Dec 13, 2011 (Morning Edition) — NPR's go-to librarian would like you to meet some friends of hers -- from six novels and one work of history. As you read, these artfully developed characters will become more and more real. Pearl says that when the stories ended, she was left longing for the people she'd met between the pages.
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Illustration: A man steps out of a book to shake hands. (Priscilla Nielsen for NPR)
7 Books With Personality: Nancy Pearl's 2011 Picks
by Nancy Pearl
Dec 13, 2011 (Morning Edition) — NPR's go-to librarian would like you to meet some friends of hers -- from six novels and one work of history. As you read, these artfully developed characters will become more and more real. Pearl says that when the stories ended, she was left longing for the people she'd met between the pages.Although all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction have characters — be they animals, hobbits, dragons, humans, werewolves or whatever — I've found that there are some books in which these characters are three-dimensional and awfully interesting. (Whether or not they're likable is another question.) These characters become, as the story progresses, more and more real to me. It's as though they've become good friends.
I'm always on the lookout for this kind of book, but they're not always easy to find. Oh, I've read plenty of novels in which the characters are pleasant enough, but they're not particularly memorable. The sort of book I'm talking about here leaves you with a longing to find out what happened to the characters after the book ended. Here are some books — six novels and a work of history — that have marvelously evoked characters.
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