Character names in books & other silly thoughts

So, after struggling a bit to get into Blogger to write this, here's what's been rattling around my brain as the day begins. (note to self, blog more than once a week and you'll probably remember your login & password!). If I were writing a book, there would be freedom with the names of characters. They might be Hezekiah, Christopher-Robin, Adrianne, or anything at all. However, if I were reading a book ALOUD, the names I would choose would be more like Bob, Tom, Sue or Liz. How many times can you read the name Hezekiah aloud and not wish that it were shorter or easier to say? This thought process came about because of The Kite Runner, my current book on tape for the car. It was written by Khaled Hosseini, and the version I'm listening to is read by the author. That brings up another thought for another paragraph, an author reading his own work. But back to the thought at hand. The story begins in Afghanistan and the main characters at the beginning are Amir, his father whom he calls Baba, and their father and son servants Ali and Hassan. Not bad as far as reading names aloud repeatedly. But around the middle of the book he introduces other characters such as Amir's in-laws, whose names I won't attempt to spell and can't reproduce since it's a book on tape and the only way I know them is aurally. As Hosseini reads the book I can't help but wonder if he tires of rereading these more complex names. But then again, since they're foreign sounding to me but natural for him to read this might not be an issue. It just sparked the thought, since a lot of the books on CD, tape, or Playaway, and the downloadable type from the library website that I've listened to lately have been read by the author. You wonder if they reconsider any part of their work in light of reading it rather than the original writing of their thoughts.

Back to the idea that an author reading his or her own work sparked. It actually makes a book more enjoyable for me when the person who created it reads it aloud, rather than having a narrator do the honors. That's saying a lot, because most of the readers/narrators I've heard were excellent, smoothly changing voices for different characters and putting a great deal of passion and inflection into their reading. Having said that, somehow knowing that the author is reading his own work gives you peace of mind in knowing that things will be pronounced as they were written and that the text will have the emphasis the author intended. Who knows best how to speak a certain sentence than the person who created it? In the first few sentences of this blog a word is italicized and another written in caps in an attempt to get you, the reader, to hear the sentence in your mind the way it was intended to sound or to reproduce what I heard in my head when I wrote it. How much simpler would it be if I read you those sentences; you'd have no doubt about my point or emphasis. It's just clearer.

This brings me back to the original thought about the length and difficulty of pronounciation of names in literary works. (in non-fiction you're kind of stuck with the names a person's parents gave them and you don't get to choose). I read a book to a 5 year old yesterday and was very glad that the characters were "Fox", "Mole" and some nameless birds. It was a simple but interesting read, very open-ended so that you could interact with a child and get their ideas or thoughts on what was happening in the story as though it were happening to them. Fun. In contrast, I used to read the Little Golden Book Cheltenham's Party to my nieces and nephews when they were past the squirmy 'can't sit still for a book' age and before they got to the 'I can read it myself and I'd much rather go play a video game' stage. It was definitely a fun read but figuring out how to pronounce the names was a challenge! At some point you realize that A. the child being read to cannot read the name for themselves and B. even if they could they would be clueless as to how to pronounce it. This was very freeing. The story is about a cat whose 'people' go away, leaving him home alone for a day or two. He decides to have a party and the usual wildness ensues involving party activities and attempted cake baking (animals in the kitchen, oh my!). Of course Cheltenham's family returns from their trip early and we enjoy the fun chaos of speedily cleaning the mess and clearing the house of guests. It was an enjoyable read but had it been longer than Golden Book size it probably would have spent most of its time on the shelf. . . too many long and complex names to deal with in that one. When you're tired you'd rather deal with Spot, Jane, Sally, and their simple family dramas, unless of course you have to read "run, run, run" or "go Sally, go, go, go, go!" too many times. At that point you hand the book to the child to show off their reading skill, sit back, relax and enjoy the golden moment.

Will there ever be a time when I have to choose names in one of my books based on whether I'll be reading my creation aloud or whether people will be reading it for themselves? Wouldn't that be fun? ( just writing "one of my books" was fun!)