Saturday, April 12, 2014

different reading styles

This article came through my Medium alerts feed - Agency or why we love Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. I happen to enjoy both of these stories but not everyone does, and some of it comes back to the doorways mentioned by Nancy Pearl - character, language, setting, story (a description of this by Nancy Pearl is here), and there are a range of other factors as to why people may not enjoy these titles.

These books are interesting because they can be interpreted by readers as fitting in all of these doorways.  They both have strong story (even if we don't quite know where GoT is going).  There are many interesting characters, and we want know what happens to them (even if we only get to know then for a short time thanks to GoT).  The locations of both are important and described to add to our experience of reading them (and we can see that location can be an influence), and they have interesting use of language.  Depending on which of these is most important to you, will depend on how these books appeal to you (and there are a whole range of factors as to why they may not).

We all have a different mixture of the doorways in how we read, and there is not a ranking system, as they are all important to each of us in a slightly different mix.

This is obviously not language to be used with library clients,  but the ideas can really help when working with clients and helping them find something they want to read (without trying to give them something identical to what they read before - unless they really want this).

This article - Agency or why we love Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings - is also interesting because the description demonstrates the different doorways, without using the terminology.

I tweeted about this, but felt a longer explanation was needed.

As an aside Medium is a great source of a range of news stories appealing to different  reading styles.

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