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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.

  1. 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.
  2. Errors on book covers. Here is a doozy.
  3. 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.
  4. Too much information on the back cover - especially when an important plot twist is given away.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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...
  9. Dangling plot threads. Includes characters that disappear (or change names), side plots that aren’t resolved and questions that are left unanswered.
  10. 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.

Comments

Very nice list. Lots of annoying problems in your list.

Here's my list of bookish peeves: http://readerbuzz.blogspot.com/2011/03/top-ten-bookish-peeves.html
Anonymous said…
Great list. I can't believe I didn't also list your #1. Too many blurbs is another one I wish I had thought of... :-)
Willa said…
Infodumping is such a pain!
Megan said…
Ooo, I forgot infodumping on my list, but that's a big one for me, too. Nothing jolts you out of a story like a paragraph long compilation of "necessary" information.

You know what else drives me crazy that your list reminded me of? Books with pages and pages of vague blurbs and *no* other information on the back cover, so you can't even tell *what* it's about when you're browsing bookstore shelves.
Bibliophile said…
Megan, I almost think no cover information is worse than too much.
Falaise said…
Completely agree with your list.
Sarah said…
Infodumping is a great one! Perfect example? The Historian. Liked the book overall, but the pages and pages of history were kind of a giant bore.
Geosi Reads said…
I also hate too may spelling mistakes in books. I love your list here.
Anonymous said…
Excellent list, I think just about everything on it is a peeve of mine as well! I especially dislike foreign characters who speak one out of every ten words in their native language for no apparent reason at all!
DJL said…
Totally agree with you on all points, especially your number 1. I cannot stand how the cover for Beastly looks on current editions. It totally distorts what actually happens in Kyle's transformation. Great, great list, and thank you for visiting! :D Happy reading!
Trish said…
Great list! As for #1, not only do I not like movie covers, I don't like real people on covers, period.

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