Thanks for for bringing up this good point. It was interesting to read your take. Just a quick aside that mentioning latkes (aka Judaism) doesn’t necessarily denote race or ethnicity, as there are Jews who are Black, White, Asian, Latin American, etc. |
I completely agree with your “aside”. My intention was truly not to use food as a proxy for race or ethnicity. I was trying to illustrate in an accessible way —paralleling the use of the tropes that I complained about earlier — that including details like this might suggest cultural indicators that, in turn, might nudge a reader to be alert for additional indicators in the pages ahead. And, yes, some of these cultural indicators might be surprising to some readers. I also wanted to suggest — however clumsily— that both POC and Non-POC deserve a few details of the sort that often get casually tossed out by writers for characters who are POC. Although I realize now that I didn’t express this clearly, I was actually thinking along the lines of your valuable and valid criticism when I wrote my earlier post. To use myself as an example: I might make kasha for breakfast, muse about how much I miss the sable tails that I used to get from Posin’s as a small child, and wonder about how my friend created the tradition of making lefse with her children. These details could segue into wondering about things like: how my taciturn African-American father started making us kasha for Sunday breakfasts; how the DC neighborhood that I grew up in quickly shifted from being a predominantly Jewish neighborhood to a predominantly African American neighborhood before I was born; and how, two generations after this transition, interracial families in the same neighborhood both continue old traditions and create new ones. Thank you for continuing this conversation. You’ve given me much “food for thought”! |
Cat fur in my library books. I know animal fur and dander can be invisible to people who are surrounded by it, but I don’t like it in my home for my husband’s allergies. I guess you roll the dice when you use library books, and usually it’s not a lot, but sometimes I wonder if the patron combed their cat with the book or something. |
My quirk & ick- it’s not too much with writers. It’s with readers. Who now come to books with a host of demands and expectations. |
You have to elaborate there! |
Well, it’s not really a demand. We are consumers and we like what we like. Readers are free to have preferences the same way patrons of a restaurant or any other consumer has preferences, and we are free to voice those preferences. Of course you are free to not like it that consumers voice their preferences but at least understand that nobody is demanding authors do anything. |
Changing perspectives by chapter--that is, Chapter 1 is written in the "voice" of one character; Chapter 2 in the voice of another character, Chapter 3, etc. There are a lot of novels that employ this technique, and IMO, it's very hard to do well. Most don't succeed all the way, and you have chapters either sounding too similar to each other or one character gets the short end of the stick and is underdeveloped. So many fiction authors do this nowadays that it feels like a gimmick.
Same thing with jumps forward and backward in time. This is another technique that's really hard to do well without confusing the reader, and the past few books I've read lately that've done this have fallen short. |
+1 I would imagine that any writer who is mad at readers is actually mad at publishers? Aren't publishers the ones deciding what is going to move forward in the traditional publication pipeline? |
Like what? I expect decent editing. |
+1 I am generally okay with this if the book is a beach read. I agree that it is hard to do well. |
Tasha Alexander does this. At times, it's a dual POV that makes a lot of sense. But sometimes, she has you flipping between stories that take place hundreds of years apart and it's hard to follow. The series she writes got optioned and it sounds like it's actually going to go into production. It'll be interesting to see if they stick with the main characters/plots or attempt or not. |
If I had a penny for every "chill ran down my spine" - I'd be a billionaire. |
Romance novels where a big character trait of the male lead is fancy stuff he owns, like in Discovery of Witches.
|
This is a pretty obscure ick but I can’t stand when people eye roll when I tell them I prefer to read on my Kindle or the Kindle app on my phone. There is no inherent superiority to the method in which you consume your books! |
Reading is reading! And with extremists coming for our books, we need to promote reading and support our libraries and booksellers regardless of our preferred format. Having the kindle app and a few ebooks going means I don’t mind waiting in line at all anymore. I felt pretty happy when I whipped out my phone and read a few pages while in line at the supermarket this morning. |