Six For Sunday – My Bookish Irritations and Dislikes

So it’s time for another Six For Sunday prompt from Steph, this week is all about our bookish hates. The prompt got me thinking hate is a pretty strong word and is there anything about books I really hate? Probably not, are there things that irritate me, absolutely! So that’s what I’m going with some things that irritate me, and some things that just aren’t for me when it comes to reading, in no particular order…

Six for Sunday is a weekly meme hosted by the lovely Steph at ALITTLEBUTALOT. You can find a list of prompts from January to June 2019 here

Bookish Hates

Plot Cheats!

So if you read last week’s post on my bookish loves you’ll know I’m a fan of a plot twist, I love it when I can’t predict the ending, when an author manages to completely blindside me with a twist – y’know the type the good guy actually isn’t such a good guy or where that person you’re utterly convinced is the murderer isn’t. What really irritates me though is when there’s absolutely nothing in the preceding pages that even vaguely hints at this, no small clue at all, then it just feels like the author is cheating and as we all know cheating is not okay…

Magical Realism

I love a bit of magic in a fantasy novel but I’ve read a couple of Magical Realism books and I just didn’t enjoy them. Maybe it was just the two books I picked up, but yeah it’s just not for me…

Dog Earred Books

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not someone who thinks a cracked spine is a crime punishable by death – although I’d never do it intentionally I think it can be a sign of a well loved book – on the other hand dog earred pages really annoy me, when I see someone folding over the corner of a page to mark their place I want to ask if they’ve never heard of a bookmark?! I mean I’ve been know to use a train ticket or receipt in a pinch, I’ve even typed the page number as a memo on my phone when I’ve had nothing else available! I had a new book delivered recently and the corner had been damaged in the packaging, that alone made me sad and it wasn’t intentional in the slightest!

Cover Changes

I read a lot of crime fiction and that’s the sort of genre that lends itself quite kindly to a book series, in particular quite long book series. For example James Oswald published his first Tony McLean book in 2012, the ninth in the series is published next month. Ian Rankin’s Rebus series currently consists of over 20 books. Now if I love a series I have no problem buying book after book as they are released but I can’t be the only one who would love for her books to line up neatly and match on the shelf?! So here’s my plea to whoever makes these decisions please stop changing the cover design part way through a series!

Admittedly it could all be a clever marketing ploy to get people like me to buy extra copies of a book so that they do all match still…

Pre-Order Incentives

Or more accurately the lack of pre-order incentives in the UK. I keep seeing all these wonderful pre-order incentives for US readers, beautiful book art postcards and prints, pins and even tote bags but I rarely see anything for UK readers. Admittedly just yesterday I saw Bloomsbury’s house badge incentive for pre-ordering the hardback house editions of HP & POA so maybe I’m just missing them all, am I just missing them all?!

Characters I Just Don’t Care About

Now I realise this is as subjective as it comes but if I don’t care about a character I’m not going to care about what happens to them. I can think of a few books I’ve read in the past year or so where the central character has been treated pretty terribly but there’s been nothing in the book to make me care about that character. I’m certainly not saying the characters deserved what happened to them but meh I just didn’t really care that it was, I wasn’t invested at all and it really ruined the book for me.

They were my #SixforSunday! Do any of my irritations make your list? Let me know in the comments! If you’ve taken part leave a link to your post below and I’ll be sure to check it out!