Top 10 Tuesday: Bookish Pet Peeves

Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about bookish pet peeves!

This was a fun one! That being said, I did have a hard time coming up with ten. So, shout-out to my husband and my mom for helping me come up with a few more to complete my list! I definitely want to make it clear that these are my personal preferences, and I totally understand that these wouldn’t apply to everyone! They’re definitely not universal, but these are my top ten pet peeves related to books and/or reading!

1. Dog-earing Pages

If you’re reading your own book and this is how you prefer to mark your spot (rather than using a bookmark), that’s fine! You do you. However, if you’re borrowing one of my books, please do not do this. It physically pains me to see this done to my books.

2. When People Borrow My Books and Don’t Return Them

To be honest, this is more of a fear than a pet peeve. I don’t typically loan my books out because I’m so afraid of this happening (knowing how much it would bother me if it did). I’ll loan books to my parents because I know I’ll get them back (and that I’ll get them back in good condition), but otherwise I’m hesitant to loan out books.

3. Leaving Books Unfinished

This is one that I wish wasn’t a pet peeve of mine. I hate DNF’ing books, but honestly, sometimes it needs to be done. Life is too short to read books you don’t like. Part of the reason it’s so hard for me to not finish a book is because two of my all-time favorite books are books that I absolutely hated at first, but by the end they had made such a positive impact on me. So whenever I’m not liking a book, I always want to power through just in case it ends up being worth it. I hate to mark a book as DNF because I always have that nagging question in the back of my mind of “What if?” What if it got better? What if I could have learned something? That’s why I hate to do it, but I still do sometimes. It just takes a lot for me to quit a book because it’s one of my personal pet peeves!

4. Waiting for the Next Book in A Series When the Previous Book Ended on A Cliffhanger

This is another one like number two that I manage to avoid most of the time. I manage to avoid being annoyed by not having books returned to me by not loaning them out in the first place. I avoid this pet peeve by (usually) not starting a series unless all of the books have been released. It doesn’t bother me that the book itself ends on a cliffhanger, as they’re usually exciting! I just don’t like then having to wait an indefinite amount of time to find out what happens next.

One caveat: I do want to support authors as they’re publishing a series, so if there’s a series I’m excited to read, I often will buy the books as they come out and then wait to read them until they’re all out (as long as I’m relatively sure I’ll enjoy them). I recognize that if too many people waited to buy books in a series until they were all published, it might seem like people aren’t interested and the publishers might not want to continue publishing them. So I try to be considerate. I’m doing this right now with the new additions to the Uglies series. I loved the original four books, so I want to support Scott Westerfeld by buying and showing interest in the books. Although I am actually reading those as they come out (because I get so excited), and it’s been so difficult having to wait in between each one!

I also naturally avoid this one by having such a large backlog of books that I generally don’t read a lot of new releases anyway. By the time I get around to reading popular books, they aren’t as popular anymore. So if it’s a series I’m wanting to read, it’s often a series that been out for so long already that all of the books in the series have been published.

5. Bad Movie Adaptations

On the one hand, it’s pretty exciting when you find out one of your favorite books is getting made into a movie! It’s even more exciting when the movie does the book justice (even if it’s not as good as the book, because we all know it rarely is). However, it can be so disappointing to see one of your favorite stories being mistreated on the big screen. I remember going to see the Twilight movie when I was in 8th grade, and when I walked out of that theater I was so disappointed. But then again, seeing a movie like Catching Fire actually capture the greatness of the book was really exciting! Netflix is making Uglies into a movie soon, and as much as I love those books, I kind of wish it wasn’t being adapted for the big screen because I’m so worried it’ll be bad.

6. Men Who Can’t Write Female Characters/Objectifying Descriptions of Female Characters

I absolutely hate when women are poorly written by male authors (and sometimes by female authors as well). This is actually one of the things that can cause me to DNF a book, which I don’t do very often. I prefer reading books with complex female characters, and it really bothers me when female characters are mistreated in books. The worst incident of this that I’ve come across has been in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Though Planet of the Apes was pretty guilty of this as well. You can find my review of the former HERE and the latter HERE.

7. Movie Tie-In Covers

If I wanted a movie cover, I would buy the DVD of the movie. I don’t really have much of an explanation for this one, these kinds of covers just really bug me.

8. Good Books with Bad Endings

I feel like this one might be more universal than some of my other pet peeves. Isn’t it always such a bummer when you’re reading a book and loving it, and then the ending is so bad that it just ruins the whole thing?

9. Books that Don’t Live Up to the Hype

Similar to the previous pet peeve I listed, being disappointed by a book that you were expecting to like also really sucks. This happened to me with The Hating Game. It had so many good reviews and I had seen/heard so many people raving about it, but I just really didn’t enjoy it. And I felt so frustrated at the end because I stuck with it due to my stubborn hope that it was going to live up to the hype… But I ended up just feeling like I had wasted my time.

10. Stickers on Books

Why?? Why do some stores and publishers do this? I don’t need a permanent sticker on a book telling me that it’s 20% off or that it’s going to be made into a Netflix movie or something. If they were easy to remove that would be one thing, but they’re usually more-or-less permanent! Target is one of the worst offenders of this I’ve noticed. If it’s on sale, mark it on the back of the book or on the price tag on the shelf! Don’t put it directly on the cover. The worst is when they’re not actually stickers, but they’re printed directly onto the cover so that they’re definitely impossible to remove.

What are some of your bookish pet peeves?

Let me know in the comments!