Very short post on Imagination land

I've always been curious about this since it's different for everyone, but I wanted to pose the question anyway:

How do you read?

Ok so that wasn't a very clear question, what I mean is how do you bring characters and events to life as you're reading a book with no pictures? For me I can describe the process as I'm playing that scene or that character's conversation in the space behind my eyelids (possibly my brain). One would wonder though how I can pay attention to moving pictures while simultaneously reading letter (R - L or L - R) across a page? I don't know. It's a myestery. So I ask again, how do you read?

Also, say a character is introduced into the book with a minimalistic description (gender or skin color). Do you impose a certain race or other descriptive qualities to the character? For example, I'm currently reading the middle book, Linger, in Maggie Stiefvater's Werewolf Sam & grace trilogy (preceded by Shiver). While the main character, Sam, has been described with moppy dark hair and golden eyes my mind immediately pictured him and Grace to be a matched pair of blondes and this is how they stayed.

Image courtesy of arockridgelife.wordpress.com

While some authors take time to introduce a character's attributes and description, some authors such as When you Reach Me 's Rebecca Stead and Virginia Euwer Wolff's Make Lemondae Trilogy only provide one attribute, such as skin color, or none at all to be purposefully ambiguous. As a result, readers may try to "place a race" on the character, either for imagination or for curiousity's sake. I know I've read that Wolff purposely left her main character's race to be ambiguous because she didn't want it to control the transformation of her character (minority rags to riches story, if that makes sense). Readers made inferences anyway based on such details in the book as geographic location, dialect, etc. How do you feel about this practice in young adult and children's books? Does assigning a race to a character ultimately bring up particular stereotypes embedded in the reader's brain, much as my mind takes control over how a character physically appears despite what the author writes?

In the School Library Journal blog, I found an article entited, "When You Reach Me: The Race Card" that touches more on this subject:

"JULIA’S AMBIGUOUS RACIAL IDENTY

Julia’s skin color is described, but she’s never labeled racially or ethnically. She could be African American, but she could be Indian or Asian, too. Or biracial. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a similar technique employed by Virginia Euwer Wolf in the MAKE LEMONADE trilogy. It allows the reader to impose an ethnicity or racial identity on the character. We would generally recognize this as a strength, but there’s also a trade-off. Isn’t there also a generic quality to the character? One writer told me that, for example, when you set a book in the South, everybody knows that it’s hot and humid. What she looks for are the details in the setting that reveal a native understanding of the region. What are the details that would escape the notice of the casual visitor? Apply this to Julia’s characterization. She’s universal, but not very specific. Again, this is not a weakness of the book, generally speaking or in terms of the Newbery criteria, but it still left me wishing for those extra skillfully woven details. Another slight note of dissatisfaction."

I guess a point to take away from this discussion is that steroetypes have the ability to be changed or destroyed. So if we're dealing in the realm of fiction and not fantasy (where races are optional and as changeable as a pair of jeans), perhaps we can take comfort in this fact that even the reader's stereotypes of particular characters can be changed through reading books such as Stead's and Wollf's.