Plot? Character? What Drives You To Read?

It was such fun hearing from so many of my readers about their favorite books and/or authors. Since the time I learned to read, I've had my nose stuck in a book. My teachers despaired about my paying attention in class because I was reading. It usually took two or three prompts at the beginning of each school day for me to put away my current book and pay attention to what I was supposed to learn that day. 

I always have a book at hand. Now that I read on my phone, it's even
easier to carry a book around with me at all times. Books are my
go-to entertainment and escape. 

There are many aspects to a book. There is the basic story-line - the plot. Plots are what will cause a person to pick up a book or to leave it on the shelf (at least, unless you automatically read anything written by a particular author, in which case plot is irrelevant). Plot often will fall into headings of genre/type. Those basic headings can be subdivided even farther. Grabbing onto the largest and most popular genre - Romance Literature (RL) - there's a lot of it out there. But not all RL is the same by any stretch. 

• CLASSIC MAJOR GENRES OF LITERATURE
• Asemic writing
• Comedy
• Drama
• Horror fiction
• Literary realism
• Romance
• Satire
• Tragedy
• Tragicomedy
• Fantasy
• Mythology, and
• Adventure

The main heading might be RL, but under that are subheadings of type. Here's where you find your science fiction, Western, hurt/rescue, mystery, and comedy subcategories, as well as many more. This is where you'll find your plot hiding. It's plot that sells books. If I'm not happy reading stories set in the Regency Period of English history, I doubt I'd pick one out of a reading pile to spend a few hours with. But if I love murder mysteries, I might be tempted to indulge. I'd be on the fence for a Regency Period murder mystery. Here it would depend on the plot summary. 

Plot and character work together, but for me, if there isn't
character, the plot really doesn't matter. 

Once that book is opened and you start reading, however, the book can go one of two ways - plot driven or character driven. My personal preference is for character driven books. I want to know about the characters, the situation in which they find themselves, and how they manage to resolve the plot twists by the end of the book. Of course I'll read JD Robb's latest mystery book, but it's the characters of Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke that make the books interesting to me. Their interpersonal dynamics while resolving each mystery just work for me (and quite obviously also work well for thousands of other readers). 

A great plot with stagnant characters will eventually cause me to close a book unfinished and to never pick it up again. For my e-books, I make mistakes here and there. I buy a book based on its' review (I subscribe to several review services in the genres I enjoy), but every so often I find out I've made an error. I keep a list  of every e-book I have to read in any given year, and I assign a rating of one to five stars to each as I finish the book. I do have a few one-stars in there, but the five-stars tend to predominate. I work my way down my list, knowing I always have another great book waiting for me to read it. That's wonderful! 

I always have my nose in a book, to the
despair of friends and family. My ideal
day is one where I just read for the
entire day, maybe with some cookies and
a glass of milk in mid-afternoon. Heaven! 

Are you plot or character driven? Can a bad plot cause you to put a book away? Or is it a shallow treatment of characters that should be richer and rounder that will cause you to stop reading a book. Share your views with me. 

Tonight is Project Runway All-Stars so tomorrow's post will be the synopsis of the show without spoilers, followed by Saturday's "reveal" post. The week is winding down. Enjoy your day!