What makes for an immersive and/or memorable reading experience?

We started this discussion on my thread after I recently read Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories" (thanks MrsLee!), which is available online if you are interested.

What makes a story or novel memorable for you? Separately, what makes it immersive? Perhaps even a third quality, what makes a story so good you want to go back to it again? I think we all have individual examples of books others may not be familiar with, then there are the novels or series that appeal to many, but not all.

I wish I knew the answer to this question and I wish I knew how to write them.

I'll throw out some of my examples though. For me, possibly the two most memorable fantasy series I can think of are Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. I think the first one is an obvious choice, somehow Tolkien managed to make a world that is very memorable and usually immersive.

A Song of Ice and Fire, even before the TV series, was memorable for me. Somehow Martin managed to create people and places that are memorable. Is it his use of colorful heraldry for each house and how specific he gets with their homes and lineage?

I don't have an exact answer to that, it's very subjective so maybe there is no answer. At least some of it is setting, for me. If the beginning of the story is uncomfortable or doesn't paint a picture as to where I am, it's going to be really hard for me to continue reading it, at that point I'm already bored and lost. That can be any genre, any time period as long as I'm presented with an initial picture. For my own writing, I always try to paint that picture from the start.. what I paint still may not be enough to keep people interested if they don't like the content, but they will probably read past the first chapter at least.

I need to feel as though the world has disappeared around me and I want to walk along side the character, feel and hear what they're going through. One series I still feel as though I'm a part of is Iron Druid. I can pull up an image I had or a feeling I felt while reading this story at pretty much any time. Other books that are always memorable were Stephen King's books, though most of them I don't really want to be able to recall lol.

Pretty sure this has changed for me as I have aged. It was much easier to lose myself in Middle Earth when I was 13. So when something captures me completely now I appreciate it. That doesn't necessarily make it memorable, though. I'm going to have to come back to this thread for a more in depth answer after I ponder it a bit.

I think emotional resonance plays a large part in it.

I don't find Lord of the Rings immersive. For me, it helps if there are any women in it anywhere, just for starters.

I think it's really variable. Stuff I really love (e.g., N.K. Jemisin) other people bounce off of.

>3 clamairy: >4 Marissa_Doyle: I think both of those things are definitely part of it, though I would say the 'greater' the work, the wider range of appeal, though I doubt there's any work that appeals to everyone. I don't think that's possible.

What about another quality - the book that you don't want to put down once you start reading it?

Vast quantities of coffee does it for me. MrsHouseLibrary and I set up a room on the house (the one that shelves the 900-range of books) as the Harrell J. Odom Reading Room, in memory of her father who died in 2008. Two comfy recliners facing each other, set at a catty-corner offset by a long narrow table that had coffeemaker in the middle and goose-neck lamps by each chair. We'd spend countless weekend hours reading and drinking coffee.

From that setting, it was easy to get lost in whatever reading material we had. I recall that a few times, mostly while I was reading certain parts of Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, Karrell would get concerned because she noticed I wasn't breathing. I'm sure I was, but imperceptible to her.

I'm going to copy what I posted on Karlstar's original thread, so its more conveniently placed:

Wish I knew how to judge before reading! I would say that immersive is very different to memorable. Some of immersive is simply a clear writing style adjectives and pronouns correctly chosen and placed appropriately so you can take the gist of the sentence/scene without having to think outside of reading what the author might have meant. Having nothing that throws you out of the suspension of disbelief - physics and rules being consistently applied, characters acting as you expect. This is difficult to achieve with characters that are also exciting and inventive. A fast paced plot helps to carry the reader over any holes without noticing them so much.

Memorable is harder - writing characters that resonate with you (all the different varied you's) as a reader, Worlds that you can believe in and want to be in, innovative solutions to situations you've found yourself in and wished you'd been able to use. I think the key memorable works for me are those I have wanted to be in, detailed enough to visualise and grasp.

>1 Karlstar: I find this topic fascinating and want to have time to think about it. I will be thinking about your three aspects, immersive, memorable, and what makes a story one that I want to return to again. My thoughts are along the lines of firstly defining what I understand as immersive and memorable giving examples.

In terms of immersive, I find there are books that I do not want to put down, but find I have to because Real Life (the curse of the reading classes) keeps intervening. So, first up, an immersive book may be prevented from immersing the reader if the environment is wrong; people (or pets) interrupting, noise (people talking, radio on, etc...), or the lack of a suitably comfortable reading space. My wife has the ability of total focus. If she is reading something she is not aware of the world around her. She ignores everything. I thought this might be due to her hearing not being great, but since she got hearing aids she still has to ability to ignore the world around her. I, unfortunately, do not have this super-power. That can prevent my total immersion in the world of a book.

Four books that spring to mind (and perhaps this makes them memorable as well) that I would consider to have been immersive for me are:

REAMDE by Neal Stephenson
The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Arcadia by Iain Pears

What made them immersive for me?
REAMDE
This book started with a family reunion and, to be honest, that part was not grabbing me. However, when one of the guests returned home and discovered they had been burgled, questions were posed. The why? how? when? what? where? who? all started to come into play. This was the tip of an iceberg and the rest was revealed as we went through the story. Stephenson kept me hooked and dragged me through a complex tale that was fast paced, covered a vast amount of terrain, and still managed to keep me interested in what was happening to the individual characters. Every bit of the story pulled me through to the next bit. I often think of music and novels as if they were a painting. Has all the canvas been used? Are there any areas on the canvas that are underutilised? (With regards to underutilised bits of canvas, white space can still be full use of an area of canvas in the context of a broader picture.) Are the characters well drawn? Is there too much detail? Are there little diversions and bits of humour along the way? Are multiple things going on at once? All these things help make a story immersive for me.

