Meme: Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Bookish Pet Peeves

The meme Top Ten Tuesdays is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. If you want to see what irks other readers, go visit the mother site and click on some of the links to the other participating blogs.

I have so many bookish peeves that I decided to just pick a random sample of 10 from my long-list.

Movie covers on books. When a book has been adapted into a movie and they put the actors on the front to increase sales of the book.It rarely looks good and it spoils my perception of the characters - I like to imagine them myself rather than be told that this person looks like this actor, and so on, thank you very much.
Errors on book covers. Here is a doozy.
Too many spelling mistakes, typos and bad grammar. This makes me wonder if a book was self-published, or if both the editor and the proof-reader were having a bad day.
Too much information on the back cover - especially when an important plot twist is given away.
Perfect bound hardcovers. Why? The book will fall apart at the same speed as a softcover. Hardcovers should be stitched, because people don’t just buy them for the way they look on shelves, they also buy them in the expectation that they will last longer than paperbacks. It also means that if you want to re-bind a book, it is going to be very hard to do in such a way that you get a nice copy out of it.
Too many blurbs. Open any Nora Roberts novel and you will find at least three pages of them, not one which sheds any light on the book itself. A waste of trees if you ask me, since I don’t know anyone who actually reads them.
Authors who sprinkle their text with foreign words and phrases just because they can. I am still, after several years, annoyed with Lord Dunsany for a phrase in ancient Greek that he used in one of his short stories, which was supposed to shed light on a plot point. I haven’t found a translation of it either.
Factual errors of all kind, in books that are otherwise accurate. However, I do enjoy an alternative reality narrative, where an author speculates what could have happened if...
Dangling plot threads. Includes characters that disappear (or change names), side plots that aren’t resolved and questions that are left unanswered.
Infodumping. This includes both necessary information all given in one passage instead of being sprinkled throughout the narrative and too much unnecessary background information that bogs down the story with long passages that perhaps contain one or two snippets of information that is really important to the story while the rest is just stuffing. And authors: the long descriptions of weather and landscapes and the inner monologues are best left to the literary fiction crowd and out of genre novels.

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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