top ten tuesday: bookish pet peeves.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This week’s topic is bookish pet peeves. I previously wrote about some of my book confessions here. Here are some more of my bookish pet peeves:

1. Love triangles. It’s not that I hate love triangles; I’ve read a couple of books that have love triangles in them that are really great. It’s that it seems like in the past 10 years that every love triangle is a YA book where the heroine thinks she’s boring and not attractive and then all of sudden she has two guys after her and one guy is good and one guy is bad and who is she going to choose??? Those stories are just not for me.

2. Movie/tv adaption book covers. iI’s such a bummer when you pick up a book you want to read only to see some actor/actress’s face on the cover because they were in the adaption of the book. Sorry, I don’t want to read a book that has a huge photo of Elijah Wood on the cover (nothing against Elijah Wood), mainly because I don’t want anything to influence how I see the characters in my mind.

3. Books with deckled edges. I understand these books look pretty and old-fashioned and actually help to preserve book pages but they are so difficult to read. It is so hard to turn the page when the page has a deckled edge.

4. When a book has no synopsis on the back. Some publishers will just include a bunch of reviews of the book on the back cover instead of the blurb. I don’t need to know or care what some book reviewer thought of this book. What I need to know is what is the book about!

5. Dust jackets on hardback books. I never know what to do with the dust jackets while I’m reading. Do I take them off or leave them on? If I leave them on, then most of the time they slide off the book while I’m reading and they just get in the way. I’m trying to hold the book open to read but I also have to hold onto the dust jacket so it doesn’t slide around or rip or get bent. I do like to use the inside flap of dust jackets as a bookmarker so I guess they’re not all bad.

6. Stickers on the front of book covers. It drives me crazy when you have a nice book cover and it gets ruined because there is a big 20% off sticker on it or a sticker telling you the book is part of some random celebrity’s book club. And then you try to take the sticker off and either the sticker doesn’t come off all the way or it leaves a sticky residue. It’s just not good.

7. Movie adaptions with plot deviations. Why can’t movies follow the plot of the book it’s based on? Obviously, the plot is good otherwise, it would not be made into a movie so why would you go and change the plot? I understand changing small things or taking some things out because of time considerations but when you change a huge plot point, what is the point?

8. People who bend the spine of paperbacks. I cringe whenever I see someone bending the spine of a paperback book. The front cover and back cover should never touch! I also get annoyed when the spine is so broken that you can’t even read the book title or author.

9. Mismatched series covers. Why do publishers change book covers in the middle of a series? Why can’t I have all the covers match? What is the reasoning behind this?

10. Finally, it drives me crazy when the author doesn’t tell you that a book is part of a series. Or if a book is part of a series, the author doesn’t tell you how many books will be in the series. Series are fine but I just like to be prepared and know what I’m getting into. I hate it when you are into a book and you get to the end only to find out that you need to read the next three books to find out what happens. Or when you think you are reading a three-book series only to out that the author has decided to stretch it out into a five-book series.