I don't usually pick up on physical descriptions in books either, but the second I saw Rue on screen I was even sadder for her death. She is one of the cutest kids ever.

She is one of the cutest kids ever.

Yeah.

(Am sad now.)

Every time she was peeking out from behind something! So adorable.

Wow. I am disgusted by those twitterers.

The teenage girls that were at my showing were scary.

Totally going back in time, but I will never forget seeing Glory in a theater full of high school kids (we went for class) and the cheering was horrible. It is not awesome when someone's head gets blown off!

The flat-out racists are stomach-churningly horrible, but this comment on the Jezebel story just made me go, bzuh?

Am I the only one who doesn't assign a race to a character when reading a book? I mean, if the author states clearly that the character is, say, Indian, I will picture the character as Indian. Other than that, everyone is a race neutral character in my head.

I mean, when reading Harry Potter, I didn't even picture Cho Chang as Asian. I just don't think about race when reading books.

Entirely aside from the fact that in my mind this person sounds exactly like Stephen Colbert ("People tell me I'm white, and I take their word for it, because I don't see race"), it just feels so discouraging. Why the fuck even bother writing anything but a big long string of dialogue? Are there really and truly readers who don't just miss the nuances of extra descriptors, they regard them as pure filler and dump them down the memory hole as soon as they've passed across their eyeballs?

Writing long strings of dialogue would be fine with me...well, me and Elmore Leonard. I suspect everyone else would be slightly put out.(But you can still tell what race Elmore Leonard's people are, and which one will be Delroy Lindo in the adaptation so...) Somehow, I missed Katniss' olive skin, but I must confess that book bummed me out so maybe I wasn't careful about it.

I remember being flabbergasted many years ago when a quite prominent SF writer said in her writing process, most of her characters didn't have names. She just designated them as A, B, C etc.

really? Why? THat kind of just creates engines to move your plot, right?

I generally miss nuances of character description, unless it's a big deal, like someone gets rhapsodic over the color of someone's hair etc. The people in my head appear more as the shapes of their names rather than pictures of faces, ie, the shape of the word Katniss rather than a person.