Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
I don't need to necessarily like them or identify with them, but I do need to be interested in them. If the characters fail to stir any interest in me, I'll usually get bored and ditch the book, no matter how well written.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
Perhaps "connect" means "care about", like in personal connections. If you are not interested in finding out what is going on with the characters, the story will be a slog.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I tend not to like fiction where I feel disconnected from the characters and story. You see in that, that "connect" is about feeling involved in the story, not alienated from it, but how that feeling of involvement, of connection, occurs will vary with each book.
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How I feel about the protagonists is important to how I feel about a book, and the quotes above all feel right to me. To like a book, I need to want the protagonists to succeed. If I'm indifferent to them, I'll lose interest, and if I dislike them, the book will annoy me.
But this doesn't mean they have to be people I'd like if I met them in real life! Terrible people can be written in a way that make me root for them while I'm reading, and admirable people can be written to be deadly dull.
An example: In Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, Lucius Cornelius Sulla is an amoral, egoistical, cruel person. For instance, he murders several people because they will be more convenient to him dead than alive. But the author still manages to describe him in a way that makes me root for him.
Later in the series, Gaius Julis Caesar becomes the main character. He is described as an over-the-top superhero, which makes him boring and annoying, and I abandoned the 6-book series somewhere in the last book because I didn't really care about what happened to him.