Unlike most tags, there are no rules about thanking people or tagging people. If you want to fill it out, you can! If you don't, then don't!
Reading the Last Page First -- OUT. I can only remember doing this once, and it was for And Now Tomorrow by Rachel Field. I did it that time because the first section of the book made it sound like the book was going to end differently than the 1944 movie, and I adore the 1944 movie, so I had to find out if it ended the same way or not. Because, if it didn't, I wasn't going to bother reading the whole book. But it does, so I did read it. And loved it.
Ordinarily, though, I don't want to ruin the flow of a story by reading the ending first.
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| (Bwahaha! I snuck an Alan Ladd picture in here!) |
Enemies to Lovers -- IN. It's not my favorite trope, but I love books like Pride and Prejudice, North and South, and the Anne of Green Gables books a lot, and they all use this, so I'm fine with it.
Dream Sequences -- IN. Sometimes, I don't even mind "it was all a dream."
Love Triangles -- IN. They're a classic. I've even used them myself, like in My Rock and My Refuge.
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| (This and all the following book photos are mine from my Instagram account.) |
Cracked Spines -- OUT. OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT. My mother gave me a boxed set of four Jane Austen novels for my birthday when I was in my upper teens. Then she borrowed them each in turn to read herself and absolutely destroyed their spines. Not only did they no longer fit in the slipcover, you couldn't even read the titles on the spines. They made me sad every time I looked at them, and I eventually gave them away. I still have my original Anne of Green Gables paperbacks that my mom also ruined that way, but my grandma gave me those, so I keep them anyway.
Now, a caveat to all that, though -- if I'm buying a used copy of a vintage paperback, like a Louis L'Amour or a Rex Stout or something like that, I am super fine with the book looking like it lived in someone's back pocket for weeks on end fifty years ago. In fact, I prefer those to shiny, new copies for specific genres and authors. But I WILL NOT contribute MORE crackage to their spines. And I prefer them not to be so cracked that I can't read the title anymore.
Back to My Small Town -- IN. Although "someone new comes to town, and everything changes" is my favorite trope, I also love "someone comes back home, and everything changes." Probably my favorite versions of that are the book The Count of Monte Cristo and movie The Lone Ranger (2013).
No Paragraph Breaks -- OUT. Also, ew. Also, I don't think I've ever read a book like that, but I'm against it on principle.
Multi-generational Sagas -- IN. I mean, I'm embarking on a quest to read all of the Sackett novels by Louis L'Amour this year, so I'm obviously a fan, right? Also, I love historical fiction, and that sort of thing generally involves lots of history.
Monsters Are Regular People -- OUT if you mean horrific villains are portrayed as normal and acceptable. IN if you mean stories where vampires just wanna make friends and hold down a job. Angel (1999-2004) is my second-favorite TV show of all time, after all.
Re-Reading -- IN. I reread a LOT. I've estimated that 1 out of 4 books I read is a reread, usually. This past year, it was closer to 1 in 3 -- I read 103 books, and 29 were rereads.
Artificial Intelligence -- OUT. I don't read much sci-fi, and I just am not a fan of sentient robots in general.
Drop Caps -- IN. They usually look amazing.
Happy Endings -- IN. I LOVE happy endings!!!
Plot Points That Only Converge at the End -- IN, as long as the book isn't too long. I must admit, I've never read a book by Tom Clancy because I've heard so many people talk about how he'll start like eight little plots going and you never find out how they're related until the very end, and that does sound kind of daunting to keep straight. But J. K. Rowling did the same thing over the course of the Harry Potter series, really, and I loved that. So... I'm not against it, anyway.
Detailed Magic Systems -- IN if I don't have to read all the details. Out if the book is basically a travelogue about a fictional world. This is part of why I don't read a ton of fantasy and sci-fi. Descriptions of places and how things work bore me, and if that's the bulk of your first few chapters, I'm outta here.
Classic Fantasy Races -- IN. The fantasy I do dig, such as The Lord of the Rings and Eragon and Harry Potter, all use classic things like unicorns and elves and dwarves and centaurs and dragons.
Unreliable Narrators -- OUT. I am not a fan. I want to trust the narrator to tell me what's going on. If I can't, I'm probably going to dislike the book.
