Eurydice (eurydice72) wrote,
Eurydice
eurydice72

Where I ruminate too long about my reading likes/dislikes

As I get close to the end of my ljbookbingo, I thought I'd give some random observations about what I choose to buy, why I DNF certain books, and why I can't stick to a single genre.

1. I probably average out buying/getting a book a day. I hit B&N every couple of weeks, I check older titles out of the library (both print and ebook), I follow BookBub for regular deals at Amazon, and I check out a used book place for things I can't find otherwise. If I can, I also almost always defer shipping on our Amazon Prime to get credit for ebooks.

2. 95% of the time, I pay no attention to covers. I read blurbs and reviews on every title I look up. I may not remember the blurb when I finally get around to reading it, but I only impulse shop when I'm feeling lazy at B&N. Even there, most of the time I'll whip my phone out and check reviews on something if it catches my attention.

3. I am not a single genre reader. I get bored. Certain genres are much harder sells than others, however.

4. Because my TBR pile is so large (currently 857 print books and 302 ebooks), I look for every reason NOT to buy a book. It's why reviews are important to me. I know what I have low tolerance on, so if there's even a whiff of it, I say no.

5. I never even finish blurbs that are written in first person unless it's urban fantasy (since that's genre-expected). It's become a wider trend in romance because of a few incredibly popular authors, and I hate it. Now, it seems I mostly find it in self-pubbed books. It smacks of author insertion to me. That doesn't mean I don't read 1st person POV. I actually love it. But for me, that's not what a blurb is, and because I've seen the trend rise in self-published authors (and my experience has been that the greater proportion of self-pubbed romance authors lack respect for the process, including editing, which drastically lowers my respect for them), I tend to use it as a guideline to not take the book or author seriously.

6. Other things that pull me out of a blurb a lot of the time:
- mate (using mates as a way of putting characters together feels lazy to me)
- fae/fairy (really not a fan of the word games that typify most fairy stories, plus the magic-building always feels fuzzy and too fluid)
- too many indecipherable fantasy names (I can do it once in a story, but a blurb is supposed to short and succinct, to entice you into reading the book, not a summary)
- professional sports (don't follow, not interested)
- main characters that are writers (feels like author insertion again)
- anything regarding conflicts in the Middle East (hits too close to current politics, it's already a tense/difficult situation to understand, plus way too gray about good/bad sides to make me enjoy the reading experience)
- child abuse/death/abduction (hits too close to home)
- stories set in Australia (I have no logical reason for this; I only noticed it recently but I almost always dismiss stories if I see that they're set there; I'm weird)
- stories that claim to be a retelling of any Jane Austen title (very much not an Austen fan and this is WAY overdone)
- blurbs that have a dozen reviews before I even get to the actual blurb (I just want to shout at authors who do this to stop trying so hard to convince me their book is great)
- if a time travel book is set in Scotland (seriously, Diana Gabaldon has screwed over those of us who love time travel romances because so many authors write nothing but Outlander rip-offs anymore)

7. I have almost zero tolerance for head-hopping. It's one reason why I can't read my early work. I just put down a mystery by an author I've enjoyed before when I was almost a third of the way through the book just because in a single scene, she suddenly head-hopped between two characters for three pages. She hadn't done it for over a hundred pages or in any of the other books by her I've read. Why on earth didn't somebody catch this before? Inconsistencies shatter my trust.

8. I cannot read a book in the middle of a series if I haven't read everything that's come before it, even if it's only #2.

9. I don't read anything overtly Christian. I grew up Lutheran, but as an adult, I consider myself a humanist. I absolutely loathe being preached at, and books where Christianity is a featured part automatically raise my hackles. I once had to pass on a book I'd been assigned for an award competition after only one page, because the heroine was sitting and reading a bible as she waited for a date. I knew even after one page I wouldn't be able to be a fair judge, and the author deserved better than that.
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