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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3308 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 25 best novels written by authors under 30 [flag rambles at work]

I'm back! Of the drunken promises I made last night, this one is the easiest to fulfill.

    If I stop and wonder how old the author is, then the book is a failure.

Absolutely? I am surprised. Many books are impossible to extricate from the spectre of the author's personality, not out of bad writing but because of the genre or style or content. I recently read Cat's Eye, which is the story of a woman growing up and examining her past, and I had several thoughts like, There is a certain age where it makes sense to write a book like this. Not to say Atwood had to be that age (she was, I think, about 45, slightly younger than her present-day protagonist) to write it, but that her age or not-age added a dimension to my reading. I encounter this frequently.

    I tend to be more conscious of the author's gender especially if they are attempting to write in the voice of not-their-gender.

This I do not often think about. Unless perhaps the cross-gender writing is jarring, but I don't often encounter that. It may be the types of fiction I read. Have you read Philip Pullman's Lyra? Or ... hmm. I will think about this more.





lil  ·  3308 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Glad to see that you've awoken! You make a good point. It's probably true that a younger person would not consider writing Margaret Lawrence's The Stone Angel or Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version.

The Art of Fielding (a baseball book that you would like) has mostly young college-baseball-aged characters. Those characters are the most believable. There's a somewhat unbelievable college president and his not completely unbelievable daughter. It took a few chapters to hook me, then it was fun.

So much goes into committing one's self to the reality of a novel (film, TV show), that even the questionable follies of the college president weren't enough to lose me.

user-inactivated  ·  3308 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That does look like a bit of fun, reading part of the synopsis.