There was not much overlap among the lists, yet each topic or quality seems like something that ought to generate a comfortable market niche for a book that does it well...I've never kept rabbits or known one well. People who live with rabbits bond with them. Show me how! Tell me why!
And, protagonists with chronic medical conditions whose diagnosis is not the main story of their books? The reason why I've not written fiction about celiacs fighting crime is that that storyline is tediously close to my real life. I'm a celiac. I fight crime. And the occasional fire. It'd be fun to read about other people like me, if writers have ever known any of us. We are a minority, even in Ireland, but we do exist.
And here are ten more things I'd like to see more of in books...with a bonus: at least one book that contains a good example.
1. You can't have too many self-accepting introverts who've bonded with one another as friends in our own way. Stories about how people grew out of wanting to be extroverts, preferably before grade ten but college is tolerable, are all right as far as they go. Stories about how we live our lives, our own way, are even better. We could use more novels like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin and Juniper Gentian and Rosemary.
2. Otoh there aren't a lot of extroverts who are worth reading about, except in biographies of the ones who became heads of state or billionnaires, and even then they're not nearly as interesting as they think they are. But children's and teens' stories about how extroverts learn to control themselves and be less tedious to others might be good. I think that's the redeeming quality that makes Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl more than a teenager's view of an unpleasant part of history. Probably Anne would rather have been giggling and squealing with other kids or examining her pores in the mirror, but, when forced to sit down and write something of historical interest, she became a much nicer girl--and wrote one of the best historical diaries ever written. With lots of help from grown-ups, how not. Still.
3. Most cats, like the one in Edward Eager's Half Magic, have nothing to say and don't need to be enchanted into saying it. Still, humans reveal a lot about their characters through their interactions with cats. I can certainly relate to a romance where the girl reconsiders her relationship with Terribly Attractive Ted when her cat, who is usually shy and occasionally friendly, spits at him. That smart animal knows something about Ted that's not become manifest in ways humans can rationally understand yet. It will. She should start appreciating Not So Terrible Ned now.
4. Before I started this post, the last book I laid impatiently aside contained a scene where the young man serves the young woman, whom he's just met and not consulted about the matter, a croissant filled with roast beef and cheese. Hello? Does this writer have any idea how many readers are disgusted by the croissant, the beef, the cheese, the combination, or all of the above? Maybe if that boy had admitted, "That was a test. It's so unusual to find someone who shares all of my minority food tolerances," the scene would seem less icky to me. More fictional characters should hate cheese, or at least know how to cook without it. More should think of alcohol as strictly a cleaning product. Everyone should know enough to ask before offering anyone meat, wheat, sugar, any dairy product, anything containing alcohol--or, considering how many people need to lose weight, anything to eat or drink at all. Eating a restricted diet doesn't make a character Sloane Miller, Allergic Girl. It's mainstream. Asking people what they eat before we poke food at them is normal and polite.
5. Romance is fun, but so are stories where protagonists stay single and live happily ever after. A real triumph of the writer's art is being able to write about characters who are definitely very close, fighting fires or constructing languages or working on urban missions together, and who are interesting and believable enough that readers wonder whether they're having sex with each other (or would like to be) or value their friendship more because it's sex-free...and readers are never actually told. Much of the appeal of Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue is that most readers like Nazareth and Michaela more than they like most fictional characters, and one set of readers is convinced that they're a lesbian couple, and another set is convinced that they're not. I like the boldness of the story being written with discretion.
6. Nonconformists of all kinds. Protagonists who don't have television sets, or cars, or computers--or want them. People who patch together ways to get an education without taking out a loan. People who don't seriously claim to have cryptids as friends, but find cryptids more believable than the transhumanists' crazy fantasies. I've burned once popular novels in which very young girls seduce older men, but I'm willing to forgive Piers Anthony's Shade of the Tree for having a sixteen-year-old girl be Ms Right for a full-grown man because Brenna and, even more, Josh are such terrific examples of nonconformism. I prefer frugal nonconformists to extravagant ones, radically religious ones to reactionary atheists, but I'll take what I can get.
7. The whole idea of preserving personal independence by doing without all those "benefits" that have all those strings attached to them. Characters who simply happen to have inherited a lot of money, or even "earned" a lot from one lucky break, are acceptable. Characters who launch businesses without taking out loans are more interesting. I love the quiet, patient, persistent way Alice Walker's characters in The Color Purple refuse to be victims of Socialist Realism, but start making and selling something useful, being good capitalists in spite of their author's politics.
8. Realistic contemporary books, fiction or nonfiction, from countries other than the US and UK. There's ample room for better books about the countries from which most literature in English comes, but there's a real need for books about other places. How do the rest of the world know how much needs to be explained to US and UK readers? Try us and see. Good readers have learned something every year that we didn't know last year. Every single reader is not going to have a friend who makes them want to read books from their friend's country and let their friend explain things to them, but these days most universities seem to be actively working to give every student that experience. I have a particular thing for books that can be read side by side in the original French or Spanish and an English translation. I liked Hanan Habibzai's Between the Bear and the Lioness, and Dodzi Amemado's Surfing the Unknown, and Edward Aaron Mugabi's Thorns and Roses, too.
9. Animals, big or small, tame or wild, just doing their thing. I never actually brought myself to read an entire novel about anthropomorphic cockroaches when the library had a copy, but I did read Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel and I once read a novel about anthropomorphic moles. I like realistic animals that just wander through stories about humans in a natural way, too, like the dog in Hazel Smith's "Maid Ivy" mysteries, or the dog in the Little House on the Prairie books, or the butterfly Patrick Pennington watches to relax on his lunch break in K.M. Peyton's Penn's Last Term (aka: Pennington's Seventeenth Summer). The animals don't have to be the stars of the stories; sometimes all they do is make a nature scene more lifelike. I like human characters who notice, recognize, and appreciate the animals.
10. Stories about what people do when they realize that jobs that sounded like great opportunities to monetize their talents are being used for destructive purposes--not merely selfish, but positively harmful to others. I loved Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats, where the goal is to portray beef and the beef industry in favorable ways through interviews with real people, but every look at those people shows how much harm the beef industry is doing them. I liked Hunter Chadwick's The Agency--DDD Inc., where the computer wizard realizes he's being paid to keep people making bad choices. I'd like to see more writers' reflections, over a reasonably long time, about how they've reacted when they realized their jobs did not qualify as Right Employment for them...fiction or memoirs.
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