Another song for you this morning:
And now for the main
I'm not going to lie--lately there have been some things about books that have really been annoying me.
Long-Ass Books
I've never been a fan of long books. I suppose I have the attention span of a gnat, but I can't handle spending more than a week reading one book. My TBR pile is too big and there are too many books in this world for me to read. Usually this isn't a problem, but lately--is it just me, or does it seem like books in general have been getting longer? Nowadays I heave a sigh of relief every time I come across a 300-pager.
Series
This kind of ties into the long books thing, but does every single book that's published have to be part of a series? I recently read a book that was pretty good, but the fact that it was the first in a series annoyed the crap out of me, because it was over five hundred pages long and had no conclusion. Because it's part of a series, of course! Not only that, but a seven-book series ("at the very least," the author states on her website), which quite frankly I don't think the plot of the book warrants. I don't mind when series makes sense, but in some cases it seems like a cop-out. You don't have to write a conclusion because it's part of a series! You don't have to come up with new characters because it's part of series! Well, my gnat-like brain wants new characters and new ideas and is tired of series. So I guess I don't have to keep reading them.
Prologues
Prologues are another thing I've had a long-standing issue with. I do not read prologues. If I'm going to read a novel, I want the story to start at the beginning. Hence, I start reading at the beginning and not at the before-the-beginning. But recently a writer twicked me by putting in a prologue, but not labeling it as a prologue. Instead, it was called "Chapter One." By the time I finished chapter three, I realized that I'd just read 40 freaking pages of prologue and didn't even know it. Infuriating!
I just want my novels to start at the beginning, have a middle part, a climax, a denoumet, and then an end. Is that too much to ask? If there's backstory and it can't be fit into the narrative, I really don't need to know about it.
Is there anything you're sick of seeing in books?
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