The Oddly Specific Things I Love In Books Tag

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Boss Design Studio to bring you this important message blog tag.

I have literally never been hit with one of these before, so bear with me on this.

The Rules:

1. Link back to the tagger: Chloe the Movie Critic, for me.
2. Share the graphic on your blog. (Did that.)
3. Share the outline on your post. (Pretty sure that's what this is.)
4. Share a detail you love about the season of summer into fall: below!
5. List at least 7 random/specific things YOU love to read about in books, big or small.
6. Tag 7 people!

It becoming fall means it's no longer hot and annoying. Why is this question in the tag?

All right. Now, without further ado, I present at least seven random things I love in books, in rough order of least to most weirdly specific:

1. Dragons and aliens as proper villains

I don't care what everyone says. Good dragons are overdone and they're much more interesting as antagonists (if not full villains). Similarly, we should stop feeling bad about fighting the aliens and/or discovering we're the bad guys for fighting the aliens.

(Also, we should stop using war with the aliens as a thinly veiled metaphor for Western colonialism and how awful and terrible it is. Granted, colonialism wasn't a great idea and there were a lot of abuses and atrocities, but we all know that by now so can everybody please quit harping on it and do something interesting with your books? Ender's Game already did what you're trying to do, and it was also good.)

War-with-the-aliens is much more fun to read when the humans are unambiguously the good guys, like in The War of the Worlds. And dragons, in the same way, are much more fun to read when (like Smaug in The Hobbit) they're powerful and terrifying antagonists. Why can't we have more of those in modern fiction?

2. Protagonists who aren't twelve

This one is just a slight pet peeve I have, because it seems like 95% of protagonists in middle-grade fiction (which is most of what I read and review here) are twelve years old.

My theory for why this is is that twelve-year-olds are young enough that the target audience can relate to them, but they're also old and competent enough that they could conceivably do all the stuff the authors are having them do. That doesn't mean I'm not tired of reading about them.

3. Trains

I like trains. The original Thomas the Tank Engine books (the ones actually by the Reverend W. Awdry) were my favorite books for most of my early childhood, and I'm still enthused whenever trains show up in random things I read. Even if they're just normal trains and aren't sentient or anything.

4. Ancient sci-fi technology in a fantasy world

I don't know why, but I really love it when a book's set in a world of knights and wizards and kings and dragons... but lurking somewhere in the past, there are also ancient decrepit robots and computers and lasers and spaceships.

5. Guns working on the supernatural horror

A la Quincey Morris in Dracula, whose idea for dealing with the titular vampire boils down to "What if we just shot him? I bet that would work."

6. Dragons monologuing about how awesome they are

Think Smaug's "My teeth are swords! My claws are spears! My wings are a hurricane!" speech in The Hobbit. I like my dragons to have presence, and the Dragon Epicness Rant is a good way of establishing that.

7: Random characters from bits of a mostly disjointed series cameoing in books that aren't their own

This one is very prevalent in Discworld, wherein each book focuses on only one subset of the series' increasingly large cast. But that leads to opportunities to have, for example, Commander Vimes show up for one scene in Monstrous Regiment or Senior Postman Groat briefly be part of Wintersmith when someone steals his socks. Extra points if they're the main character of their origin book, but not of this one, so we get a glimpse of how other people see them.

And now to tag 7 people. Uh. I don't know seven people with blogs. I think I'm going to have to skip this step.

(Endnote: And now, having failed to tag anyone, I shall remain "it" forever. Unless this is freeze tag. Or zombie tag. Or artisanal cheese tag.)