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I'll occasionally do this for some authors, hopefully that's not too creepy. A lot of my favorite authors actually lived pretty interesting lives so far as I can tell. Which I guess shouldn't come as a surprise. Tolkien, Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, to name a few. It's interesting delving into their pasts to know where they got some of their ideas and inspiration from. I guess it's just interesting to me as an on/off creator myself.

Oh, I know it is both, but I assumed it was exclusively male.
Then again, in my language, names are either male or female. No name can be both.

It's both, see Robin Hood

Yes. I'm on mobile so won't link but she was not a good person

Nearly always, if I have the opportunity. Example: I've seen a few books by Lesley Blanch and have The Sabres of Paradise in a pile upstairs. Contemporary of Barbara Cartland writing about a 19th century Islamic revolutionary and Victorian sexual bohemians. Seeing a book written in an over-the-top style about such very exotic subjects, you want to know straight off, how did she come to do that? and did she know what she was talking about? The Wikipedia page isn't that great but it does say who she hung out with, which explains something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Blanch

The Sabres of Paradise reads like a novel but the biography makes it clear that it wasn't one.

Rarely.

I would like to publish some day also but to do that I need a finished work. I like to draw inspiration on the fact that these authors are not aliens from another planet but people like me with jobs and kids and who also write - except they kept on writing.

but your criticism that something is poorly written is not an objective fact.

raw chicken is consumed in some cultures, you can get raw chicken sushi in Japan. so yes if the coq au vin was from a fusion restaurant referencing a style of cooking from a culture you are not familiar with, you are not the target demographic and there is nothing wrong with your dish. similarly, if you find a bug in your food it might be because the restaurant is incorporating novel sources of protein.

back to my original comment. you might think the book sucks because you do not have the background knowledge needing to understand what the author is referencing. or the author could legitimately suck. barring some extreme cases, your opinion that something is terrible is not any more correct than another's opinion that something is awesome. that's how opinions work.

i read a lot of manga and manga artists will sometimes actually add a section at the end of each volume (or little sections between chapters) that tells them a bit about themselves. you don't tend to get any gritty details but thanks to it i know that the guy that writes PHD: phantasy degree is a huge gaming nerd that sometimes would have rather have just played fantasy video games all day instead if writing manga,the lady that writes tokyo mew mew likes to cosplay as her main character when she appears at cons and sometimes get's weird questions and the lady that writes emma: a victorian romance is such a huge maid nerd that she used the series as an excuse to take a trip to london for "research".

it's not a LOT of info but it does let you get to know them a little bit and creates a level of connection between author and reader that just wouldn't otherwise be there.

Nope. I have very little interest in the people behind the media I enjoy. I don't really care what my favourite musicians, authors, actors etc. do in their spare time. Never have.

I do, but honestly it's a double-edge sword. For every Douglas Adams that you find out spends (spent in his case) all his time and money pursuing noble causes and helping people, you'll have an Orson Scott Card who has turned into a diet-Rush Limbaugh.

not a complaint, but an observation

.. hi I never noticed this action verb without a conjunction thing before, and/but i now cannot unsee

OMG NEW POTENTIAL NERDY LANGUAGE BOOK PEEVE 🤩🤣🤪

Nah, I don't really care. There are a couple I happened to see/hear from more and I either like or dislike them, but it was never a choice I made, it just happened.

(I used to think Robin Hobb was a man. I don't really like her books at all, but for YEARS I assumed she was a man. Then again, I am not a native English speaker, so Robin sounded like a male name to me.)

As someone who reads a lot of literary fiction, memoirs, and classics, yeah.

Not every work is a reflection of the author, but a lot of the more personal work is informed by their experiences.

A good example of this outside the literary world is The Dark Tower by Stephen King, which started me on this path. You cannot understand The Dark Tower without coming to some understanding of Stephen King, because in many ways, The Dark Tower is a portrait of a man's interests, his personality, and his worldview across his entire life. Everything in the Dark Tower is informed by some aspect of King.

