Top Ten Tuesday #336

Hi all! I hope you’ve had a good week since my last post. My interview on Friday seemed to go well, so I’m just waiting to hear about the outcome of that now!

Anyway, as it’s Tuesday, I have another Top Ten Tuesday courtesy of Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is Bookish Pet Peeves, and as I did a topic revolving around my content pet peeves a few years ago, I’m taking a different tactic this time and talking about my Reader Frustrations (basically the same thing, but a different name!):

1. When people try and read over my shoulder

To be honest this is a general pet peeve of mine, even outside of reading but it especially annoys me when I’m trying to read. I want to concentrate on my book, not the person behind me and I find it really distracting when someone’s trying to read over my shoulder. If you want to know what my book is about, ask! Don’t hover behind me!

2. When people try and talk to me whilst reading

Okay, having said people should ask me what I’m reading rather than trying to read over my shoulder, I don’t really like it when anyone talks to me when I’m clearly reading! If I wanted to be chatting to you, I’d be talking. I really don’t like any kind of interruption when I’m trying to read, it breaks my flow, so I’d rather everyone around me just leave me alone when I have a book in my hands!

3. When book covers don’t match

AH THE BANE OF MY LIFE. THE MID-SERIES COVER CHANGE. Why do publishers do this to us? If you’re going to change the cover of a book that’s part of a series, at least wait till the series is over first! It spoils the look of the series on my shelf if half way through the cover (and therefore the spine) has changed and instead of a beautiful seamless transition from one book to the next, suddenly one sticks out as it obviously doesn’t have the same cover.

4. When my book series are in mismatching formats

This is kind of related to the one above, but I hate it when I find a series several years after the first book has come out, or after the movie adaptation has been made, and I end up getting the first or second book (occasionally both) in a different format to the rest of the series. This happened to me with the Bone Season series, where the first two books were only available in paperback and then the more recent releases have been released in hardcover. I wish publishers would stick with one format for the whole series, so that you were able to collect all the books in the same format no matter when you started (without having to wait a year for the paperback release) or didn’t take the hardback out of print so quickly!

5. Stickers on books, either the peel off or the printed on kind

I think all readers can agree on this one, stickers are the bane of our reading existence. The peel off ones always leave gross sticky residue no matter how carefully you peel them off, which ruins the look of the book. The printed on kind also spoil the aesthetic of the cover, and potentially cover up details of the cover as well. Basically no more stickers guys! WE HATE THEM.

6. When the hardcover is published first and you have to wait a year for the paperback

Whilst I’m sure we can all agree that hardcovers are very pretty, they are a little unwieldy and not massively convenient for reading on the move. I generally prefer reading paperbacks, but I have a lot of hardcovers because a lot of books these days seem to have the hardcover published first and I don’t want to wait a year to get the books I want. I wish paperbacks were either published at the same time so we had an option of which format we’d rather have (though I appreciate that would probably be very expensive) or at least that the gap between the hardcover and paperback release wasn’t so long!

7. Movie tie in covers-they’re just ugly and lead to mismatched series

Does anyone actually like movie tie in covers? I can’t think of any that I’ve really liked. In general, I don’t think movie posters make good book covers, and would be perfectly happy if movie posters just remained on buses or tube adverts, and didn’t make their way onto book covers.

8. That will I never have enough space for all my books

I’m sure this is a frustration for all readers, that we will never be able to fit all our books onto the shelf space that we have. My solution to this is generally doing an unhaul every so often, but I wish I had enough space to be able to keep all my books in one place!

9. That hardcovers are so expensive

I know I said before that I prefer paperbacks for ease of reading, and this is true, but there’s also the cost consideration of hardcovers. Hardcover books can cost anything from £15-£25 and that’s a lot of money! I appreciate that in the UK, books aren’t as expensive as in some other countries, but I wish that hardcovers were a little cheaper, especially as hardcovers generally get published first, if the book is going to be published in hardcover.

10. That book series don’t come with recaps in their sequels, so I’m just expected to either reread or remember what happened!

Publishers, Authors, I am begging you! PLEASE PUT RECAPS IN SEQUEL BOOKS. We readers read a lot of books every year, and it can be anything from a year to as much as three or four between sequels publication, depending on the author, so it would really, really, really, help us out if you included a little, this is what happened in the series so far…… page in the front of all your sequel books. If TV shows can do it for weekly TV episodes, you can definitely do it for yearly or more published sequels!

So there we go, my biggest reader frustrations! Do we share any? Any frustrations you have as a reader that I didn’t mention here? Let me know in the comments!

I’ll be back next Tuesday, and the topic this time is Favourite Book Settings. I’m going to go fairly general on this one and talk about the kinds of settings I like, rather than specific places from books, as I’ve definitely done quite a few topics talking about specific places from books I like before.