Heather's Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Words/Topics That Will Make You NOT Pick Up A Book

Top Ten Tuesday is the creation of The Broke and the Bookish, each week they post a list and one of their writers answers.  This week's topic is Top Ten Words / Topics That Will Make You NOT Pick Up A Book, so click the jump to read my list.

There's not a lot I won't read and I genuinely mean that; I try to read outside of my comfort zone whenever I can.  So these are topics / words that make me hesitate to pick up a book.

01 Romance: I feel bad for saying this because I've read a few books that are romantic and okay, but for the most part when I see a book described as romance, it typically means the narrator will go on about love for the whole book instead of doing anything interesting.

02 Erotica: I could kinda put this in the same vein as #1, but I feel like I've read a few where it was just endless sex scenes and nothing else happening. There is good erotica out there, please don't get me wrong, but again I hesitate to pick up a book if I see that in the description.

03 Abuse: Not in the sense that I absolutely refuse to even acknowledge the subject, but in the sense that I feel like abuse is not treated with the gravity it should be a lot of times and that upsets me.

04 Mental Illness:  As someone suffering from one, I really hate to see people who also suffer from one demonized or romanticized based on whichever one fits the authors whimsy best.  It's something close to me, so I always try to make sure I agree with how it's handled before I read it.

05 Murder:  It's something that happens out in the real world (I was friends with a guy in high school who got shot in the chest), but in all honesty it makes me really uncomfortable.

06 Award winning:  I'm not to judge whether or not it deserves those awards, but when I see "In this [long list of awards] award winning novel", I feel like it's saying "read this, other people loved it enough to give it awards, so you should buy it and rub your face on it right now!"

07 Mysteries:  This is something I've recently been overcoming, and at the time of this post I'm actually reading two mysteries, but I usually envision them as some whodunit that's really tedious to wade through.  Like I said though, I have been getting better about it!

08 Reworkings:  I usually always wind up comparing the reimagining to the original work and griping about it.  Some of them are very good in their own right, I admit, but for the most part they aren't things I really like to read.

09 Short story collections:  I feel like only so much can be accomplished in a short story and some authors should stick to novels because they have big ideas that can't exactly fit in the confines of a short story.  Plus, I'm still kinda miffed I read Haruki Murakami's short story collections before I read all his books and later realized that a lot of ideas in those stories were reused in his books.  =[  I was not a happy camper!  Some authors can do it really well though, which is why this is low on my list and not really that much of a turn off for me.

10 Diary style:  Not actual diaries of authors / celebrities published in book form, but books written in diary format.  Usually I find them to be really unrealistic, especially if we're talking about the characters being people in the current world.  A lot of people don't speak in the formal way writers use and it completely takes me out of the reading experience.