Recommended reading

You may guess from the title of this that I'm going to recommend some books for you to read, but it's really more about the action of recommending books in itself. It's not very often two people talk about books without recommending ones to one another, and that is an excellent thing. More than any other consumable, books are really spread by word of mouth through recommendations, and can live on bookshelves a lot longer than, say, games can, because of the fact that people will keep talking about them, and if a sequel is ever written, you really can't experience it without experiencing the first. Not to mention, books never fall out of compatibility, unlike VHS tapes or PS1 games.

However, I would argue that books are some of the hardest things to recommend to people, because there's nothing to point to except for words in their regard. The only thing they have going for them is their story, and while I may love a good story, other people may not. Games and movies you can point to their cinematography, their character designs, their soundtracks, how beautiful they are or how easy they are to get into. But a book doesn't have any of those things. Just words, of varying length and complexity, with varying quantities, and if those words don't grab you from the first page, they're never going to. Not to mention, trying to explain the story or why it entices you is a lot more difficult then simply showing a person a small snippet of what is there.

And accordingly, it can be much more difficult to judge a person's taste in books than their taste in games or movies. I know that I am far and away mostly interested in medieval fantasy, yet when I tell people that they without fail will suggest Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. However, I have tried both of these series, and I do not enjoy either of them. And this confuses people. And if I tell them what kind of books I do like, say The Blue Sword and The Exiled Queen, most people have no idea what I'm talking about because they've never heard of those books. So of course I, in turn, would recommend those books, though people don't tend to take my recommendations very often. But I suppose the books I read are fairly uncommon and ones I found on a whim, but I digress.

But making those kinds of recommendations, even if they're never followed through on, is still a good use of time. It opens a dialogue between two people. Allows them to learn about one another. Get to know the way they think. See the kinds of things they like. Perhaps even understand why they like what they like. For me, as I've said before, a lot of it is about character development. I love to see the way a character grows in time and ends a story a different person than who they were when they began it. And that's reflected in the books, movies, and games that I recommend. And, hopefully, in the stories that I write. For others, it's about the world building, or the atmosphere, or the danger. And I'm fine with all of those, but they don't make a story in my eyes. They're just the flavoring. The meat, for me, lies in the characters alone.

But we all think differently. We all want different things from our stories. And that's a good thing. Because that means that there are going to be even more stories out there in the world. And I can't think of anything better than that.