Two Different Perspectives
Ron Charles, Book critic for the Washington Post, asked his Book Club members to describe to him what most annoy them in books. I list a few of them below:
–Dreams (Worked for Dickens and Shakespeare, but apparently many readers don’t like dream sequences.)
–Typos and grammatical errors
–Overused and pretentious words (lugubrious, lubricious and preternatural to name a few)
–Excessive length (Of books, paragraphs, description, etc. )
–Evaporation of quotation marks ( apparently Amor Towles did not use quotation marks in Lincoln Highway. I didn’t notice their absense so I obviously didn’t find it annoying.)
Taken from The Washington Post, February 8, 2023
Interestingly, writing for the lithub.com on February 12, 2023, Emily Temple gave equal time for books to tell what their pet peeves were.
Books do not like to be shelved spine in
Books do not like to be used as props in Instagram posts Who knew????
Books hate it when the reader points out their errors. Nobody’s perfect!
Books don’t like being left outside too long or getting sandy.
Books would rather you leave their jackets on.
Books don’t care if you actually finish them. They just don’t like for you to read the last page first.
The author of the article ends with this sentiment:
“Of course, books hate being banned, but books also know that the people who ban books aren’t actually readers, so that’s a complaint for a different list.”
People who aren’t actually readers shouldn’t have any say on banning books!
So true!!
Books don’t want you to put protective book covers on them unless, of course, it is paisley.
I had no idea about that one!