The 15 Day Book Bloggers Challenge hosted by April @ Good Books and Good Wine.
Today is Day 14 and today's topic is deal breakers. But guys...the Top Ten Tuesday topic of this week is Top Ten Words that Make Me Put Down a Book...so I feel like I'm doubling up here and going to be repeating myself. How about...come back Tuesday to see which words are deal breakers for me in reading.
In the meantime, I'll try to discuss some other deal breakers. I'm not sure if April intended for these to be book, blogging, or what, but I'm doing a mixture of all.
- Overall Rating of 3.5 or lower on Goodreads and/or Amazon. The only exceptions to this are when it's a series that I know I want to read and the other books in the series have much higher ratings or an author that I trust (though none of my auto buy authors have been in this situation). I'm not trying to be a snob, but with as many books as there are out there, I just don't have time to read ones that I don't think are going to be at least "good" or "enjoyable."
- Gay/Lesbian/Trans/Bi. I'm straight. I'm a Christian. On top of that, I feel that where these topics might have been shocking to be written about years ago, that's just not the case anymore. I feel like the industry is trying to capitalize on the gay rights issues that are popular in the media right now (along with the bullying problems), so the market is SO saturated with these stories that there's nothing new about them. They've become cliche and overdone.
- Anti-God/Atheist. As a Christian, it bugs me to no end to have anti-God messages thrown into the middle of a story that just doesn't make any sense for them to be there within the context of what else is going on in the book.
- Erotica. Um yeah, not going to happen. Shoot, some of these new adult books really toe the line for me.
- Captcha. I know I've mentioned this recently, but every single site that I come to that has this option turned on makes me lose a little bit of patience with this. I try so hard to visit other sites and comment as much as my free time allows, but captcha bugs me not end. I'm afraid I'm going to lose my cool and do something drastic and horrible (what I'm not exactly sure). I just have no clue how anyone except brand new bloggers can even think this is a good idea. And then those bloggers I would hope will come across someone who has been blogging for longer and see them ranting about how much captcha sucks and then they go "well crap, I better run go turn that off because people hate it." And the world becomes a happy place again.
- Passive Aggressive. I don't know that everyone knows what this means, but it's one of the most annoying forms of conflict for me. I don't like it used in books, and I don't like it when people use it in comments either. Just say what you need to say.
What are your deal breakers? Let me know!
Captcha is annoying, no question.
ReplyDeleteAnti-religion: I don't like anti-religious bias of any sort (on the author's part; it can be all right on the part of a character). Some of the medieval-analog fantasies are guilty of this; "The Church" (whatever its doctrine) is too often painted as purely negative: oppressive, corrupt, and power-hungry. Granted, there's some historical basis for those aspects, but there's also historical basis for charitable, scholarly, and humble. If you're going to have a single, dominant church in your fantasy or medieval-history world, show both sides, the positive as well as the negative. Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series does quite a good job of that.
Equally, I don't usually like preachy or heavy-handed religious content in my fiction -- and I say that as a person of faith. If the references to religion -- any religion -- come out of who the character(s) is or are, that's fine. If it's laid on with a trowel, is there to advance the author's particular brand of faith rather than advance the plot, or is overlaid on the story in order to sell it as Christian (or any other faith) fiction rather than being organic to the story, that tends to turn me off.
Yes, it feels different if there's a character within the book that is anti-God/religion than when it feels like the author is pushing agenda or their own beliefs (or lack thereof) onto the reader. Or just when it doesn't make sense to come up in the book at all.
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