Tuesday Tea: What character from a book would you like to meet IRL?
Invite your favorite out of the page!
While thinking of our own answers to this question, we realized that — just as you can love visiting a place without wanting to live there — you can like a book’s characters without wanting to know them in real life. The snarky heroine is hilarious in print, but might grate in conversation. The dashing, ‘I live by my own code’ hero is irresistible in print, but may be wholly unreliable on a Tuesday afternoon.
Then, every once in a while, you spend time with a character between the pages of a book and think, ‘Too bad I can’t invite [character name] over for wine/coffee/popcorn/a boardgame.’
Dave’s says…
Gandalf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. I expect he would have some really good stories. We could eat honey-cake and smoke pipe-weed and talk about his long, long life. Then maybe the hobbits would come over!
Mel says…
I know everyone is probably expecting me to say Jane Eyre. I do love Jane, but she might be a bit of pill in real life, no? I’m going to cheat a little and choose two: Helen and Turgut Bora from The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Helen is brave, intelligent, worldly, multilingual, and stylish; plus, her somewhat prickly exterior slowly yields to a very tender heart. Turgut is the truest of friends, with an enormous spirit and unrelenting curiosity. I can’t think of two other people equally suited to drinking cold white wine on a hot day and going on a potentially perilous adventure. In my imagination, they look like this:
Inspector Gamache or Ruth Zardo from Louise Penny series.
I’m gonna lean into my fangirl side with this one and say Alex Claremont-Diaz from Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.
Did anyone else come up with a much longer list of characters they absolutely would not want to run into under any circumstances, or is that just me?