The re-read test
I've been thinking this week about what makes me fall in love with a book. It's a complicated question, which doesn't have an easy answer.
The broad definition of a book I love is one which has some kind of adventure at its heart. Happy family saga-style stories would bore me silly. So that's the first criteria: something bigger than the domestic sphere has to be happening in the book. The second thing that would bore me would be a book which was predominantly a romance. I can cope with romance as a secondary plot, but if it's the main point of the book, well it's not for me.
I think this can be summed up as a book with some kind of movement in it, but it doesn't explain everything. I've read award-winning fantasies with huge quests at their heart which have left me completely cold. And I've just finished reading A Memory Called Empire, a book about an ambassador embroiled in court intrigue, which is quite a slow burn at the start. That's…
The broad definition of a book I love is one which has some kind of adventure at its heart. Happy family saga-style stories would bore me silly. So that's the first criteria: something bigger than the domestic sphere has to be happening in the book. The second thing that would bore me would be a book which was predominantly a romance. I can cope with romance as a secondary plot, but if it's the main point of the book, well it's not for me.
I think this can be summed up as a book with some kind of movement in it, but it doesn't explain everything. I've read award-winning fantasies with huge quests at their heart which have left me completely cold. And I've just finished reading A Memory Called Empire, a book about an ambassador embroiled in court intrigue, which is quite a slow burn at the start. That's…