do you ever struggle with believing the characters?
i feel like i started doing this a while ago subconsciously and that ruined reading a lot of books.
judging characters is inevitable but
the author uses the characters to show us the world they live in,
but instead of taking what they say at face value i criticise them as if they were real people.
for example in the book i am currently reading,
the main character walks up to a girl in her class after the class ends and tries to engage her in conversation, she responds but clearly she is in a hurry and so she says
"yeah, sorry i have to run, nice meeting you."
this could mean that she really was in a hurry or she was not interested in being friendly to the main character or just not interested in being friendly with anyone right?
this is what the main character thinks next
"Sadie didn’t know why she bothered. You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones. Sadie was, by nature, a loner, but even she found going to MIT in a female body to be an isolating experience -"
then the monologue moved on to how in 90s women in STEM were not taken seriously or there were not many of them, which is a relevant issue, and
i feel like this reaction that she didn't want to talk to me because she wanted to be a pickme ,
this is the beginning of the book and this was the first class in the college so she doesn't know that person at all.
assuming that about her actually makes the main character a pickme.
and in some books i know the character is designed to come across as this but that is not the case in this book.
and that is just how sometimes
subtly the character's behaviour takes me out of being immersed.
have you recently experienced this?
by taanukichi