Americans reading today.

 

Click here to read the full post on Vox.

 

Does Reading Actually Change The Brain?

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This article, by Carol Clark-Emory, originally appeared on Futurity.org on 12/23/13.

After reading a novel, actual changes linger in the brain, at least for a few days, report researchers.

Their findings, that reading a novel may cause changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain that persist, appear in the journal Brain Connectivity.

“Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns, lead author of the study and the director of Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy. “We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it.”

Neurobiological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun to identify brain networks associated with reading stories. Most previous studies have focused on the cognitive processes involved in short stories, while subjects are actually reading them as they are in the fMRI scanner.

The study focused on the lingering neural effects of reading a narrative. Twenty-one Emory undergraduates participated in the experiment, which was conducted over 19 consecutive days.

All of the study subjects read the same novel, Pompeii, a 2003 thriller by Robert Harris that is based on the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Italy.

“The story follows a protagonist, who is outside the city of Pompeii and notices steam and strange things happening around the volcano,” Berns says. “He tries to get back to Pompeii in time to save the woman he loves. Meanwhile, the volcano continues to bubble and nobody in the city recognizes the signs.”

The researchers chose the book due to its page-turning plot. “It depicts true events in a fictional and dramatic way,” Berns says. “It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative line.”

 

Click here to read the rest of the article on Futurity.org.

Click here to view the original Emory University study.