Bookin Thru Thursday

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question is:
Suggested by Simon Thomas:

Have you ever been put off an author’s books after reading a biography of them? Or the reverse - a biography has made you love an author more?

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I usually don't read more than the blurb about the author on the cover of the book. Once in a while I'll read a biography, but I prefer memoirs above them.

To answer the question tho, I can't think that I would be put off by any information about an author. "Generally" that is-- there are always exceptions to the rule.

There is a book by Jim Trelease, the author of "The Read Aloud Handbook", in which he gives a very short story of various authors...to pique interest of adolescent readers, or non-readers, as the case may be.

I guess you could say that Treleases "bio" made me love him more, although he is not an novelist, but a champion of getting kids to love reading and raising children who read. The book I'm talking about is "Read All About it". I always thought it a good intro into the lives of authors, not only for teens and pre-teens, but for the rest of us who want to know just a little bit more, but not the whole story of an author's life. I've used the book for presentations I've had to give, book clubs and just because it interested me.

I hope that information about an author won't keep people away from a good book. I hope that people are more open-minded than that. But I hear about boycotts all the time, and it makes me mad, when people don't make up their minds by themselves. I don't like being told what to do by a "group". I knew a woman once who would go into the library and take a book she didn't agree with and move it...re-shelve it in another area. She would never steal a book, but she thought that by making it harder for others to find, she was doing a good thing. I'm getting off track here.

I might not like everything I find out about an author, and it might make me look at the book in a different way, but I don't think much could turn me off, if it were a good book.