Top Ten Books Featuring Artistic Characters

Welcome back to another top ten tuesday hosted by the broke and the bookish. This week’s topic is Books featuring characters who …. so I chose to talk about artistic characters. This includes characters who are musicians, painters, actors, writers or otherwise involved in the arts.

Why did I choose this topic? Well I’m on holidays right now and I am trying to be more creative. I’ve recently started the first draft of my new novel idea, and I’m planning to get a bit of painting in before I have to go back to school.

I feel like I haven’t read many characters with artistic hobbies and I want to see if I can find some I might have forgotten about in the list of books I’ve read. Often in this logical and extroverted world hobbies that are creative and usually independent are overlooked or seen as less skillful, which is definitely not true.

Characters tend to only have hobbies that benefit the plot, so I struggled to find characters who fit this theme. Some of them are a bit more dubiously linked than others, but isn’t that always how these lists go?

now onto the list

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda

This book was full to the brim with artistic characters. A whole bunch of the characters are involved in a theater production as actors or creators which was really interesting to read about. Additionally there are quite a few characters in this book who are musicians and I love reading about musicians.

 

The Selection

Considering one of the castes in this world is for artists it figures that there are a bunch of artists in this story. America Singer’s whole family is involved in music or sketching or painting. Despite all that we don’t actually see much art happening which was kind of disappointing.

We Own the Sky

This is a book I was sent for review by the author, and I was really pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. You can read my review here, however the main concept of this book is that artistic abilities are enhanced by “muses” who was basically ghosts. And so it makes perfect sense that this book features a bunch of artistic characters. Our main character Sylvia is a musician as is her father and a bunch of her friends.

Gemina

The Illuminae files are a piece of art on their own, but one of my favorite parts of the second book was seeing sketches done by Hanna (one of our main characters). It was amazing to be able to actually see her drawings because of the format of the book and I feel like it really helped me get to know her as a person.

ACOTAR

This is one of the first characters I thought of when I decided on this topic. Our main character Feyre is a painter and I liked how this really added to her personality. We got to see her painting and talk about painting. Even the way she looked at the world in terms of colours and scenes reminded me of painting.

Fangirl

This book is popular primarily because of Cath’s writing. As a writer I love reading about characters who also write. This hobby was a major aspect of Cath’s personality which was really cool to see.  We get to read a bunch of her writing which adds a really different twist to the form of the novel.

Afterworlds

Like in Fangirl, the main character in Afterworlds is a writer and we get to read parts of her writing. This book was interesting because the chapters that were Darcy’s writing almost felt lower quality in terms of writing? Which would make sense because it was her first novel. The real world chapters of the book followed Darcy’s publishing journey which was really nice to read about as someone who would one day like to be published.

The Sun is Also A Star

I recently finished this book and I loved it. In this book one of the main characters Daniel is into writing poetry which was super interesting. It was a bit different and not something I had seen a bunch before in books. I like the idea of poetry but I have never really read much of it. I would like to read about more characters who write poetry.

The Raven Cycle

I’m starting to grasp at straws now, but surely Blue’s home made clothing counts as art? And she did DIY certain elements of her room (I think??). Plus Ronan is definitely creative with some of his skills. I think it counts. I like how unique the creativity in these books is, but it’s definitely there.

Code Name Verity

Okay this one is a shot in the dark, but Verity’s writing totally counts as an art form. I would say that her whole personality is very creative. The whole book is really. I actually loved how unique this book is.

are there any characters I missed? what did you choose to do for your topic?