This week I got two books out of the library. Well, I got more than two, but these two are the ones I want to talk about. One was The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner, which I have read before, and the other one was The Princess and the Hound by Mette Ivie Harrison.
I read The Queen of Attolia first and it was every bit as good as I remembered it. In fact, better. (I love it when that happens!) I put it down with a sense of having gone so deep into the story that it was going to be hard to come back up to real life. Then I read The Princess and the Hound. It started out with some great possibilities, and I was getting rather excited to see where it would end up, but in the middle it started throwing me off. As I got closer and closer to the end, I found myself falling farther and farther out of the story, so when I reached the end I was merely reading words on the page. I wanted to throw it across the room! But I couldn't, because it was a library book and I didn't have any money to pay for it if I ripped it.
And it got me thinking: how some books can totally draw you into the story and others don't even skim the surface. What makes some books so great and others quite stupid? Part of it is the plot, I suppose. Good books often have great sub-plots as well as main plots to keep my mind active and interested. And the plot has to be relatively believable and consistent in order for me to keep reading. Without a plot, there's no story, right? But I think a lot of it has to do with the details of the author's writing. Really good books, I often find, are the ones where the author has thought about his/her writing. Not just dashing the ideas down on a page, but really sitting back and thinking about the exact words that will best convey the meaning. And mixing up the sentence structures so that the writing does not get stale.
Most often, what will make or break a good book for me are the details of a writing. Whether the author has taken trouble to really write a story so that it opens up in front of me, or if he's just recording his thoughts on paper.
As Snoopy so aptly put it, "Good writing takes an enormous amount of concentration."