REAMDE was a book I could not put down and I finished its 1,200 pages in less than a week which is good going for me. Anyone else I know who read it also read it in a short time period. It was just compulsive. It was like a book on anti-gravity; I just could not put it down.

Real life has just interrupted, so, in the words of The Great Arnie: "I will be back!"

E.T.A. Some of the answers to the questions posed in >1 Karlstar: can be found by considering what makes a book totally non-immersive, easily forgettable, and/or even repulsive.

>9 pgmcc: "REAMDE was a book I could not put down and I finished its 1,200 pages in less than a week which is good going for me. Anyone else I know who read it also read it in a short time period. It was just compulsive. It was like a book on anti-gravity; I just could not put it down."

I hated it. Could easily put it down and do anything else. I only finished it to find out just how bad it was going to get. Neither immersive or memorable for me (I had to go back and check my review to find out why I remembered disliking it).

I do agree with your point about real life and immersion - however the very best books drag me in so deeply that the world around me goes away and I don't get disturbed. curse of the mistwraith had me missing my bus stop, which I've never done before.

>10 reading_fox:
curse of the mistwraith had me missing my bus stop, which I've never done before.

Missing a bus stop is a very good indicator of how immersive a book is. There is even the possibility of using the number of bus stops missed as an objective measure of the scale of immersiveness. :-)

>8 reading_fox: Thanks for re-posting that here.

>9 pgmcc: >10 reading_fox: Sounds like I have to give REAMDE a try, after my last couple of Stevenson's I have not been rushing into any more. I used to be able to read with such focus that I literally didn't hear people around me, even the TV, but have mostly lost that ability. At least I think I have, others may not agree. I also usually only get to read in small time segments, I really miss having extended time to read, so 'can't put the book down' doesn't mean what it used to mean.

>9 pgmcc:

I'm back!

On the topic of what prevents a book being immersive for me, I would list a number of things. Firstly, no likeable characters. I recently tried to read The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley and had to give up very early on. The characters were so obnoxious I did not want to spend any time with any of them, even in the context of reading a book. It is, I believe, supposed to be a murder mystery. I must say I could not care less if they had all been victims. I quickly dispensed with that book and moved on.

I recently attempted to read Slow Horses by Mick Herron. I had high hopes for this book as Herron was being heralded as the new John Le Carré. Anyone who has read my reading thread will know that Mick Herron cannot hold a candle to John Le Carré. His writing style is erratic. His dialogue disjointed and full of jargon and esoteric acronyms. He does not make reading easy for his readers. Also, he is trying too hard to copy Le Carré’s work. His attempt to create a “Circus” for his crew of underperforming intelligence officers presented endless pages of description for a non-descript building. He has created a character who is supposed to be a Smiley equivalent. He does not have one iota of the talent Le Carré had, and his writing can be turgid and unengaging.

So what did I learn from the failings of Mick Herron that show what can make a book non-immersive for me? Well, I could list a number of objective points, but I think the biggest sin was trying to copy the work of one of my idols and trying to use that idol’s name to curry favour with my idol’s readership. People not familiar with Le Carré’s work might be fooled by such cheap, sensational marketing ploys, but I can tell you that people in the Le Carré fanbase are not fooled by Herron or his publsihers for one minute.

Well, first I ran to my bookshelf and pulled down my old copy of Tree and Leaf to re-read Tolkien’s essay “ On Fairy Stories”. Then as the conversation got going over there on Karlstar’s thread, I began thinking about how I’d answer this question. In part because memorable and immersive (as someone has previously noted here) are two different things. In keeping with Tolkien’s mission, let me go back to something that I think of as memorable.

So he turned his back, and sat by his window looking out over the sea, and weeping great tears for his lost daughter, till his white hair and beard grew down over his shoulders and twined round his chair and crept into the chinks of the floor, and his tears, dropping on to the window-ledge, wore a channel through the stone, and ran away in a little river to the great sea.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/130023#3321876

There’s so much in that passage that is visual and emotional and (to my mind) heart-breaking.I saw that quote in the book English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel ten years ago and the image of an old man’s beard growing down into the chinks of the stone floor as he sits immovable in a chair has stuck with me. ( FWIW, I had to go back rummaging through my old book orders and reading threads to find where I’d read it, but I remembered the quote.)

The quote is memorable in a way that the book itself may not be. (I also wonder what Tolkien might have made of that particular volume and whether some of the writing would meet his standard of the depth of inner truth needed in story-telling.) Similarly, I found the character of Gabriel Betteridge in The Moonstone to be memorable because of his habit of consulting the book Robinson Crusoe when he needed guidance or advice. (What Tolkien would have made of Wilkie Collins is unknown; I don't think Collins would have appealed to him on any score of literary merit.) But again, it's the specific character that I remember from that reading rather any series of events that unfold in the novel

So then I went and thought about the immersive experience of a book. What made The Goblin Emperor such a great experience. Bulleted items are:
– Novelty of the premise (What happens to someone 17 spaces away from the throne when suddenly forced to assume role of Emperor?)
– Underlying theme (Coming of age story, recognizing the importance of close relationships when you haven’t had them before)
– Depth of detail about the world Kathrine Addison created (the court, the names, the ships, etc.)

Alternately, I thought about Death on the Nile. Bulleted items are
– great jumble of people brought together with some characterization so that the illuminate different facets of the theme
– Setting up the conflict to support, the thematic point Christie was making about ideas of ownership of objects & persons

Add in a couple of other elements that add to the immersive experience
– prose style (descriptive, taut, light, etc.)
– depth of characterization (pgmcc referenced City of Brass above as something he found to be immersive and I think I would agree)
– association with a place or an historic period with which I’m familiar. I thought The Golem and the Jinn was wonderfully done in capturing the feel of immigrants in 19th century New York. Phenomenal novel.

