This week’s Booking Through Thursday is an interesting query.

If you’re anything like me, one of your favorite reasons to read is for the story. Not for the character development and interaction. Not because of the descriptive, emotive powers of the writer. Not because of deep, literary meaning hidden beneath layers of metaphor. (Even though those are all good things.) No … it’s because you want to know what happens next?

Or, um, is it just me?

For me, the characters are a key to the book, but if the book doesn’t leave me wondering what is going to happen next, I’m bound to set the book aside and just not bother with it again. Once in a while I’ll pick up a book that I wasn’t interested in the story for later on and try it again, but to be perfectly honest if the book’s story doesn’t grab me the second time, I’ll post it on PaperBackSwap or I’ll find some other way of passing the book along and be done with it. It really is mostly about the story line. If the story doesn’t keep my attention, if I don’t care what happens next, if I’m not excitedly going forward (in a mystery book) to see if I’m right about who did it, then I don’t bother with it.