Can I care about it?

This week I've read the third book in a fantasy series.  I read the first book back in 2014, and I have to confess I can't remember a word of it.  And that got me wondering what it is that makes a book memorable for me.  

First off, I'm not a fan of comedy.  The odd wry aside is okay, but 'comic' books often make me cringe.  I think that might be due to my quiet introvert nature, but the thought of going to a stand-up comedy gig is the very idea of torture for me.  The one big exception to that isTerry Pratchett, but his humour is often sly rather than slapstick.  And buried under the humour is always some deep observation about the nature of humans or the universe that can take your breath away with its profundity.

So, being a fairly serious person, I like my storytelling to be (mainly) serious.  And that includes the story idea.  If the story is based on a whimsical premise I'm going to have a hard time suspending disbelief and entering into the reader's contract to go along with the story .

That doesn't rule out fantasy, by the way.  Julie Kagawa's young adult Talon books are brilliant, with shape-changing dragons.  But what makes the series work for me is the ever-present threat of death the dragons face from the soldiers of St.George.  And here's where the fantasy gets serious.  The books become an exploration of prejudice, brainwashing, and entrenched politics.  And at is heart is a soldier of St. George who questions his programming and why things are like that.

Bcky Chambers' book A Closed and Common Orbit is at base about the search by two characters for their true identifies.  One is human, the other is a sentient AI.  And both have  pasts they need to transcend in order to truly flourish.  The philosophical and ethical observations in the book are what lift it from just another SF tale into something memorable and much more important.  The search for identity, and the prejudice around it, resonates with me, I guess because I've always resisted being turned in to what society wants me to be.

So I think that what makes me care about a book is that it's more than a story.  It has to pack some moral or philosophical punch, or to question why things are the way they are, to be truly memorable for me.