I don’t expect every book I read to have every single element I’ve noted as lending to an immersive reading experience. But it’s always some combination of what I’ve named above. That’s why it’s so hard for writers of fiction to hit the big time, because that combination is going to be different for each of us.

>9 pgmcc:
What did I find made The City of Brass immersive for me?

The City of Brass caught me straight away. I have gone back to the book several times to see what it was about the start that piqued my interest and made it imperative that I continue reading. Straight away we are presented with a character to identify with. She is in the process of trying to con two officials and we are brought into her confidence during this transaction. It is also in a location that is mysterious and full of wonder. We are also presented with some information about the historical period in which the story is opening.

Another key element, a more serious matter than mere good writing skill and story-telling, is how the story turned out to be about prejudice and sectarian strife between two groups within society. The story was set in an Arabian Nights type environment, with djinn and other magical beings being common-place. In this setting I was able to see the stupidity and cruelty of such conflict for what it was. What struck me was that the incidents in the book matched what I had experienced in my own life growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I could identify with the incidents and events portrayed in the book and the personal, societal and family impacts of those incidents. It read like an allegory for the conflict I lived through. It is an allegory for any conflict between two groups of people. It could have been an allegory for the Middle East strife, for the Balkans conflicts, for any situation where parties to inter-group unrest can be used by unscrupulous people to cause violence.

What made this book immersive for me? There was the good writing, the interesting characters that I could identify with, and that grain, a pretty big grain, of verisimilitude that was supported by my knowing how real the tensions, events and emotions portrayed are. It was real, albeit presented in a fantasy world.

I wonder whether the 'immersive' question isn't more about the reader than the book.

I found all reading much more immersive in my teens when I was non-critical and I thought everything I read was fantastic. At the time, Dragons of Autumn Twilight and The Sword of Shannara overwhelmed my senses. I doubt I'd get past fifty pages of either one now.

As an older reader, the only thing I get immersed in now is something that triggers personal memories. Proust is doing that to me in spades, I can scarcely make any headway since I keep staring at the page, remembering something else he's triggered instead of reading the next sentence. Before I start sounding snobby, Ready Player One was another immersive read I've had recently, with all of that nostalgia content it's carrying.

Anything that aligns especially deeply with my worldview, especially if it opens a new door in that house, is also going to do it. Islandia is probably the best thing I've read in the last decade but it won't work for everybody.

I can't see how an author can aim to make any of those responses happen, it's just about the serendipity of matching the right reader with the right book. Otherwise I could say "Book X is amazingly immersive!" and you'd all agree with me.

>13 pgmcc: I definitely agree with the idea that a derivative book would be a problem for me, if I even suspect the writer is borrowing from someone else it bothers me, though I think as Tolkien himself said in the essay, we're not supposed to look at the bones in the soup, but judge the soup for the soup. I guess if the soup is a imitation chicken soup, it can't be as good as the original?

I'm not sure about characters. I've read some books recently where I didn't like the characters much, but enjoyed the book. To your point, they probably weren't very immersive, but were memorable.

What about bad plot situations? I definitely did not enjoy the central idea behind Project Hail Mary (the end of the Earth) but I loved the book.

>14 jillmwo: I'm also a big fan of The Goblin Emperor. One of my few 9 star reads and one I recommend all the time. I liked the characters, loved the setting. There's not a lot of plot, but who cares? It was just well written? I did not find that to be the case with City of Brass. I liked the characters but was constantly puzzled about daevas vs. djinn vs. the political factions, they just never made sense to me. >15 pgmcc: Maybe I just couldn't identify with the situations enough?

As with >8 reading_fox:, if I have to puzzle my way through a sentence more than once to determine the meaning or translate strange grammar, it is a big problem for me.

>16 Cecrow: When you read a book is definitely a factor. I've re-read Dragons of Autumn Twilight and Sword of Shannara and enjoyed them every time. This is definitely a subjective question, but I think we can agree that there are some books that are memorable or immersive to a very large number of people - but never everyone.

So I'm no closer to answering the question than at the start. Definitely has to be well written to be immersive, probably can't have objectionable characters (probably), can't have difficult to read language to be 'can't put down'. I still can't say why A Song of Ice and Fire is so memorable.

>7 WholeHouseLibrary: That sounds wonderful!

I found Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle very immersive. One thing that stands out in my mind about the start was how every sentence created questions in my mind and while the next sentence acted like an answer it also gave birth to new questions. Reading his work just had me eager to get to the next sentence which only built up my enthusiasm to get to the subsequent sentences. I find Murakami's work fascinating, rewarding, and exhausting. When I have read one of his novels I need to wait a while before reading another one.

The immeresiveness of Murakami's work stems from his keeping me interested, alert, pondering deep questions, and always wanting to see what happens next. In many of his works he will use supernatural or surreal elements, some borrowed from Japanese mythology, to raise questions in the reader's mind about the ordinary or mundane aspects of real life. His stories, while using the supernatural or surreal, are never about the supernatural or surreal; they are about questioning the here and now, generally to lead the way to a more fulfilling life. Well, that is how his work affects me.

Arcadia is a book I had had on my shelves for years without reading. I was spurned on to reading it by a group read organised by @Bookmaque. It was a wonderful read. I never wanted to put it down.

An element that made Arcadia immersive for me was the wonderful landscape pictures Pears created. Right from the start I had very vivid images in my head of the surroundings of and detail background of all the scenes. The number of intertwined timelines and the intricate relationships involved also kept me interested and involved.

