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.
I haven’t done a Top Ten Tuesday in a while. This week’s topic is Most Anticipated Books Releasing During the Second Half of 2023. Honestly, I have so many books on my library hold list that I will be reading library books for the next three months so I haven’t really thought about new books coming out. I looked through the Top Ten Tuesday topic archive and I found a topic from a couple of weeks ago that I decided to write about instead: things that make me instantly not want to read a book.
Here are ten things that make me instantly not want to read a book:
Sports. I know everyone loves a hockey romance but I have little interest in watching or reading about sports. Even if it is a romance, I can’t think of anything more boring than reading about sports.
Novellas. Unless there is something really compelling about a novella, I mostly find these stories too short to go into any character depth or plot. I’m left feeling like I’ve read half a story.
Love triangles. I’ve read a couple of books where the love triangle is really good and intricate. But too many times it seems like the triangle revolves around a girl who doesn’t know she is pretty and she can’t believe these two guys (who are usually a good guy and a bad guy) are into her.
Books with power imbalances. Most times I see these types of books in the romance section. These are books where one character is a billionaire and the other is their assistant, or it’s a teacher/student relationship or another type of employer/employee relationship. I just can’t get behind these books because of the inherent power imbalance between the characters.
Graphic novels. I’ve never been able to understand the format of reading these. Plus, I like to imagine the characters and places in my head instead of being told what they look like.
Retellings/adaptations. Some retellings/adaptations are great like Clueless or Bridget Jones’s Diary. But when the retelling is basically the same storyline as the original and all the character names are the same, I wonder where the creativity is.
First-person present tense. I find this so difficult to read.
It’s about Covid or has Covid references in it. I don’t need to be reminded of Covid and I prefer to believe that my characters live in perfect worlds. Reading about Covid (and other real-life events) take me out of novels.
Books by authors I dislike. If I’ve read more than one book by an author and didn’t like any of them, I reserve my right to give up on that author.
Bad covers. I’m sorry but I do judge books by their covers.
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