Evil Protagonists -- OUT. One of the things I demand from fiction is that it restore moral balance by the end of the book. Also, if the protag is evil, I'm really not going to want to like them. And if I don't like the protag, and they either have to face dire consequences or will get away with being evil... why would I want to read that? Why???
The Chosen One -- IN. Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Eragon, the Pevensie kids... I'm totally a fan.
When the Protagonist Dies -- IN and OUT. Ordinarily, I hate it. I want my happy ending. Buuuuuuut... Hamlet dies. And I adore Hamlet. I can be okay with protag death if that still results in a good ending.
Really Long Chapters -- IN, I guess? I don't care, when I read. I tend to write short chapters, though.
French Flaps -- OUT just because I don't really have any books with them and they seem annoying. I had to look up what they are, though.
Deckled Edges -- IN. I am a very sensory, tactile-oriented person, and how a book feels can matter a lot to me. Like, I really can't stand cloth-bound books and avoid buying them. I love the feel of deckled edges :-)
Signed Copies by the Author -- IN! Why would anybody not want that?
Dog-Earing Pages -- IN! Books are not sacred objects. It's okay to bend the pages. When I was just starting to read chapter books, I had a toddler brother who delighted in pulling bookmarks out of every book he found, so for several years, dog-earing was a necessity. I usually use a bookmark, but if I don't have one, I don't feel guilty about dog-earing.
Chapter Titles Instead of Numbers -- IN! But be aware I will probably ignore them completely.
I was not tagged with this, so I'm not tagging anyone else, but if you think this looks fun, by all means fill it out yourself!
This is fun! I might do it myself.
ReplyDeleteNo paragraph breaks? Is it really a thing? I've seen (too) long paragraphs *glancing at Henry James*, but never unbroken one - that would be awful to read!
Fanda, go right ahead :-)
DeleteYeah, I'm not sure how a book with no paragraph breaks would work. Maybe for stream-of-consciousness? Odd.
Your mom -- LOL!
ReplyDeleteDid you ever have a sit down with her to discuss this?
Ruth, well, I am pretty sure I complained to her that she had ruined my books (and before I got to read several of them, too) that were a gift to me in the first place. And I have not loaned her any pocket paperback books since. I've let her read a couple of trade paperbacks when she's visited me, but only after stern lectures about not breaking the spines OR curling the covers back underneath while she reads, because she does that too.
DeleteShe claims she can't hold a pocket paperback open far enough to read it without breaking the spine. I have given up.
This is a lot of fun!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, do some people read the last page first on a regular basis? That's...disturbing. XD
Oh dear. I really don't mind about cracked spines, but it sounds like your mom went a little over-the-top with the cracking, sheesh.
Hmm. I am very much a fan of unreliable narrators--and I don't know if I have ever met anyone who wasn't! So I'm intrigued that you prefer reliable ones. I can understand your reason, but it's just not something I ever thought about someone preferring, I suppose.
Samantha, isn't it fun? Feel free to do it if you want to!
DeleteI think perhaps you define "unreliable narrator" much more broadly than I do. I hold that a narrator is unreliable if they are deliberately misleading the reader, whether it's by withholding information, skewing the facts, or straight-up lying. The narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Poe is unreliable. The last Agatha Christie novel I read had an unreliable narrator. I don't like either of them.
Naturally, I expect any first-person narrator to be telling us only what they know, think, and observe. And they cannot know, think, and observe everything, but that does not make them "unreliable." For instance, a first-person mystery narrated by the detective will often involve the detective not knowing things, so the reader does not know them. The detective is not concealing things from the reader (or, if they do, I often will not read more books about them because that is not playing fair) because the detective does not know what the villain is doing what he's doing either!
If I thought all narrators, first-person or otherwise, were unreliable, I wouldn't read fiction. How can you know anything about the story if you don't trust the narrator and believe what they tell you? You end up in Immanuel Kant territory, and who needs that kind of dizzying instability? I trust narrators to be telling me what they believe and know to be the truth, until they prove otherwise, just like I trust real people to be telling me what the believe and know to be the truth. If I asked my husband if there are still cookies left, and he says yes, but he doesn't know that one of our kids ate the last cookie without asking permission, is my husband unreliable? No, he's uninformed. Totally different.