I am not usually very interested in descriptions, but in the case of Arcadia I found Pears was succinct yet evocative with his sketches of scenes.

>17 Karlstar: I still remember scenes from Dragons of Autumn. I've loved a lot of Weis and Hickman's works. They're not necessarily the best books I've ever read (however you define that!) but I loved them at the time, and they caught the whole DnD experience wonderfully.

Ice and Fire is a curious one. Each chapter is utterly immersive. It's too complex for me to call it memorable, although the basic themes and characters stay with you. But the transition between chapters is too large for the book as a whole to be immersive. I seldom wanted to read 'just one more chapter' when the character changed it was dead to me and I could put it down again.

With me, it's a combination of factors:

*Likeable and relatable characters (heroes and villains)
*A well-built world that doesn't look like the author took elements of our world and cultures, filed the serial numbers off and dropped them at random around the map
*Sensible geography that looks like somebody understands plate tectonics instead of dropping kewl bits around (I always thought Middle Earth was a bit odd with the random volcanos)
*A consistent plot that doesn't throw plot twists at you out of the blue and characters acting true to their motivations
*If a historical novel, pay attention to the actual history and gender roles within that society (no 20th century women in costume or anachronisms like restaurants in 14th century Florence)
*Well-written and has been proof-read by somebody who knows English grammar and isn't BFF with the author - ideally the author needs to be acquainted with grammar as well but we can't have everything_

The story can be trope-y and pedestrian, but if it's got all the above and comes across as fresh, then I'm good with it. It may qualify as something to save for holiday reading. The thing I loathe is 'fashionable' novels - the ones that are written to catch the current 'in' thing, or ones with an issue du jour that looks like it's been bolted onto the plot at the behest of an editor or publisher to make it relevant (a YA novel which was a folk-tale retelling with a LGBT plot line - which sat oddly with the particular setting).

>22 Maddz: Loudly seconded as to your last two points and also as to the comment about issues du jour. To your last point you might add that either the author or the editor knows what to leave out. Too many books are too long.

As to anachronisms or outright errors, I lost touch completely with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's recreation of Mycroft Holmes after an incident where Holmes is chased through Victorian London by a gang of ruffians, and Holmes and all the ruffians are riding horses. Not even in a steampunk London would I buy that. It's not even an anachronism — I doubt whether anyone has ever kept riding horses as daily transport in London (as distinct from outings in Rotten Row). Also, maybe it's just my day job but I'm sensitive to misused words and awkward constructions of sentences.

And I simply refuse to read any book that has recently won a major literary prize. I was bullied into reading Possession years ago (and TBF it actually wasn't bad) but I haven't read a Booker winner since. I don't know whether the issues du jour books are constructed at the behest of an editor or publisher, or spring out of the author's own head, and I don't care.

>23 haydninvienna: You scared me there for a second. I thought you were going to diss Posssession and then I'd have had to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about you. (grinning)

>24 jillmwo: I’m relieved about that. The person who bullied me was my then girlfriend (long before I met Mrs H) and she thought it would be good for me, or something. I’m very reluctant to read anything that’s good for me, but read it I did. No, I’m not going to diss it, and if the truth be told I enjoyed it, but I still don’t do Booker or other prize winners. Even Nobel prize winners, except for Hesse, Thomas Mann and Bob Dylan. (If someone had asked you “What do Bertrand Russell, Thomas Mann and Bob Dylan have in common (other than the obvious)”, would your first thought have been ‘a Nobel Prize for literature’?)

>20 pgmcc: I should have joined in that group read, I just had too big of a backlog to get through at the time. I'll pick up Arcadia sometime.

>21 reading_fox: Do you prefer the Dunk and Egg novellas, which generally don't follow that format?

>22 Maddz: I may be somewhat guilty of points 2 and 3, so I likely give authors a pass on those, but 4, 5 and 6 are definitely a problem for me.

>23 haydninvienna: I've had such mixed success lately with prize winning books, I should likely give up on my quest to read all of the Nebula and Hugo award winners.

>26 Karlstar: Yes I find the rest of his writing great. I'm not a huge novella fan in general, too short to properly get into but have enjoyed everything I've read. Sandkings is certainly memorable. Way of Cross and dragon is among my favourite ever books.

memorable, immersive, re-readable

What makes a book immersive for me depends on my mood, what's going on around me, and the book itself. I like a plot that clips along without a lot of padding, multi-dimensional characters, good editing, and no anachronisms. I read a lot and I have a very good instinctive grasp of dialogue, grammar and spelling, so errors in any of those will trip me up every time. I am not a history buff, so I'm sure I miss a lot of anachronisms in historical books, but if even I notice it, it's really badly done. Shoddy worldbuilding, especially in fantasy, irritates the heck out of me. If it's not our world, and there's no France, why are characters drinking champagne or Merlot?

Memorable? I remember lots of books for bad reasons, like the ER book where (among multitudinous other offenses) the author used the word "chelonian" instead of "crustacean." I recycled that book when I was done. The ones I remember for positive reasons tend also to be the ones I found immersive, but not necessarily re-readable.

Re-readable - well, if I found it immersive, that's a good sign, but it also needs to have a positive (if not actually happy) ending, protagonists I like and want to root for, a world that I find interesting, and tech or magic systems that make sense. It doesn't have to be laugh-out-loud funny but a sense of humour is a definite bonus. Pretty much everything >22 Maddz: said.

Like >23 haydninvienna:, I avoid anything that has won a mainstream literary prize or won Canada Reads (annual "competition" to decide on a book every Canadian should read) because they are all (as far as I can tell) depressing and/or full of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other. Socially-relevant is NOT a selling feature for me :)

>28 tardis:, "If it's not our world, and there's no France, why are characters drinking champagne or Merlot?" I know, right? Stuff that like really breaks the immersion spell. The one I'll never forget is the fantasy-world narrator of Modesti's first Recluse book comparing something to a Chinese vase.

