What has author done to engage you, the reader, in a relationship with the books content?

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are hilarious together. They make characters that are believable, and the tone of the entire book is really funny. The conversations the characters have with each other are spoken in ways that are very easily imagined because they are so true to the way the characters have been set up to interact. Not only that, but the conversations like normal conversations that people have. I don't know if you feel the same, but I've noticed that conversations in many books are slightly different stylistically than conversations in everyday life. If interactions between people in the real world were recorded in books, they would be much different from what we have in literature. People in literature rarely ever mishear each other. There are never simple misunderstandings where Person A thinks that Person B said C, but really Person B said E, and Person A argues that Person B actually did say C, and it just goes on and on and can never be resolved. And this makes sense, its confusing to participate in these conversations, confusing to witness them, and it would be even more confusing to read about them without the benefit of body language or tone. But somehow Pratchett and Gaiman have successfully created realistic conversations between their characters that are simply hilarious and also believable.

In some books I have read, characters mush together in my head. The author's tone of voice shows through so much in their characters that the characters, instead of being their own entities, are merely different facets of the author's personality. Pratchett and Gaiman, perhaps because they are in fact two people rather than one, don't have this problem. Each character has their own specific tone of voice and personality that make their dialogue easily distinguishable from the others.