The Power Of Good Characters

One of the things I've inherited from my mother is the insane appetite for reading. Ever since I was old enough to read, I've done so at a brisk clip. As I've said before, there are few things I enjoy more than reading books.

There are times that the books I read just grab me and won't let go. I ran into that with the recently completed Yoda: Dark Rendezvous (by Sean Stewart) and am enjoying that right now with Harold Coyle's God's Children. Though Coyle's dense US Army infantry descriptions can sometimes evade my entire grasp, his style of writing just kept me turning pages and having to force myself to stop to do other things makes for an exciting experience.

Late last year, I finished Kyle Mills's Sphere Of Influence and Smoke Screen in only a day and a half each. Mills, too, has a way of writing that made me keep reading no matter what. In Sphere Of Influence's case, he wrote a character by the name of Christian Volkov that was so magnetic that I enjoyed reading more when he was involved. Volkov is one of the bad guys in the novel but was written in a way that that didn't matter.I liked him and carried thoughts about him long after I was finished.

As a counterpart to Volkov, I also "keep" Ian Dunross, the protagonist of James Clavell's Noble House. Dunross may be a fictional character, but Clavell wrote him with such authenticity that he leaped off the page and took residence in my consciousness. There have been times where I would muse to myself something along the lines of "What would Ian do?" when faced with certain situations. Odd, but interesting.