>29 Cecrow: & >28 tardis:
Yes, internal consistency is vital.

>29 Cecrow: True, but... weren't the inhabitants of that world originally from Earth?

>16 Cecrow: "Anything that aligns especially deeply with my worldview, especially if it opens a new door in that house, is also going to do it."

That is a good description of the books I love enough to read again, so memorable I suppose. Lois McMaster Bujold does that for me every time. Her worlds exist. I know they do, just as Middle Earth does. Her characters frequently struggle with the same conflicting thoughts and issues I do, and sometimes they enlighten me or crystallize my thoughts.

Discworld is immersive for me, and rereadable, but I've never once thought it existed. Perhaps because it pokes to much fun at itself?

Another series I reread is the Dresden Files. There are many things I love about it, but it isn't there. Too escalating and bombastic, and also set in our world, even though it is about the other world. Sort of. I don't think less of it though, sometimes I want just that type of escape.

As far as memorable goes, I forget many details of books I loved, but remember the emotions associated with them. That makes it nice because I can read them again with a sense of surprise and suspense.

>32 MrsLee: Agreed to all except Dresden Files, which I don't recall ever seeing in this neck of the woods.

Possibly another attribute that makes a book immersive and memorable in the right way is being set somewhere the reader knows and written by someone who knows and respects the place. For me the perfect example (unfortunately few Dragoneers have read it) is Light Across Time. The most vivid example of this is the scene set within walking distance (I know that because I often walked there as a teen) of the house I grew up in. Hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that the author, Tom Learmont is a Johannesburger of long standing. This also suggests that there is no law stating that the author has to be famous to provide a memorably immersive reading experience.

So oddly enough (or possibly not) I have been immersed in books I found memorable, that I didn't necessarily enjoy. Conversely I've been immersed in books I thoroughly enjoyed, but that I remember virtually nothing about. Much has to do with what else is going on in my life. Stress is the great memory eraser, I have found.

I also need characters I can relate to, and at least admire if not like. I also need the writing to be decent. It might a be an imaginative or engaging story, but if the language is clunky or the dialog stilted I just can't do it.

I have to ponder this a bit more and perhaps look at my reading lists from the last decade or so, and then come back.

I wonder if anyone finds naming to be a key element of an immersive experience, most particularly in science fiction and/or fantasy. I find if a language is too complicated (in terms of pronunciation, even when when reading silently), then it can keep me from being fully "in the experience" of an imagined world. Perhaps it has to do with being uncertain about how to pronounce the word when encountered on the page.

What do the rest of you experience?

>35 jillmwo: Normally I would agree with you, but for some odd reason the names in Katherine Addison's books don't do that to me. Yes, I find them a little frustrating, but they don't knock me out of that world.

>35 jillmwo: Being the troubled reader that I am (lacking the skill to read whole words,) I am initially very much caught up in how to pronounce every word I come across. It's a curse ... and a gift. But having been a computer geek for over 30 years, acronyms are easy for me to pronounce. REMWAF, LAAMFCRB, MBOCDB. Easy!
On our headstone, I have panels that read: IwaetY (over my name) and YtowIe (over Karrell's.) Top dead center is >NaCl.
IwatY (eye WATT ee) = I, who am enamored to you.
YtowIe (yuh TOE ee) = You, to whom I'm enamored.
>NaCl = More than salt.
It's the way we addressed each other in emails.
The back of the headstone contains a 214-synopsis of the originally >2 Silversi:,300-word Slavic folk tale. We were linked to that story.

Now, the only name I kept stumbling over was: Sartiblartfast.

>35 jillmwo: It doesn't even have to be fantasy names. If a book has too many foreign language snippets without translation, it becomes tedious to me. Spanish names are not a problem, French names fill me with dread because even reading silently, my eyes and mind stumble, knowing that I have no idea how to say them.

>35 jillmwo: Intuitively I would agree, but then I look at books I have really enjoyed and see that some of my favourite books have character names that I have never been able to pronounce. I have loved Iain M. Banks's science fiction novels and many of his characters have difficult names. Asking myself why did this not disturb me or throw me out of the story I answer, all the character names were sufficiently different that I never got confused between characters. When I saw the difficult name I knew who it was. The fact that I could never pronounce the name was not important.

What does disturb my reading is when a author has several characters with names that start with the same letter. I find this can causes me confusion as to which character is being talked about, or is doing something, or whatever. This can throw me out of a story and have me rereading sections to clarify who is doing what. I find this a much more problematic situation than complicated or difficult to pronounce names.

>38 MrsLee:
My son-in-law is third generation German-American and has fluent German. He went on holiday with us to France and we were highly amused at is attempts to pronounce the names of French towns.

Foreign language snippets without any translation can be annoying. Luckily I have a tiny amount of French and German, which helps. However, while I studied Latin at school, I have to resort to Google translate to know what is written. Despite what other people may say, I have no great knowledge of Eastern European languages. That is my official position. I have no clue with other languages.

>35 jillmwo: >39 pgmcc:

Names don't bother me - Although I don't consciously think about it, I tend to read in blocks, taking in the gist of a whole sentence at a go. Hence I don't worry about the pronouncing a particular word because I'm not 'reading it out loud' even internally to myself. I seem to assign a tag to characters and hence the Same letter per >39 pgmcc: or even multiple names with the same 'shape' will through me out and confuse me which character is involved.

