Washington At Home by Moran, Percy, 1862-1935<\/p><\/div>\n

As we lift the cover of our ideal book, what is the sort of story which meets our eyes?\u00a0 Perhaps the most comprehensive answer is, \u201cA delightful one.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what constitutes a delightful book?\u00a0 In the first place, our ideal story must be for the whole family.\u00a0 Maxwell Perkins once wrote that, \u201cMost of the best books in the world are read by both children and adults.\u00a0 This is a characteristic of a great book, that it is both juvenile and adult.\u201d\u00a0 The ideal book draws our whole family together around it.\u00a0 Yes, it can be appreciated at different levels by different ages, but a book that is a classic cannot really be put into a single age group.\u00a0 It is a book which is loved by both young and old\u2014a book to be returned to again and again throughout one\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

I quite recognise the difficulties which this ideal book will need to face in pleasing so wide an audience at once.\u00a0 And for this reason our ideal story must be an engaging one.\u00a0 We want to go away from a chapter wondering what will happen in the next one.\u00a0 We want to be carried along from the first page to the last, in an easy, natural sequence, which does not let the story drag or halt, but flows along, making us more interested with each passage we read.\u00a0 Its pages may be divided into chapters\u2014we may go away, perhaps for twenty-four or forty-eight hours at a time\u2014but we are never allowed to forget about our characters, or the plot in which they move.<\/p>\n

By this I do not necessarily mean that the ideal novel is an out-and-out adventure.\u00a0 I have read a great many adventure novels, and I am willing to admit that on the whole this genre has a far higher percentage of engaging books than most others.\u00a0 But a novel that is purely adventure has a tendency to verge into sensationalism.\u00a0 Instead of reading for what the book is itself, we are reading for the thrill of suspense.\u00a0 This style may be harmless in small doses, but I do not think it is the ideal of writing.<\/p>\n

The ideal novel is a wholesome one\u2014and it is a realistic one.\u00a0 I was skimming a story in an old magazine recently, and I happened to come in for the denouement of a serial piece, in which the plot appeared to be the trouble which the heroine caused herself by imagining that all the events out of contemporary sensation novels were going to happen in real life.\u00a0 An interesting remark which the author made was that it is a mistake to put excessively improbable incidents into books set in modern times.\u00a0 They suggested that there have been times in the past when such adventures were<\/em> realistic.\u00a0 The story of the Apostle Paul comes to my mind.\u00a0 Paul escaped out of Damascus by being let down over the wall in a basket, he was nearly killed by the Jews in the temple and rescued by Roman soldiers, and then sent off by night so as to avoid a plot against his life.\u00a0 These things really happened, and it is not unreasonable for us to suppose that in writing fiction set in the last years of the Roman empire, our ideal book might easily make use of similar events.\u00a0 But they would not be fitting in the western world in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

This gives, of course, a more limited repertoire to the author who selects a peaceful time and place for the backdrop of his book, but then that is the reason that I admire so much the author who can make an engaging plot out of the events of common life.\u00a0 By this I do not mean that my ideal book is a hum-drum one.\u00a0 I have read books which contain precisely the same feeling of heroic, life-and-death importance as the most epic adventure, without employing a single event which might not have happened to any of us.<\/p>\n

And how do these authors accomplish this seeming impossibility?\u00a0 By making their drama lie not in the outside world, but within the characters themselves.<\/p>\n

Next week, we\u2019ll take a look at just what sort of characters can make an epic tale out of commonplace events.\u00a0 For now, I would love to hear what titles you love for their engaging style and their ability to delight the whole family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we lift the cover of our ideal book, what is the sort of story which meets our eyes?\u00a0 Perhaps the most comprehensive answer is, \u201cA delightful one.\u201d But what… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,17,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-and-great-books","category-great-books","category-ideal-book"],"yoast_head":"\n