Top 5 Character-Driven Novels

Welcome back to Top 5 Tuesday! You’ll notice that I haven’t been the best at keeping up with these lately. Mostly because I work on these when I don’t actually have access to my bookshelves, and my GoodReads is so far out of date it’s laughable. (And I don’t have the time at the moment to go through all of my shelves and update it.)

This week’s topic is Top 5 Character-Driven Novels, brought to you by Shanah @ Bionic Book Worm. I will admit that I’m not particularly sure how many of the books I’ve read count as “character-driven,” but I’m going to give it a shot! (Spoiler Alert: I Googled “Character-Driven Books” and looked through lists to find ones that I know I’ve read and enjoyed.)

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I will find a way to put this on every single Top 5 Tuesday list, I swear. It is the ultimate character-driven book. It has a plot, true, but the way it’s structured and designed is to make you care about the characters you’re reading about. You want to see Rudy turning himself black with charcoal and running like Jesse Owens. You want to see Liesel becoming the Book Thief. You want to listen to everything that’s going on. And you are going to be devastated by the ending, no matter how many times you’ve read it.

The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

I reviewed this novel a few weeks ago, and I will say that it’s certainly character-driven. While it does have a plot, it sort of fades into the background. You want to know what will happen to each of these characters. Every single one of them was depending on a large chunk of the family fortune (their “nest egg,” so to speak, ringing in at $250,000 apiece) to get out of their debts and straighten their lives out. When their brother’s scandal comes to light, he gets the majority of the fortune to help him out of it, leaving the other three siblings with about $2,500 apiece. The book follows each character through their ups and downs, and while the ending isn’t what I wanted, I still enjoyed the journey. The characters are memorable, too.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

There are so many characters in this series that I don’t even know where to begin. As the story develops, the characters grow and change in ways you don’t ever think they will. You’ve got Sansa Stark, who starts out as this bratty and spoiled princess-y type and ends up being a badass on her own right. You’ve got the Queen of Dragons, who was originally a twelve-year-old child sold by her brother to be the Khaleesi of a warrior tribe who roams the plains. Each character has an intricate backstory, and while there aren’t quite as many characters now as there were in the beginning of the series, they still each have their own goals and ways of working in this world. I’m hoping the final books come out soon, because I want this series to be finished by Martin and not someone else, like the way the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan was finished by Brian Sanderson.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I know that this is the book that’s the bane of most high school sophomores’ existence, but I really enjoyed the novel. Not in high school, of course, but later on. Not much happens over the course of the novel, because everyone is too concerned with throwing parties and getting ahead in their lives. I almost wish Gatsby had survived, and we could have seen what happened to him after the stock market crash of 1929. Now that would be an alternate ending I’d like to see!

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I received this book as a Secret Santa gift a few years back, and admittedly it took me a while to get into it. It was a bit of a struggle to get through in its entirety, but once I finished, I really enjoyed it. Would I go back and read it again? I’m not so sure at this moment. I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but now that the plot twists have been revealed to me, I might wait a few more years until I’ve forgotten everything about it. It’s hard for me to describe exactly what went on in this book, because there’s so much to it, but it’s safe to say that the characters are what shine in this book. (That may be why I had so much trouble — it’s hard to follow the plot.)

This particular T5T was a lot harder to write than I thought. I struggled with the last two books, and it took a lot of searching through my GoodReads and searching through pages of “Character-Driven Books” on Google in order to figure out things that I read and enjoyed. There were a lot of books listed that I have read, but not all that many that I’ve enjoyed. Crime and Punishment, anyone? Sense & Sensibility? No thank you. I considered putting Northanger Abbey on here, but I’m not particular sure if that counts as a character-driven novel, so I’m going to leave it out of the main list and just mention it here.

Exciting things are coming in the future, though! I’m going to be updating my dividers on my page, because I’m not the biggest fan of the one I currently have. I’m also going to attempt to go back and replace images in previous posts (although whether I actually do that or not is still up for debate). I want to get back into writing more each day, but it all depends on how much time I end up with.

What are your favorite character-driven novels? Do you have any suggestions for me, or for my blog in general? Let me know in the comments!

And as always, keep reading.