>36 clamairy:, that's interesting, I found The Goblin Emperor was especially tough that way. It seemed like everyone had three names and she'd change which one was being used to address them all the time, or else using one of their titles. I thought I was reading Tolstoy or something. I think it's a fairly immersive story, but that sure made me work for it.

>42 Cecrow: Yeah, I think I had more trouble with the first one than the two I read afterward. I am pretty sure I stopped trying to read any of the names and just started taking my cues about who was talking or where they were going from the rest of the text. But it did not take me out of the book, oddly...

I am reading and enjoying A Desolation Called Peace, but I am faced with such words as Teixcalaanli. Now to their credit, the author and publisher included a page or two at the end of the book that purports to tell me HOW to pronounce each letter in that word, but frankly, I find it less helpful than perhaps was intended. I wish I were able to *listen* to a chapter or two of this title, so I could get a better handle on what it's supposed to sound like.

The character names are a tad disconcerting although I've come to accept and recognize Three Seagrass. I find Eight Antidote to be more challenging in trying to picture who this kid IS. I realize as that if he were renamed Joe Doakes or if Three Seagrass were re-christened as Babs Johnson, the creation of the fictional world would not be nearly as successfully alien. Fantasy needs to be fully sewn together to make the whole believable, as Tolkien understood, but I just keep tripping over the additional vocabulary.

And it is quite obvious that Arkady Martine spent real time on developing her linquistics. I'm just need to hear what it sounds like. (Maybe I should have gone with an audio version, but I suspect the various points of view would then have become confusing for me. I am that PITA reader who is the bane of imaginative and clever authors everywhere.)

>35 jillmwo: I definitely find names to be part of the experience of a book being memorable. The same with words; Donaldson's use of words that I've never read before doesn't bother me, but authors who use words incorrectly or make poor word choices definitely throw me off my reading.

>42 Cecrow: >43 clamairy: I found that the constant use of titles and what felt like switching of titles in The Witness for the Dead definitely threw me off, but I still enjoyed the book. I just finished Grief of Stones and I've learned to read past it. However, like >39 pgmcc: said, authors that have characters with similar names, which also happens in Grief of Stones, really bugs me. Is it a typo, or are there really two characters with such similar names? If so, why the heck didn't they come up with a different name?

>45 Karlstar: Yes, there is that issue... Especially for someone like me with a touch of dyslexia. Again, I find myself relying on context to figure out who is being referred to. Just like I had to do when reading Tolstoy, where every character had three different names. I think by the time I got to The Grief of Stones I was just able to deal with it better.

>46 clamairy: Tolstoy: seeing Our Pilgrim is no longer in the land of the living, perhaps it is up to me to pick up the baton. All Russians have three-part names. If Pilgrim were here, she'd tell you the parts in Cyrillic letters, but my computer's not that clever, so I'll tell you Imja, Obshchestvo, Familia. Imja is the given name, such as Piotr; Obshchestvo is the patronymic, for example Ilyich -- "son of Ilya" -- and Familia is the surname, Tchaikovsky in the example we've been dissecting. (Note that the last two are inflected and change for women: the composer's imaginary sister would have been Somebody Ilyevna Tchaikovska.) Now. If you don't know the person you might use the surname. If you know them but not that well -- a work colleague for example -- you use Imja + Obshchestvo (Piotr Ilyich in our example), and if you know them very well (relative, lover etc.) you use just the first name or a nickname. And Russian nicknames are truly incomprehensible to outsiders; if Pilgrim were writing this she'd have avoided shooting herself in the foot with a duff example as I have; I don't know the usual nickname for a Peter. So for this example think of a character called Aleksandr Somebodyevich Somebodysky. His nickname used by the family (etc.) will be Sasha, which could be confusing if you don't know the equivalences.

edited to delete a superfluous word

>47 hfglen: And Tolstoy would use ALL THREE to refer to the same person in the same paragraph...:oP

>47 hfglen:
I was aware of the multiple Russian names and the gender variations, but your post is the first time I have seen them explained. Not only that, your explanation is very clear and informative. I was never aware of how the patronymic and the family names were used. Thank you for educating me.

>47 hfglen: Same for me, I was not aware of this and appreciate the explanation.

I'm reviving this thread, because I've been thinking about a particular reading experience. I first encountered Agatha Christie's book The Mystery of the Blue Train back in 2011. I know this because I documented it in a reading thread here in the Pub. Now, initially, it was just a casual "entertainment" kind of thing. NOW, more than 10 years later, I re-read it much more slowly than I might have done when I was simply whiling away the time.

What struck me was that I had "remembered" a different ending to the book, one where the young woman who has been engaging with Poirot throughout the book meets up with the young man who has fallen in love with her. I again "remembered" the closing scene as being somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not the two actually were going to marry and live "happily ever after". That said, my memory was faulty. The book does not include such a scene (maybe there's a different Agatha Christie with such an ending, but who knows?)

At any rate, when we talk about what makes a book memorable, what do we do about faulty memories -- when what we think made a book memorable is not in fact what actually appears on the page?

>51 jillmwo: Oh boy, I think you have opened a can a worms. There are times when I either recall a reading experience fondly (or not) only to reread my LT journal blurb and find that my experience was different from my memory. Perhaps much of that has to do with what else is/was going on in our lives at the time.

>51 jillmwo: >52 clamairy: I had a similar experience recently, where I'd mixed up parts of a book I thought I'd remembered well. Maybe remembering key parts is enough - character names, key plot elements, some passages? Don't know about you folks but I do not have an eidetic memory, though that may be the wrong term for remembering writing. I also have so many characters, plots and passages stuffed in my head from the years of reading, maybe it is just my filing system mixing them up.

>51 jillmwo: I read a book about the way our brains make memories, now I don't trust them at all.

