I wrote a post about my pet peeves regarding YA a while ago so I thought it was about time that I wrote one about a few of my pet peeves relating to reading and books in general.
Grammar
This one can really get on my nerves. I understand that no one has perfect grammar, myself included, but that still doesn’t mean obvious grammar mistakes don’t bother me. Whenever I see something like “Me and Toby went to go get ice cream.” I just want to rip all of my hair out. Is it so hard to say “Toby and I”? And then there’s the subject verb agreement problem. It might be hard to believe, but words like everybody and anyone are singular. Which means saying something like “everyone are going out.” is grammatically incorrect. Okay, enough with the grammar lesson. Maybe the reason why grammar issues bother me so much right now is because I’m currently studying for the SAT’s writing section… But seriously, these kinds of mistakes should not be made more than once and when they do occur frequently, that’s when I want to bang my head with the book repeatedly.
Flashbacks
This one is kind of interesting. I don’t really mind flashbacks as much as the way they are denoted. Some books use italics or even stating something like “last night” or “yesterday, 3 pm”, etc. I don’t have a problem when they do that. It’s when they don’t specifically indicate that a flashback is happening, that’s when I have a problem. If I Stay by Gayle Forman is one of my favorite books of all time and yet I almost DNFed it because figuring out the difference between whether Mia was talking about what was currently going on or if she was remembering the past was driving me bonkers. Eventually I got a hang of it, but I would have preferred not to have that headache.
Character Names
I am definitely not one of those people who think some of the outrageous names celebrities give their kids can be counted as “cool”. Unique maybe, sound cool yeah, but cool in the long run? No. Not only isn’t it practical, I kinda of feel bad for the kids with weird names like the name of fruits or a direction, for example. So why is this important? I guess I’m just trying to say that I don’t always appreciate attempts at “unique”, out-of-the-box names. That being said, for some reason I can’t stand it when a character shares the same name as me. I don’t know why, but reading about a character named Emily is a huge turn off for me. Okay, so maybe I do appreciate some attempts at not everyday names.
So yeah, that’s some of my reading pet peeves… yes, I have more but I didn’t feel like boring everyone. Maybe next time.
What about you?
What are some of your reading pet peeves?
Great post-I agree with you on the flashbacks! Drives me nuts when I don’t know if the characters are in the present or past grrr.
Hah, these are great peeves actually. I dislike poorly written books too, and weird names and settings irritate me as well. I don’t think I like flashbacks either. That’s one thing that bugged me about If I Stay.
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