Interesting! I think that you might be right that I define it more broadly than you do, but I think I also have a higher tolerance for *actual* unreliable narration that you do. One of my favorite book series' POV character (well, one of them) makes a habit of telling the exact truth in his narration, but withholding information constantly, and I do think I'd consider that truly unreliable.
DeleteBut you make a good point--no first person POV is going to be completely 'truthful' or 'accurate', because it has to be filtered through that person's experience, knowledge, biases, &c.
How do you even crack a book's spine? Is that a thing people do on purpose?
ReplyDelete*confuzzled*
In the only Tom Clancy book I've read so far, "Red October," I wouldn't say he has a bunch of discrete plots so much as he just has a bunch of CHARACTERS. The characters are scattered around the world doing different things, true, but he makes it clear from the beginning how each character's actions are related to the story's major problem (the sub defection). So I didn't find it too confusing. It was his first novel, though, so he might have been working harder to keep it reader-friendly ;)
Katie, yes, my mother cracks the spines of all pocket-sized paperbacks and most trade paperbacks deliberately. She claims she can't read them otherwise. She holds pages and cover in each hand and curves them out until the spine pops. It's horrifying. She also curls the front cover and pages she's read underneath the book. By the time she finishes reading a book, it's often half-destroyed.
DeleteI just realized something today while thinking about this, though -- my mom basically never rereads a book. Ever. Not voluntarily, anyway. So it probably doesn't matter to her that a book's title on the spine is unreadable (you don't need to know what the book is when it's on the shelf if you don't intend to read it again) or the cover is so curled up it won't lie flat ever again.
Cowboy has read a fair number of Tom Clancy's books, and he said the earlier ones are much more stream-lined. Once Clancy got really famous, it's like he stopped getting edited very much because "you don't need to edit Tom Clancy," and then his books got bloated and unwieldy. (I feel that way about the last Harry Potter book, too, that the publishers said to themselves that they didn't need to edit J. K. Rowling, and it really should be tighter.)
O.O
DeleteI did not know you could do that to a book. Terrifying.
Hmmm, yeah, I can see how not rereading would make you less inclined to care about the book's physical condition, although I'm not a rereader either and I still want my shelves to be full of pretty books in good shape. (Not being a rereader does make me less inclined to BUY books, so I keep a smaller collection overall.)
Ha! Yes, that's probably exactly what happened XD Sometimes famous authors go off the rails a bit and leave their audience in the dust. But I don't think you would run into any issues with "Hunt for Red October" at least. It's also much shorter than his later novels; I think I finished it in a week or two.
This was fun to read. I agree with you on most of the questions. I am hyper-vigilant about taking care of my books, so both spine-cracking *and* dog-earing are cardinal sins 😁, as is reading the end of the book first. I’m a big cozy mystery fan so that’s a huge no-no for me. Part of the fun for me is the suspense & puzzle solving, so reading ahead is very anti-climatic. Also adore short chapters, or long ones that have distinct scene breaks are okay, too. I always like ending my reading time at a good spot. 😀 I try to use ten to minute windows to read when I can, so short chapters help.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Anonymous :-) My standard for book care is that you shouldn't make it unenjoyable/impossible for others to read after you're done. So I don't mind dog-ears.
DeleteA lot of times, in mysteries, I prefer to stop reading in the middle of chapters because the chapters so often end with big reveals or shocking developments and then I'll be very annoyed that I have to stop, lol!
I am not sure how I totally missed that you are an author! That is really cool! I really enjoyed reading your answers! And I 100% agree with this: "Descriptions of places and how things work bore me, and if that's the bulk of your first few chapters, I'm outta here." I know people love long descriptions, I am just not one of them...get to the point already, LOL!
ReplyDeleteCindy, thanks! Yeah, lengthy descriptions (and my "lengthy," I mean "more than about 3 sentences," lol) just get skimmed by me most of the time. I'm going to imagine up the surroundings, costumes, scenery, whatever myself anyway, and I really just want to know what is happening next!
DeleteThe big exception to that is L. M. Montgomery -- I'll often read her descriptions in full because I do enjoy them a lot.
And, yes, I am an author :-) You can read more about my books on this page!