>52 clamairy: That's probably wise. Completely aside from any aging strains on the brain or need to check with my doctor re an adjustment to medications of whatever sort, I do have to pause and wonder. We're all aware of instances where publishers have changed specific British/American vocabulary in order to match with local usage. There are the instances where publishers offer "edited" versions of a reprint edition, eliminating scenes here or there to meet their own production requirements. But what that does to our memory of the reading experience is akin to a form of gaslighting, isn't it? If I read The Shuttle as originally published back at the turn of the 20th century, it should not be different from the edition published by Persephone Books at the beginning of the 21st century. And yet, sometimes, things get dropped for political reasons so as to be successful in the marketplace.

It will bug me until I find that missing Agatha Christie scene...

>53 Karlstar: "I also have so many characters, plots and passages stuffed in my head from the years of reading, maybe it is just my filing system mixing them up." Well, that's pretty much the biggest issue, if you ask me. I'm not going to stop, though!

>54 MrsLee: Was there a bit in your book about how things are remembered best after a good night sleep? Because if there was that would explain a lot about the last 40 years of my life.

>55 jillmwo: Let us know if you find it!

>56 clamairy: No, actually (and this is not a scientific explanation and is from my memory) it said that our brain can't remember. It constantly rewrites the memory, it thinks it again and again, crafting it to be the memory we want rather than the actual event. This is why we have difficulty remembering exactly how someone looks unless we have a photo. It is why people remember the same event differently, and so forth. I found it rather a frightening thought, but fascinating. Now I'm trying to remember the name of the book.

ETA: I looked up the book in my catalog, Lost and Found: Memory, Identity and Who we become When we are no Longer Ourselves by Jules Montague. I notice the book also goes by "Lost and Found: Why Losing our Memories Doesn't Mean Losing Ourselves" Rather conflicting titles.

Oh yes, i remember writing that book.

>57 MrsLee:, I don't know. I still have a lot of clear memories about some really stupid things I've done in the past, and they don't seem to getting any better.

On a more serious note, it's fascinating how different my grandfather's and his brother's recorded memories are of the same scenes where they were both present. Neither is alive anymore, so all we have are the contradictions.

I don't reread often so I haven't encountered this problem with books so far. I'm more leery of revisiting books I loved as a teenager and discovering I had no taste, which I can already verify without reading in some cases.

>59 Cecrow: "I still have a lot of clear memories about some really stupid things I've done in the past, and they don't seem to getting any better."

Same! I swear those embarrassing memories get worse. Also, I'm the youngest of nine siblings, and we often remember events differently.

Like you there are some books I loved as a teen that I will never reread. *cough* Time Enough for Love *cough*

>59 Cecrow: & >60 clamairy: They don't necessarily get better, they simply become what you make of them. My mother had bad memories of the mistakes she made raising us, but none of us remember them.

That's because she dropped you on your head.

>62 MrAndrew: :P

>60 clamairy: What was memorable or immersive about the Lazarus Long book? I know I read it once upon a time in college (?) but other than knowing it was a Lazarus Long title by Heinlein, I can't remember a thing about it now.

>64 jillmwo: I was 17 and my first real boyfriend loaned it to me to read. I'm sure it would seem like a quasi-misogynistic space opera to me now, filled with incestuous drivel. (Isn't this the one where Lazarus falls in love with his mother?) But at the time I'd never read anything even remotely like it, so I was blown away.

>64 jillmwo: >65 clamairy: I read it at about the same age and like both of you, that's all I remember. I don't have much interest in re-reading it either. I don't remember the part about his mother but I may have just erased that from my memory.

>61 MrsLee: >59 Cecrow:

Makes me think of the Brandon Sanderson bit I shared the other day.

>67 clamairy: I like that.

>64 jillmwo: I read it about the same time as well, got thru about half of it, threw it against the wall (yes, I really did), and swore I'd never read Heinlein again.

Always wondered about the 'throw against the wall' thing. Do dedicated readers have a dedicated wall space for this, or any wall will do?

>70 Cecrow: A small padded section perhaps, to minimize damage and for maximum bounce? I can't answer this as I've never done it. (And now that I'm using a Kindle I would never even consider it an option.) I did send once put a free book* in my recycle bin instead of giving it away. It was that bad. I couldn't run the risk of inflicting in on someone else.

*Wild Animus

>70 Cecrow: I think I've thrown a book against my brick fireplace, and if I actually used it to make fires, that book would have been good fodder. My usual action for that sort of book that I despise and wouldn't inflict on any other human, is to tear it page from page and recycle it. This is a rare event, but it has happened to several books out of my collection.

>72 MrsLee: Wow! Now I'm curious to know what kinds of books raised your ire to such proportions that you felt you needed to do that...

Edited to add that I didn't despise the book I mentioned above. It was just really badly written, and the content was naval gazing drivel.

Years ago, I got about 40 pages into Lord Foul's Bane and dumped it and its two sequels into the garbage. The protagonist disgusted me so much that I couldn't get past it, and I couldn't even give them away. Few other books have annoyed me that much, although there was a Pride and Prejudice "sequel" that was so terrible I left a scathing review on Amazon. It was a library book so I couldn't destroy it :)

>70 Cecrow: >71 clamairy: >72 MrsLee: No throwing against the wall for me, but I have disposed of a couple of books that were so bad I thought they weren't worth keeping or passing on to someone else. The most recent was Leiber's The Wanderer, there was absolutely nothing redeeming about it. This is very rare for me though.

>73 clamairy: Health Reformer II Recipes: Uncooked Food and Simple Cooked Food
by Katy Chamberlin (Author)
I labeled it a pamphlet, and my review is the only one it has, and more than it deserves IMO. The author poked me in my theology and in the kitchen. Two places I am passionate about, essentially saying that spices and herbs were from Satan to tempt us from the good, simple life. Don't even get me started.

