Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by the Broke and the Bookish. Book bloggers create their own lists based on the chosen topics and post links to our lists. It’s a way of all sharing our thoughts and our love of books. And who doesn’t love lists??
So this week’s challenge was to list the ten things that are the biggest book turnoffs. I truly believe that people should read what they love and that there is really no “bad” reading. There aren’t many things that will stop me from reading a book; I read a lot of different things. But I do have preferences, and these are the things that turn me away from picking up a book.
- Ghost Writers – OK, you know who you are, there is no way that you write ten books a year and it makes me irritated when there are so many great authors working hard to get their books noticed.
- Gratuitous Sex – Some is OK, if it serves a purpose in the story, but I don’t want to read about sex just for the sake of reading about sex.
- Gratuitous Violence – See #2.
- Whiny or Weak Women – I hate whiny, needy woman characters – they make me want to shake them!
- Political Opinion – I don’t want to read a book that is spouting biased opinions wrapped in statistics molded to support those opinions. If I want that, I can turn on the news.
- Celebrity Life Stories – There are some celebrities have had genuinely interesting lives, but then I would read it because of the interesting aspects of their life, not because they’re a celebrity.
- Sports – Sorry, just not all that interested unless there is also a great personal story.
- Sci-Fi – In spite of my tech background it’s just not something that interests me.
- Trilogies – I’ve read a lot of them, but I keep saying that I’m not doing it again – at least until all the books are out and I’ve got a boring weekend in front of me – that way I can actually finish the story!
- World War II – I need to get over this one because there are some fantastic books in this area (Unbroken, Code Name Verity, Maus, …) It just seems that there are too many books on this subject, and they are always so difficult and depressing. This one is amusing because my favorite book of all time (The Book Thief in case I haven’t mentioned that!) takes place during WWII, but I also passed it by in the bookstore many, many times before I actually purchased it. I guess I’m fortunate that my bookishness outweighed my hesitancy about another WWII book!
Watching the Words 
We have some the same this week. I can’t stand weak female characters! I also don’t like sports or political opinions in books.
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Trilogies are way too common these days. It also seems like a lot of books began as standalones, but the writers were pressured by an agent or publisher into turning it into a trilogy. It’s one thing if you deliberately planned your story in three books, but not every story needs three books to be told. Maybe you only need two, or perhaps you want seven or eight.
Re: WWII books, I know I’m no one to talk, given that I do write about Europe and the American homefront, but I’d love to see more variety in this subgenre of historical fiction. It was a WORLD war, and included countries like Japan, Korea, China, Iran, Algeria, Iraq, Burma, and Armenia!
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