BOOK READING MOOD PHENOMENON (BRMP)

I noticed that it seems that my enjoyment of a book sometimes depends on my mood. There was a time when I was a teenager when I read a book and enjoyed it so much. Retrospectively, I could remember laughing every other page! I gave it high recommendations to all my book friends. I could still remember them looking at me strangely. I could not understand why they did not like it. What was there not to like? And I could also remember that was the time when I had like, awards for graduation, I passed the entrance exam and got accepted to the most prominent college in the country, had more than adequate money saved up for the first year in college, etc. In other words, I wasn’t only happy… my world was not only rosy… I was on a high! Donkeys years later, I re-read the same book and I found the story telling quality so flat, the story boring and I was soooo surprised!! I could understand now what my friends were saying years ago about the book! Could my mood had affected my reading enjoyment of the book? A “book reading mood phenomenon” (BRMP)? I also noticed that sometimes my mood affects my choice of read… like I am feeling down and I wanted to read a kick-ass urban fantasy to pick me up. Or I’m feeling loved up and I want to read paranormal romance…. Have your mood ever affected your reading?

Dinner & Current Read

My dinner and current read 🙂

AUTHENTICITY FACTOR

AUTHENTICITY FACTOR. How authentic is the story line? The world building? As a reader, I find that I am more able to connect with a scene, character and/or a made-up world if it feels real to me. If it has a convincing semblance of reality in it. I call this the AUTHENTICITY FACTOR (AF). For a world, scene, plot, character or story to be authentic to me, it also has to make sense. The more it makes sense the more it’s AF rating goes up. Take for example, let’s take a scene off the book Sparks by Laura Bickle. This extremely long-lived character explained to this human about the idiosyncracy of his three-headed friend. He says:

“After a few centuries, they tend to develop a personality of their own.”

Developing a personality after a long time is a logical next step to me in a magical entity. I can connect with that a whole lot more than just saying, “they are like that just because it’s magic“. Okey, that might be acceptable, but the AF rating would be a whole lot higher if it makes more sense than “just magic” and leave it at that. Those kind of books which leaves it to “just because it’s magic” may catch my reader’s attention but tends not to keep it. While the ones where it made more sense, not only catches my attention, but also has a higher likelyhood of keeping it.

The more authentic the world, the scene, the plot, the character is, the more I can easily suspend disbelief. Now a few concepts in the literary world here overlaps, like the concept of suspension of disbelief overlaps the authenticity factor. I guess it is sometimes inevitable that some concepts in the literary world would overlap as they play in the same field, so to speak. However, there is also a distinctness between the concepts of suspension of disbelief and authenticity factor. One is about suspending reality and the latter is about having as much reality in it as possible. And that is as far as I’m going with it’s differences as this post is actually about the authenticity factor. There is a whole lot more to that “overlapping concepts” but that’s also a discussion for another time.

So, to the book readers out there, what is your opinion about the authenticity factor of a story?

HEA: It is not so much the destination as it is the journey.

Okey, I’m one of those readers who likes my HEA or happily-ever-after. I’m an escapist reader, so I don’t really want a lot of reality intruding into my fantasy. My ideal story therefore would have a very good semblance of reality but have an HEA in the end. And that is not real, that is fantasy. Because real life almost always dishes out a non-HEA. So a good author weaves me a realistic HEA. Sound simple? Probably. But not a lot of authors can pull that off. In fact, only a few can… “HEA”, we know the ending anyway, so where is the thrill there? Aha! This is where the “good author” comes in. A very good tale spinner can make the story a very good journey, indeed! As Captain Jack says:

“It is not so much the destination, as it is the journey.”

That is why I am always on the constant prowl for good authors. What is your take on HEA?

Happy Easter!

Seeing Doubles

I thought I was seeing doubles, but that would make you cross-eyed too… however I do not think you are cross-eyed, that means I wasn’t seeing doubles…

Same model, same dress, different cover arts for two totally different books… whatcha think?

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

Suspension Of Disbelief – is described by Wikipedia as:

“…Samuel Taylor Coleridge, suggested that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative… It might be used to refer to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. These fictional premises may also lend to the engagement of the mind and perhaps proposition of thoughts, ideas, art and theories.”

