My Bookish Pet Peeves

Hey Guys,

I wrote down a few of my Book related Pet Peeves.  Feel free to comment with your book related pet peeves.

1. Real People on the cover who look nothing like how the character is described on the book. I'm not a huge fan of real people on book covers regardless. I just don't care about the models in stock footage or in front of a green screen trying to depict the characters. I much prefer a gorgeous illustration. But it annoys me when the person on the cover doesn't even match the looks of the characters. Especially when the publisher tries to make a character look whiter.

Two recent offenders that I read were Truly Madly Royally and Kingdom of Souls. Zora was a brown skinned girl with a boss twist out in the book. On the cover they had some racially ambiguous chick most likely to further appeal to white Meghan Markle fans. This was still a very cute story and I thought Zora was a great character for black girls to look up too. It would've been nice for the cover art to portray her a beautiful brown girl.

With Kingdom of Soul while the UK cover was not as elaborate I thought the UK the girl on the cover looked more like the Arrah described in the book than the mixed looking girl on the US cover. Arrah is a pretty brown skinned girl with brown eyes who resembles her father's people. The book is full of black people in all different shades.

2. When the plot doesn't start until the 50% mark of the book. I swear writers who do that want me to DNF their book. Get to the plot in the first few chapters! I especially hate it when it happens in a mystery book.  I've DNFd quite a few cozy mysteries because the mystery didn't start until halfway through the book. Usually in a cozy it happens because the author is too busy trying to write a romance novel as opposed to a mystery. Or they get caught up in all the cutesey nuances of the small town they've created.


3. Racially Ambiguous leads written by authors of color.  People of color are underrepresented enough.  I don't want to pick up a book and wonder what race the lead is because the author felt they would alienate potential white viewers by writing a non white character.  I've heard authors say they didn't want to make the character the same race as them because they didn't want their story to be put in a box. You become an auto-skip author for me if that's your thought process. White people have enough books to represent them without minorities writing for their gaze. White is automatically considered the default for characters in books unless stated otherwise. I actually read a book that had a police brutality incident in it and the author tried to play ambiguous with the lead's race while also mentioning the race of every other character in the story. Huh?


4. Books Being Damaged: When your book cover or pages is dog-eared. I got book mail recently with an arc from the publisher and one of the first things I noticed was the condition the book was in. It looked like it was previously owned and read by someone else.  There was some creasing from the cover being bent and some slight wear on the spine. I was a little hurt because I always keep my covers in good condition. Battered books make me cringe!

5. Goodreads Janky Search Engine! Why has the search engine been broken on Goodreads for years? If you don't type the exact title of the book or the exact author name it won't find the book!  The website is owned by Amazon but they don't want to update it to feel like a website in 2020. There's times where I stumbled upon a book but forgot to mark it want to read and only remember a few words in the title. I've learned to go try and search the book section on Amazon instead.  You would think a site that has a database of books would be easier to navigate when you're looking for a specific story.

6. When Booktubers Talk about Everything but books in their vlog. When you say you made a vlog to discuss certain books I want to hear you discuss that book. Not hear about your day at work. Not see you unbox random purchases from Amazon. I don't come to booktube for makeup tutorials when we have beautytube.  I want to hear you talk books and join in on the discussion. Why are you making a reading vlog with no reading in it?

7. When comp titles are used as blurbs. Especially when the book isn't even remotely comparable to the comp titles. I roll my eyes when I read a book blurb and the book is compared to two other books it's nothing like. Like how every black fantasy with African influence is being compared to Children of Blood and Bone when they only thing they really have in common is using the word orisha and having a black girl lead.