Top Ten Tuesday: Problems With Reading

Time again for the Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by the Broke and the Bookish.  This week’s theme is the problems you have with books.

And so, here we go.  I’m going to break my list down into some serious and non-serious issues.

Non-Serious:

1.  My TBR pile seem to multiply when I’m not looking.   It seems as though every time I whittle down my TBR pile just a little, instead of getting smaller, it gets larger.  I blame myself for this one entirely and my lack of willpower.  There are just too many books that looks good or that I find recommended by other book bloggers that I want to read!    I also blame this on the “my eyes were bigger than my stomach” theory.   This can be really bad when it comes to my local library and/or getting digital ARCs.

2.  Not enough time to read.   If I could just figure out how to give up sleeping, I’d get a lot more reading done!

3.  My “next book to read” list constantly changes.   The minute I come home from the library or download a digital ARC or come home from the bookstore, my intention is to read that book I just picked up next.    As soon as I finish my current read or reads.  This rarely happens unless it’s certain authors like Stephen King, Elizabeth George or Michael Connelly.  More often than not, I put the book into the pile with good intentions to get to it and then find another book distracts me before I get to it.

4.  Forgetting I’ve got a TBR pile on my Kindle.   My Kindle is wonderful because it allows me to have a zillion and one books ready to read at the drop of a hat or my next whim.   It also allows me to carry around a virtual library without the weight of an actual library.  It also allows me to ignore a large chunk of books because they aren’t sitting there in a pile, wondering why I haven’t read them.

5.   Apps on my Kindle can distract me.  I’ve got a Paperwhite and a Fire and I love them both.  And while the Fire is great for reading comic books or collected comics, there are times when that game of Angry Birds With Friends calls out to me and I substitute it for reading time!   

Serious: 

1.  Sequels for the sake of sequels.  If one is good, two must be better and three must be great!   Don’t get me wrong here.  I enjoy re-visiting old friends and seeing them have new adventures as long as there’s a good reason for it  (and I don’t mean just to move copies of a book).   Sometimes just having one book or a series as a complete set works and then there’s going back to the well one time too many.   I think of a lot of the sequels we got to classic stories in the 90’s (Scarlet, the sequel to Rebecca).  It’s also why I’m wary of the upcoming new Harper Lee novel.

2.  Series that don’t tell which installment this book is.   Standing in the bookstore or library, nothing in more frustrating to this bibliophile than the inkling that the book you’re holding is part of a series but not being able to easily figure this out.   Ideally, the front or back cover would tell you this, but many times these days it doesn’t.   Hopefully the title page will tell you, but that may or may not be the case.  Then you’re left to finding the list of previous works and hoping it lists all the author’s works (problematic if he or she changes publishers mid-series!) or going to the copyright page and trying to piece together a reading order.  Maybe this is only an issue of the completist in me and wanting to read things in order and not SPOIL books one through four by reading book five first.

3.  Changing the cover theme mid-series.   This is kind of related to my previous problem.   It can make it difficult if the book is part of an established series.  It also creates the question of — should I replace my original copies with the new cover theme so it looks better on my book shelf?

4.  Series for the sake of series.   This kind of ties into point one, but it’s one that I see too often these days — a series for the sake of being a series.   This is true of later entries in the Ender series by Orson Scott Card.  The first two novels are fantastic and among my favorite books.  Books three and four feel like one book, expanded and split into two for the sake of having two books to market instead of one complete story.