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 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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