Seven Things

Here it is:

Things I Hate in a Novel

1. Long blocks of text full of irregular punctuation and jammed-together words because that's the only way the author knows how to be dramatic. "andhe is touching her and myheadis spinningand oh god how how they are all dead"... COME ON.

2. I hate how, in children's books, characters' parents always have clearly-defined, lucrative occupations. Who does, nowadays? Still, these people: they are Writers, or Doctors, or Artists. For example, in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry's mother is a famous scientist who makes dinner on her Bunsen burner in the lab in their home, doing so while brushing back her long, auburn, perfect hair. Also, COME ON.

3. Similarly: it sucks when characters don't have to worry about money AT ALL, because some deus ex machina god has jumped into the plot and taken care of that for them. For instance, since Meg's family is apparently independently wealthy, even though they are a single-parent household, they do not have to worry about money, more just the fact that her father and genius little brother have been kidnapped by a giant alien brain. Also see: Henry and Clare in The Time Traveler's Wife.

4. Untranslated foreign language in the text, I'm talking to you, dead ERNEST HEMINGWAY. (Unless the character telling the story also can't understand what's going on -- in which case, go ahead.)

5. Intricate science-fiction societies, the governance of which is unnecessarily explained at the beginning of the book. By the same token, elaborately-described machines when a simple plot device would work just as well. H. G. Wells it, don't Jules Verne it! (See: http://beatonna.livejournal.com/125341.html)

6. Combination of 4 and 5: Authorially made-up languages. I know Tolkien is Tolkien, but I'm still annoyed by the audacity of Elvish.

7. Description.

I may have to learn to come to terms with this one.



Things I Like in a Novel

1. Lovable characters who would make terrible friends.

2. Characters who come from a variety of socioeconomic classes, like Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith, even though Virginia Woolf was sort of classist and the novel is still called "Mrs. Dalloway".

3. Thinly-veiled, thoroughly-embellished autobiographical narratives -- I'm looking at you, Jonathan Safran Foer and Marjane Satrapi!

4. Love, but ONLY between two fully-realized three-dimensional characters. (Okay, yes, this is entirely about The Time-Traveler's Wife. Upon my fourth rereading of it, Clare seems less like a human and more like a Disney princess. Either that, or I'm just suspicious of long auburn hair on characters in general.)

5. A bunch of tales woven in and around a central plot (see: anything Neil Gaiman has ever written ever / Jeffery Eugenides' Middlesex).

6. When tragic things happen in funny ways, or when funny things, on a closer look, are tragedies.

7. When the historical is personal, but when the historical doesn't override the growth and importance of the protagonist. Salome is about John the Baptist, but it's also about self-destructive lust; Persepolis is about the Iranian Revolution, but it's really about leaving / returning.


I'm sure there are a billion people out there who disagree with me, especially about the anti-Tolkien bits. If you're reading this, and read books at all, I want to know what your lists look like. They're probably much different than mine, especially if you're Nader, in which case your second list would read "Medical literature" and "Facebook".