Thursday, February 5, 2009

BTT: Author TMI?

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Have you ever been put off an author’s books after reading a biography of them? Or the reverse - a biography has made you love an author more?

Nope. I'm not really the type to judge a book based on its author. I'm also not one to read something by an author then run out and read everything else that they have written (series are excluded from this statement though). For me, it's about the story, not about who the author is or what they believe in, have lived through, etc.

For example, Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight series, is a stay at home Mormon mom. While I haven't read a biography so to speak on her, I have read her bio on her website and seen several interviews with her. I can't say that I really LIKE her or that I agree with her at all, but I love the story that she wrote and the characters that she created. Of course, I absolutely hated some parts of her books (mostly during the ridiculousness that is Breaking Dawn), which might have been written that way because of Stephenie Meyer's belief system, but I'm not going to judge her other books just because of that.

James Frey is another author that I don't particularly care for as a person since his "memoir", A Million Little Pieces, wasn't actually a memoir at all. Parts of it were completely fabricated. I still read it though, and thought that it was amazing. Maybe this was because I read it after it was discovered that he wasn't truthful about it, so I read it like it was fiction. I don't agree with his decision to market the book as a memoir (why in the world would you not just call it fiction??) but I suppose he just wanted his 15 minutes. This won't stop me from picking up (or not picking up) another one of his books.

In the end, I guess that judging a book by its author is just about the same as judging it by the cover. Sometimes you'll get a really great one, and sometimes not. But that's not necessarily because the author is or isn't a certain type of person.

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