Death of the Author is a valid way of interpreting work, but it's not a hard and fast rule. It's just a school of thought for critique and interpretation, and it's not true for every work ever published. I'm not gonna look up the life story of Stephanie Meyer or the latest YA author writing average fantasy, but when it comes to Shirley Jackson, HP Lovecraft, and Oscar Wilde, knowing their real lives and stories makes their work feel more "complete."

loll don't take my word on it I'm hoity toitier than a lot of folks and everyone values different things in their reading. if you're in the market for some easy to read fantasy entertainment you'll probably get along with his books well enough and he's competent enough. just not my market

Yep! Generally I will read something or several somethings (short stories, novels, etc) by the author before I do though. What usually inspires me to look them up is noticing recurring patterns across different bodies of work. Sometimes I make some kind of guess about what reasons they could be interested in whatever it is, and then off I go to read more about them.

I have a lot of fun seeing what "theories" of mine have a tiny basis in reality!

Only when it's a non-fiction book, and I want to make sure the author is actually knowledgeable on the subject they're writing about.

It's better not to.

The work they wrote, and what they left behind is more important.

A lot of times it comes off that book fans seem to expect their fave authors to be paragons of virtue, and can be disappointed when they find out the TRUTH, or become very defensive (on behalf of a dead author) when others tell them that their fave media creator is actually a terrible human being.

Others find out that their fave authors, or artists, or filmmakers do what's generally considered immoral or harmful or incredibly racist/sexist things and even jump through hoops to JUSTIFY that. Like pulling anecdotes out of a hat: "Well XXXXX did that too and he's a great [whatever]." or "YYYYY did this and he's not constrained by traditional morality." So that leaves us to wonder about these defenders, "Well, if ZZZZZ doing that is OK with you because he's a great [occupation], what does that say about YOU? You'd do the same thing?"

In the end, it's up to individuals to decide whether they want to appreciate the work and ignore the moral failings of the creator, or to dump the works in the trash and not consume any more media because the creator had stepped WAY over the line. Personal and individual decision and I'd respect it either way.

What's not cool is "cancelling" or intimidating fans, reviewers, or buyers of a work or a derivative work and accusing them of the same sins that the author might have committed, and supporting the author's un-PC thoughts about current social issues. If you don't personally want to support AuthorX because of their stance on certain issues, then don't buy it. Just don't jump down the throats of people who do want to buy it. (ahem. >!Hogwart's Legacy Game!<)

Rhythm of War. He wants to start the book with another DBZ fight, fine. I know it's futile, it's too early in the book to beat the super strong enemy. Keep reading. An airship appears. Fine. He spends a while explaining exactly how it works (boring, removed me from the narrative) and it's just an absolutely terrible idea. The series was already on thin ice, but I hated this idea, it soured me on the book as a whole, and it was the final nail in the coffin for the series.

Rarely, and if so I usually just read over their Google bio blurb for the most basic overview of them.

When I read our book club selection, I or one of the others in the group will often look them up for more info on the book the they choices they made in writing it. This happens more with authors from different cultures & countries from us (United States.) For example, we read a book by a nonbinary author from Nigeria set in Nigeria & knowing a little of their background improved our discussion & comprehension of the story & the setting.

For my personal reading, I don't bother.

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Funny enough, I'm currently reading a Brandon Sanderson book. I don't hate it, but it's not the greatest sci-fi I've read, and certainly not the best YA. It's the Skyward series- and while I prefer adult books these days, it's nice to have an easy YA read.

I would say it follows unsurprising patterns- girl is special. Girl is angry at bad guys. Girl realizes the bad guys aren't really the bad guys- instead it's the government. Girl get friends to try to take down government with special abilities. So, not terrible- just nothing surprising yet. But if you're right about his other book- I think I'll keep it on my list of books to avoid.

(Although, I am on Skyward book two of three- I can't be sure if there's a twist or anything interesting. But one thing I am sure of is that those covers are really pretty- and the only reason I bought them in the first place)

And that was my point in the original post: it's not necessarily about liking or disliking a book, rather having a legitimate criticism of it (ie how competently it's written) invalidated because the subject matter may not be something that directly affected you, as a reader, in real life.

If we're going down food metaphors it's like ordering coq au vin in a restaurant, finding the chicken undercooked and badly prepared and being told 'You just don't like it because you're not French.' Maybe some people somewhere may like it that way- tastes are, after all subjective- but there's also a good chance the chef is shit and your legitimate critisisms shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because you don't fall into a particular demographic.

No , because honestly I don't care. What matters to me is their work, not them