I think we all bring our life experiences and our personal likes/dislikes to the books we read and that’s a good thing. It sure would be a boring world if we all liked the same stuff. Vive la difference!

azteclady – crystal clear!

Kati when you wrote I want the authors whose work I love to live up to the standards they’ve set. I thought, YES! I totally understand how you feel. I think I was a little afraid to say that, even to myself. After reading that it surprised me how much that resonated with me. I do have a lot of expectations from certain authors and I wonder how fair it is of me to judge an author’s individual work against their ‘body’ of work. But there it is. When, as an author you’ve captured my attention, I want that same experience over and over again. And yet, books are ‘living’ documents, they have a life of their own as each one of us picks it up. What we bring to it colors how we read it. I think that there is a contract we enter into with each book with read. Depending on my mood and what’s going on in my life will definitely inform what I think about the book- Heidenkind pointed that out so brilliantly.

Stacy, I’m in agreement with you – all the books on my keeper shelf, the ones I re-read, have all engaged my emotions. And I think that sort of lets me know why we all have such different reactions to a book. We all have different emotions/baggage we carry around and those don’t go away when we enter into the world of fiction.

I also agree that when a book ’surprises’ me – in other words, when it isn’t so predictable – well, they’ve got me. The genius of being creative, innovative and one of kind is hard to do, but when an author achieves that!… well, I’m buying their next book.

Excellent point! I totally agree!

GENIUS point, heidenkind!

I have a stack of books that are DNF’s for me that I refuse to get rid of because I *know* that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I tried to read them the last time. That is a really, really good point.

I think there are certain storylines that resonate with individuals, and they’re probably going to like any book or movie with those plot elements, even if it’s not the best. Also having characters you can connect with is important to making people like a book. But overall the things that make people love certain books are really ephemeral, I think. Like in a book I just read, Charles Dickens said drawing people into a story is like putting them into a mesmeric trance–as readers, we want to be completely transported into the world of the book. But our ability to do so doesn’t rest solely with the author, but also extraneous elements like our mood and our receptivity towards the story. I think everyone has had the experience of trying to re-read a book that we know we love, but we can’t get into it. That’s not the book’s fault, it’s the reader’s.

And I don’t have one answer to it, either, because it depends on the book. If I pick up a romance, I expect to care for the characters and to believe, by the end of the book, that their relationship will thrive in the future (whether it ends in HEA or the less formal HFN). If I pick a mystery, by golly I hope not to guess the identity of the guilty party within three pages.

And so on and so forth.

And yet, there are times when I pick up a mystery, and I do guess the identity of the killer pretty much immediately, yet the writing is so engaging, the characters so likable, that I enjoy it as much (if not more) than a mystery that’s better at keeping me guessing.

Clear as mud?

Now, I have to say something about the BDB series. I loved Z’s story. It was the first I read in the series. It made me by all the other books in the series. I just got done reading Lover Avenged, and I liked it. I didn’t say I loved it, I said I liked it. And here is why: It all goes back to your original ?. This book had love in it, but not ROMANCE. I love being transported to a different world in Ward’s series. She does it beautifully. She’s probably one of the best at it, but this book lacked romance. There was not enough build up between Rehv and Ehlenea, for that fact, there just wasn’t enough about the tow of them period. I liked them together, but I wanted more of them and less of Wrath and Beth.(There story was already told back in Dark Lover)