Top 10 Tuesday - Top Ten Bookish Pet Peeves

Each Tuesday The Broke and The Bookish provide a book related Top 10 theme.
This weeks free week on the Top Ten meme from the Broke and the Bookish came at the perfect time. I’ve been working on this list of Literary pet peeves for a couple weeks now because I’ve started to feel like I’m repeating myself in my reviews. Now instead of re-explaining why books lose stars for cliffhangers I’ll just link to this post.

1. Cliffhangers – In my opinion book 1 should never end in a cliffhanger. I don’t mind loose ends or not knowing all the details, but if book one ends with a major cliff hanger I feel like the author doesn’t trust their own writing to be compelling enough for me to continue reading then I don’t trust them to continue writing a story I care about. When I think of the most successful series, the first book can stand alone if it needs too: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight. Examples of books where a cliffhanger made me not want to read the sequel(s): Uglies/Pretties, Pure
2. Absentee Parents/Demonizing parents – Ugh. This is worse than the YA trend of absentee parents. I’m aware that parents aren’t always right and teenagers are figuring out who they are separate from their parents. But I find it incredibly frustrating when books portray all the parents as selfish and uncaring.
3. Wilting flower heroines / controlling male love interests – Twilight, the gift that keeps on giving.
4. Language that tries too hard
   1. Overly flowery (Purple Prose)
   2. Attempts to create futuristic teen slang
5. Under explained dystopia – I am totally ok with leaving some elements of “how they got here” to sequels, but if the author leaves too many holes to be filled in during subsequent books I fear they won’t fill them all in and I’ll be left with questions once the series is over or that they’ll don’t know how to fill those holes and will haphazardly fill them in the final book in a way that doesn’t make sense.
6. The Neverending Series (here’s looking at you Gallagher Girls). – I don’t mind this in contemporary fiction when an author has a certain protagonist that they revisit because every book has an ending. You pick up the next book to read about the next chapter in their lives. But in the case of the Gallagher Girls I thought the first couple books were really cute and now I’m just bummed cause I read book three and was bored (been there done that) and it doesn’t seem like there’s any indication the series will ever end (or really go anywhere).
7. Lack of punctuation – I don’t care that they did it on purpose and that there’s a reason for it. “Evening” and “The Road” were just hard to read because of it. I won’t read another book that does this regardless of how well reviewed it is.
8. Paperback book size variations – This drives me crazy everytime I organize my books. I have to choose between organizing in alphabetical order (what I would like to do) and organizing by size so my bookshelves look nice. Why are there so many different sizes of paperback?
9. Books written in the first person especially if they alternate perspectives – Yeah I don’t noticewhen you put the chapter narrorator’s name at the top of the chapter, so I’ll start the chapter in the mindset of the previous narrator and get confused a couple pages in and have to go back.
10. Movie covers on books – I think these always look really cheesy and never live up to the original cover.