Top Ten Bookish Confessions

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by the bloggers of The Broke and the Bookish. This week's topic is supposed to be my top ten bookish confessions. And it is, but it also kind of turned into a list of confessions about my bookish annoyances. 

I absolutely hate it when the spine breaks on paperback books. For me, books have a greater value when they don't look all worn and used. All of my trade/pocket-size paperbacks tend to look brand new even if they've been read more than once simply because I refuse to open them up all the way when I read.

With that being said, I love recommending books to people but am reluctant to actually hand out books for others to borrow. All of my paperbacks with broken spines are the result of them them being borrowed and read by someone who doesn't have the same OCD tendency as me.

It bothers me immensely when publishers decide to change a series' cover art halfway through the series. The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner is one of my favorite series ever and all of my covers look different and are different sizes. I like it when my series match - this kind of thing drives me insane!

I also will not annotate in books. I will use post-its to mark important passages or, even better, write my notes in a notebook. Once again, this goes back to my desire for my books to look pristine and perfect. The only book I ever annotated was John Milton's Paradise Lost (which definitely needed those annotations).

It annoys me to no end when I see or hear about people using their e-reader devices primarily for non-reading related purposes. I'm not speaking of devices like the iPad, but Kindles, Nooks, Kobos, and other devices that are specifically being marketed as e-readers (with extras). Not internet tablets (with the added potential to read books). See the difference?

I always have to read before I go to sleep, even if it's only ten pages. It's just part of my routine that calms me down and allows me to clear my mind of any real-life worries for the night.

I wrote a research paper on reinterpretations and retellings of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale over the years. Now it's become a mission of mine to continue reading all different retellings of it because I adore this fairy tale and would like to see how many different ways people can interpret it. (My favorite so far is definitely Robin McKinley's Beauty).

I hate how it's become so common these days for books to be written in first-person and present tense. Although first person narration can make it easier to understand the protagonist, the combined use of present tense makes the book feel super informal (and just not as well-written in general) to me. I like my books to feel a little distant for me - not enough that I can't relate, but enough for me to be able to step back and examine and analyze the story. And a more formal writing style makes me more confident in the author's ability to write well and write a good story. 

I read Gone with the Wind years ago and I really enjoyed the story, but by the time I got to the last twenty pages, I just put the book down. I knew how it ended and I didn't want to actually read how it panned out (maybe there was some denial there). I actually did the same thing for my first reading of Pride and Prejudice.

I'm a bit of a book purist so I have a difficult time appreciating the fact that books and their movie adaptations are different mediums and inevitably going to interpret things a little differently. (I'm mainly referring to the Harry Potter movies here and my complete abhorrence of them. The few that I have seen were not worth it.) My one notable exception is The Lord of the Rings, in which case I actually prefer the movies to the books.

So know that you know many of my strange bookish confessions, let me know what some of yours are!