(Wikipedia, 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief)

Another aspect that I look for in a book is “suspension of disbelief“. Sometimes when an author is so talented, he can convince the reader so utterly of the world he has created that the reader is transported to another world entirely. That world is so convincingly real that it is so very easy to think that it could happen or “suspend disbelief”. As far as I can see, there are two major factors that people in the literary industry attributes to “suspension of disbelief”:

1. Author Factor
• Author’s Convincing Talent: bryngreenwood‘s comment highlights the idea of “believability” of a story/scene/narrative and the author’s convincing ability, in which he said that:
  

  “….last night I had to quit watching a movie because I just didn’t believe in the characters. I said, “Look, I’m willing to believe that a neo-Nazi skinhead could fall in love with a black woman, but I don’t believe that this skinhead is falling in love with this woman. Simple as that.“

  (Isabel Roman, 2009: http://bit.ly/fefTZa)

• Author’s Convincing Talent: Isabel Roman supports the “author’s convincing ability” argument and states that “suspension of disbelief” requires a delicate balance of how the writer weaves his fiction. And I quote her:
  

  Ordinarily, you might not accept there are true, real Witch Hunters in the world, but presented as fact within a universe, it could be made believable. You can’t be tentative when creating a universe such as this. While dealing with magicks and so on, there’s still that careful line between what people will generally accept as “Well, that’s magick”, and what they’ll say as “That’s ridiculous.”

  (Isabel Roman, 2009: http://bit.ly/glOOxT).

• Consistency: Allison Pang further argues that the author’s consistency with the world he has created plays a major role in the reader’s “suspension of disbelief” (Allison Pang, 2011: http://bit.ly/h73e3M). An author is not allowed to break his own rules.
2. Reader Factor
• Another factor attributed to “suspension of disbelief” is the readers or audiences’ frame of mind (Welkos, 1993: http://lat.ms/eAxY6M). How receptive is the audience to the world the author has created?

So, “suspension of disbelief” is influenced by the human interest and semblance of truth in the story, plus the author’s covincing talents with consistency and the reader’s receptiveness.

Whether it’s 90% author’s talent and 10% reader’s receptiveness, is up for debate, because there is no solid evidence that I found to substantiate either way. However in my experience, when it comes to “suspension of disbelief”, I find it important that it has to make sense, for me to be able to suspend disbelief. To me, “It happened like that just because it’s magic” wouldn’t cut it. It wouldn’t convince me as a reader to suspend disbelief. Consequently, I would have the tendency to put that book down and pick up another. In which case, I probably would not buy another book by that author ever again. So I say, on top of Allison Pang‘s “consistency” argument and Isabel Roman‘s “delicate balance” theory, that the story also has to make sense for a reader to suspend disbelief. So in your experience as a reader, what do you find makes it difficult or easy for you to suspend disbelief?

GoogleReader Fail

All the “A”s in my subscription list has been erased! Could it be me clicking the wrong button? A computer glitch? GoogleReader ran some updates? A hic up with Google’s system? Anyway, if the blog name started with an “A” or other character like a dot or something, it’s gone! That’s like more than 100 blogs from my subscription list, gone! How am I gonna hunt them down now?? So if I used to follow you and now you noticed that I don’t anymore, this might be it.

The thing is, this is not the first time Google has auto-erased my subscription list. And there is no one to talk to about it at Google. They will just redirect you to a forum where you can ask other Google users to answer your question, but not actually somebody from Google. This is it, this is what happens when you use the Google system, they rule the roost and users haven’t got no say. *sigh*

World Book Night

What is World Book Night?
On 5th of March 2011, a million books will be given away across Britain and Ireland. The promotion will become the focus of a massive media onslaught from the launch in December, culminating in an evening of television programming, all night events, readings, book parties and nationwide celebration of the written word.

I was one of the lucky ones who was selected to be a UK giver of the World Book Night celebrations!! I would be at Pontypridd Library from 4-4:30PM on the 5th of March 2011, giving away World Book Night copies of Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. So if you are in the area, come drop by and pick up your free copy of Northern Lights!!

TV Book Club

I was one of the lucky bloggers who got invited to Channel 4’s TV Book Club recording last Tuesday. So I went all the way to London and got to meet other bloggers and see how a TV show is filmed. First off, I would like to thank Richard and Candice of MEC for bringing us to the recording!! They are very organized! Name tags for everyone when we got there, lounge area ready with bottled water, nibbles, goody bags and the perks. I’ve never been to a show recording before so I was very curious to see what actually happens… well there were tons of cameras, TV screens and technical equipments than people in there, I’m telling you! It’s like taking the box out of your telly and seeing all the wires inside. The wires that allows you to watch all the techniclor movies on the screen. Although I didn’t understand a smidgen of it, it was very interesting to see. Then we got to meet everybody who worked there, including the presenters, the camera men, the girls who makes the show run smoothly and the Charlottes Angels. Coincidentally, it was also one of the Charlotte’s birthday! So we had a sinfully beautiful chocolate cake on top of the usual nibbles. Honestly, Charlotte looked 18, but she assured me that she wasn’t!

I also came out of that experience with my belief strongly reinforced that we in the book blogging community are genereally a wonderful lot! I mean, really!! Every single blogger in that event was nice, polite and supportive. Well, I guess there would always be a bad apple in every basket, but as a whole I think we are composed mostly of nice people.