But I digress. I actully do have a topic to present. I've wondered... what makes a book resonate so strongly with the reader?

What resonates with me is when I see elements in a character that I see within myself, or situations that I can apply to my own life.

Speaker for the Dead's theme about outsiders and redefinition of who's a "person" touched me very personally due to my isolation as a child.

Why? Because it's a book about rabbits, written for the non-rabbit audiance.

As far as reading over and over, I go back to worlds and characters that I can "see" in color and detail. The ones which by the time I've finished the book, I can see myself there interacting with the characters, and I feel like I have. Pern did this for me, and I go back there more often than most. Dune had this effect too, and so do many of the works by Card and David Brin.

I'd like to mention Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, which I read earlier this year. The interesting thing here is that I didn't particularly like the book. It was well-written, but too much of a dry historical narrative for my taste (not much POV at all), and he took way too long to make his point. And it felt murky and gray as I read it. But... I find myself thinking about it - about the themes, and some of the characters, and especially the framework world that he created. Strange.

I wrote my first stories when I was eleven. In junior high, football and the popularity contest sidetracked me. I wrote on and off through high school and my first few years of college. Then I stopped writing. At the time I stopped writing I did so because I thought I wasn’t any good. Now I know that I stopped because I wasn’t ready to write. I can’t explain it any better than that.

I started writing again about a year ago, writing science fiction and fantasy. But I realized that I don't care enough about science or scientific progress to write good SF. I still like reading good SF, however. So I write fantasy. But not heroic fantasy—after Tolkien, what’s left? Most of my stories have elements of the grotesque and the macabre. I don’t like the term “horror fiction”—I use it for convention only—but I guess people would call me a horror writer.

Some of the authors I’ve read this year include: Stephen King, John Irving, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Robert R. McCammon, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Somerset Maugham, Ron Hansen, Leo Tolstoy, and Graham Greene. You can see that I read mostly dark fantasy and literary fiction. More literary fiction this year than dark fantasy.

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Eric also asked a question: What makes a book resonate so strongly with the reader? I wish I new the answer. If I did I would be a published author several times over.

The only answer I can give is this: For me, a book worth rereading must present within it a complete world worth exploring. This world doesn’t have to be a fantastic world, but a complete world. For example, a few weeks ago I read Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and it is certainly a book I’ll reread at least once. Maybe twice. The reason I’m going to reread it is because it takes me completely out of my life and puts me into another life—a life I can never live. That’s why The Lord of the Rings is a story I’ll reread several times over before I die. Along with Great Expectations and To Kill A Mockingbird and The Stand. All of these books have worlds worth exploring and characters worth meeting more than once.