Take note of how a book sounds on the page

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently on specific book reviews, so this week I’m taking a slight break from analyzing individual works to focus on larger aspects of literature in the form of a couple of my favorite writing tools. And by tools I don’t mean a special keyboard or favorite set of pens: I’m talking about a couple of aspects of language use that I find to be particularly engaging when used effectively in fiction.
The first is accurate use of sound effects. I’m well aware that reading is commonly a silent activity, and I don’t expect a book to jump up and start talking, although my love for audiobooks is no secret. In this case, though, I’m talking about the way an author can use the combined sounds of the words in any given description to bring the auditory details of those circumstances to mind.
Sometimes this takes the form of direct onomatopoeia like pop! or bang! – words designed to sound like the thing they’re describing. But I’m a fan of more subtle sound effects: creative use of consonance or assonance, certain repetitions of phonemes or syllables, all directed toward the end goal of making a sentence or paragraph sound like the things it’s describing, whether I’m reading it aloud or just hearing it in my head.
I’m especially impressed when an author manages to work things into this effect that aren’t explicitly part of the description at hand. An author might talk about the details of a room, for example, using colors or shapes that actually apply to the human inhabitants of the scene as well. In any case, there are plenty of specific ways to go about this, and I don’t have room for as many examples as I’d need, but I often like descriptive work in fiction when it’s indirect and pervasive enough to go almost unnoticed.
A second favorite literary trick is somewhat related in method if not in end result: I like the timing of a writer’s style to follow the action (or lack thereof) in a scene. If something fast and flashy is happening, I like sentence structure and vocabulary choice to follow this. Likewise for slower descriptions or broader exopsition. Once again, there are countless ways that this manifests, but an easy example to explain happens in dialogue. If there’s a pause in dialogue, I like to have something occupying it: the longer the break in discussion, the more words I’ll need to read to get a realistic feel for how far that silence is stretching. Or, conversely, too much extraneous description mid-conversation can ruin a scene to me in ways that few other things can.
This doesn’t apply exclusively to dialogue, of course. I like any action or pause or moment of introspection to have an almost physical sense of timing to it, and this, paired with my weird obsession over non-literal sound effects, colors my literary preferences in more ways than I can count.