Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Pet Peeves

Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is bookish pet peeves! I’m not exactly sure what the requirements for “bookish” are, so I’m going to include pet peeves of story tropes as well as pet peeves as a reader. 

1) People constantly “just missing” each other.

I hate when characters are running in circles around one another’s general area but keep “just missing” one another by a few seconds. I always feel like it’s there to pad out the plot, and I hate it.

2) Multiple POVs in books with weak characters. 

I used to say that I hated multiple POVs in books because I couldn’t tell who was who. Now, I realize that was just because the characters were weak. They weren’t memorable so I couldn’t remember them. Now, I read better books with multiple POVs. I almost always remember who is who and I’ve come to enjoy them. 

3) Books that go out of print but aren’t available as ebooks. 

If a book goes out of print because it was published in the 80s and barely anyone reads it anymore, that is perfectly fine! But I hate when books go out of print and there’s no way to read them anymore. These books exist somewhere, why not just take the time to put them as an ebook for those who might be interested in reading them still. I hate that in 50-100 years there could be thousands of books from the 50s-early 2000s just gone permanently because no one took the time to make them into ebooks. Many books deserve to be preserved!

4) Ebooks with poor formatting. 

I feel the pain of bloggers that live outside the US, ebooks are so annoying. Especially advanced copy ebooks. It’s almost as if publishers don’t care about the quality of ARC ebooks sometimes. I try not to let that affect my review, but it’s so frustrating when the words are scattered across the page, letters are missing, paragraphs start and end all over the place, etc. I sometimes end up DNFing a book I may have enjoyed simply because the ebook is a pain to read, which isn’t fair to anyone. 

5) Bookstores that don’t give out bookmarks anymore. 

I loved the little custom bookmarks that bookstores would give out when you bought a copy of a book from them. I see bookstores doing it less and less, which saddens me. I can say that I personally never threw away one of those special bookmarks and would use them to mark my space in a variety of books!

6) Kindle ebooks that cost more than 10 dollars. 

Alright, this one may be controversial. I just don’t think that an ebook is worth the same amount of money as a paperback book. Indie authors rarely do this, you can find thousands of ebooks on Amazon by smaller authors for 5 dollars or less. That is undercharging a bit in my opinion (unless it’s a really short book) but it does help me to try a variety of new authors. Nevertheless, new ebooks are so expensive now! I wanted to buy a copy of Ember in the Ashes.The Kindle ebook was 10 dollars, and the paperback was 6! I thought ebooks were meant to be the cheaper and environmentally-friendly alternative to physical copies, but now they are nearly the same price if not more expensive???

7) Books with cover changes mid-series

This wasn’t even a pet peeve that was on my radar until ACOTAR. Heck, almost all my series look different from one another! I will get mass market paperbacks, hardcovers, full size paperbacks, special editions, and sit them next to one another on my bookshelf as a part of my collection. I do not care, I just enjoy having the books in whatever form I have them in. Then, I got to ACOTAR. I bought the whole series, almost all at full price from Amazon. I rarely buy books on Amazon and instead wait to find them at book sales, but I couldn’t help myself with this series. I couldn’t find them anywhere and I wanted copies of all the books! I also wanted them to somewhat match. I didn’t care if some were paperback vs hardcover, but I wanted them to all have the same theme. Since the book covers have changed since they originally came out, I cannot have that without buying a third party jacket on Etsy. 

ACOTAR is a paperback of the newer (uglier in my opinion) edition, ACOMAF is paperback and has the old design, ACOWAR has the old design in hardcover, ACOFAS has the old design in hardcover, and ACOSF only had the option for the uglier new design. I loved the series so I wanted to be able to display them nicely in my permanent collection, but now I’ll probably have to do some replacing or dust jacket hunting. 

8) Movie editions of book covers. 

I’m sorry, but i have never once wanted a movie edition of a book cover in my collection. I have quite a few as they are usually the ones to end up tossed to a used book store or thrift store, and I’m never one to pass up a bargain. But I never once looked at a movie cover of a book adn thought that I liked it more than the original cover. It’s a waste to reprint a bunch of books rather than just leaving the covers as is and allowing the current stock to sell as the book gets more popular. 

9) Stickers on the front of a book. 

I don’t know why booksellers still do this in 2021. It’s one of the main reasons why the only book I can remember ever buying at Walmart or Target was the Divergent Trilogy Box-set which was wrapped in plastic with a sticker on the outside of the plastic. These stickers are very, very hard to get off. They’ll stay on the book even as they pass from their original reader to a thrift store. I’ve found books in goodwill with the same 20% off sticker still attached! It wouldn’t take that much effort to just put the sticker on the back of the book, and it would save a lot of readers the heartache of a book with ugly sticker residue on the front cover. 

10) Love Triangles, especially 1 woman 2 men. 

I typically don’t like love triangles. They overcomplicate things, and since most books don’t have polyamorous characters, they usually end with someone getting hurt. When it is one man with two women, the man is usually looked at as a “player” of some sort or one of the women is just pushing herself onto the man even though he doesn’t like her at all. These types of love triangles usually end up with the “player” losing both women, or if it is the other case the “right” girl gets the man and the “bad” girl who was pushy gets pushed away. I don’t care really either way. But when it is a WOMAN with two men, things change. 

I see so many authors never make their female characters choose between men. She is usually just allowed to lead both men on until something happens and the choice is made for her. She never experiences any repercussions for totally playing these guys, even if she was deliberately going back and forth between them. Even if she was using one of them entirely, she’s never looked at as being the bad guy. Twilight, Hunger Games, The Selection, A Court of Thorns and Roses, are just a few I can list off the top of my head. Stop it. Stop writing love triangles PLEASE. Or at least make your female characters make the tough decision rather than just killing off or making one of the love interests “evil.”