What I hope to find when I open (or listen to) a book....
Take me someplace I’ve never been…
I love a good adventure and when I open (or listen to) a book, I want it to take me somewhere I haven’t been before. I want colorful and interesting characters that I can care about one way or the other. I love finding characters that have some mystery about them, some secret, like Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series. I want colorful descriptions of the settings….use words that spark the desire to travel to these places so I can see them for myself. When it comes to a mystery, I want to be kept guessing.
Has anyone read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berent? (The movie is good but it doesn’t really do the book justice.) I don’t know about anyone else but his description of the streets of Savannah, Georgia, left me yearning to visit Savannah and the unforgettable characters I would love to meet.
How about the tingly feeling the first time one reads The Shining, or Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King? Wow, that’s what I want to find when I read that genre.
Write about characters I want to care about…..
Here I must mention those wonderfully colorful characters Charlaine Harris writes about; Sookie Stackhouse, Harper Connelly, Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard. Each book leaves me feeling like I’ve visited an old friend and I’m catching up on another adventure. Each book in the series leaves me wanting more. I love it when I find books like these.
The unforgettable characters of the Camel Club, by David Baldacci, are another group of characters I just couldn’t get enough of. I was always so excited every time a new book was released.
I can’t forget the very, very colorful and funny characters of Maggody, Arkansas, created by Joan Hess. I don’t laugh out loud reading many mystery books, but these little gems will crack me up.
There are so many fictional characters running around in my brain that I cannot possibly mention them all. The above are a few of the more recent ones I've happily had the chance to encounter in my many book adventures. So, so many....from Sydney Carton to Sookie Stackhouse, from Jane Marple to Arly Hanks...I've loved them all.
I’m no book critic….
I just know what I like, what I want to happen when I open a book. At 62, I just want to have fun.
