On Reading

Some books, I'm talking about novels now, knock you off your feet in their own way. I'm reading one of them, title unimportant, I want to come back to this post 6 months, a year from now, not knowing what book it was.   How does he do that, I am asking, about the author's knack for constructing the narrative, so that it keeps the reader wanting more, always unsatisfied, always hungry.  And I'm not sure how to describe it.

More than anything, I am wondering at the make up of the narrative where the author announces some action, hints of it, and then leaves without explaining what happened next until much later.   That is the mystery to me of how he does it and gets away with it.   Not many writers do it, know how to do it  (I reckon).

From reading Amazon one star reviews I see that many readers hate this kind of narrative, are frustrated by it,  demanding straightforward stories which proceed from A to Z, with little if any ambiguity.  I'm not talking about the mystery genre either, which to me is still a straight through narrative most of the time, with a few easy to see though and digest tricks.

It's one of those things when you cannot say, oh, I see what he's doing here, and cannot think that you can do as well or better.   Although it sometimes looks easy, or gives the impression that the author was careless or forgetful,  I suspect that it took a lot of intricate effort to construct such complex stories.