The other books I have torn up were in poor condition to begin with, and their stories did not appeal, some I finished reading while ripping the pages off, others I quit reading, but finished ripping.

>76 MrsLee: Oh, I would have been glad to join you in the destruction of something like that. In fact, I think I might have made a fire with it, and then cooked food with lots of herbs and spices over that fire...

>76 MrsLee: On the one hand, I'm rolling on the floor laughing at the idea that spices in cooking might be viewed as satanic, because that is absolutely a NEW one for me. I've never heard anyone espouse that view before in my entire life. So build that fire higher >77 clamairy: and let's do some s'mores. (OR you could make something requiring a good strong dose of curry powder...)

Oh, I thought you did a great job on the review as well!

>78 jillmwo: Apparently one of the reasons that Puritan cooking was so bland is because spices and seasonings were "of the devil." Yes, s'mores, and let's add a hot toddy loaded with cinnamon and cloves, too..

>78 jillmwo: & >79 clamairy: See? This is why one needs friends. Some of the best ideas come from our friends. I vote for some Chipotle powder on those smores and in the cocoa!

>80 MrsLee: Perfect!

>74 tardis:
I share your disgust with Lord Foul's Bane/The Thomas Covenant Chronicles.

>76 MrsLee: & >78 jillmwo: i've never heard of spices being from Satan, except perhaps some over-the-top chilli powder marketing. I have heard of the devil's herb though.

>73 clamairy:
I have only thrown one book across the room. It was "The Patriot Game" by John De St. Jorre.

The author was giving detailed descriptions of his protagonist's car journey through Belfast. He had his hero driving along roads he would not have been able to access; stopping for a smoke at the side of the "Belfast to Dungannon road", which is a motorway with no stopping allowed; viewing the aftermath of a restaurant bombing that he couldn't have seen from where his character was; coming up to a border crossing where the "border guards raised a barrier", something that at the time of the story was not the case. Even throughout the roughest times of the troubles the type of barrier he described was never used at border crossings.

It appears this author wrote his descriptions from a map never having visited Northern Ireland. Also, his map must have been grossly out of date and his ability to read it was questionable.

It was at the point where he arrived at the border and "...the border guards raised the barrier." that I flung the book across the room. It is probably the only book I have deliberately torn asunder and thrown in the bin.

>76 MrsLee: >77 clamairy: >78 jillmwo: Rajpipla Chicken, the Maharaja of Gujerat's recipe that involves 40 different spices. I don't have that, but I can let you have one with about 25.

Edited: numbering

>76 MrsLee: As >78 jillmwo: said, you did a great job with the review.

Now, I am a bit worried about >85 hfglen:.

I can vaguely remember dumping the odd book in the recycling bin, but most “books” that went that way were old phone books and such. But surely the champion of all “book reviewers with extreme prejudice”* was Nero Wolfe carefully burning a copy of the third edition of Merriam-Webster page by page, and then asking Archie whether it was safe to burn the cover.

>84 pgmcc: It appears this author wrote his descriptions from a map never having visited Northern Ireland: I’ve mentioned before that I’ve never been able to make sense of Ned Henry’s wanderings through Oxford in the early pages of To Say Nothing of the Dog either from my own knowledge of the city or on a map. I still love the book though.

*To avoid certain associations with, e g, what happened at the Bebelplatz in Berlin on 10 May 1933.

>87 haydninvienna: All because the word "contact" was used as a verb, IIRC. :) I cheered him. I also think >84 pgmcc: should add his book to our bonfire. I remember becoming extremely annoyed with an otherwise interesting story because the author put fireflies on the west side of the Rocky Mountains, which they are not, which is a very big disappointment to me. I don't think I destroyed her book, or flung it, because it did introduce me to sexing chickens, which I never knew was a thing, but I didn't keep it.

>88 MrsLee: Consider The Patriot Game duly added to the bonfire.

>87 haydninvienna:
The story was not sufficiently interesting to compensate for the gross errors in the descriptions. If he thought he was adding local colour to his book he was actually sucking colour, structure and reality out of the environment in which he set his tale.

>88 MrsLee: One can guess what NW would have thought of “author” a book or “gift” a present …

>84 pgmcc: I once had a woman in one of my book groups completely pan a mystery that was set in New Jersey because the roads specifically named in the book didn't go where the author suggested they might. I thought she might have been a bit heavy-handed in her assessment until I recalled that the author was ostensibly from the area. What made it worse was that the third woman in that group had given both of us author-autographed copies of that particular novel for Christmas! (Fortunately, the giver found the mystery to be unimpressive as well -- albeit for different reasons...)

>92 jillmwo: The book was supposed to be about a rogue IRA man doing his own thing. It was very much about The Troubles. In the first page of the book he had his protagonist driving along Royal Avenue in Belfast. He was obviously not aware that the centre of Belfast had been closed of to private traffic for security reasons with searchers and army personnel checking all pedestrians entering the city centre. The security measures had been in place for years before the time he set his story. He had obviously done little or no real research.

That was the first thing that triggered my ire.

Earlier today I read another review of the book and the review ended with the reviewer saying they could not recommend this book under any circumstance. This was interesting as he had said some nice things about the plot but objected to the book for other reasons.

I threw Heinlein's Time Enough for Love against a wall and swore I'd never read him again. Ditto Outlander

ETA: these days I read ebooks. I've been tempted to throw the reader but better sense has so far prevailed.

Outlander was a DNF for me, although I didn't go as far as to throw it. The book belonged to someone else.