A book nerd's pet peeves

Pet peeves are strange things. The Cambridge Dictionary describes a pet peeve as “something that especially annoys you.” Pet peeves are usually small, inconsequential things that bring out the worst in you.

Maybe the sound of someone chewing makes you irrationally angry or you’d rather crash than listen to someone clap after an airplane lands. Pet peeves are not normally large grievances upon humanity or things that should cause such outrage, but they always do.

As a proud nerd and lover of books, there are certain things that irk me that non-book lovers might not understand.

One is a pretty common trope in novels, though it’s slowly becoming less common, thank goodness. I hate “love triangles.” Relationships are hard enough, why does the author have to add another person to the relationship. I’d rather watch a couple I love struggle through their own hardships and grow together than watch one person be fought over.

Maybe I do get invested in a book with a love triangle. Fine, I gave into the hype and fell in love with the couple in a book. Suddenly, another person is added to the mix. I have to watch the two people I already have started to love be hurt because the author wanted to throw another contender in. Usually, my luck is that the new person ends up triumphing in the relationship and I just get angry.

Another ick or pet peeve of mine is how some people mark their place in a book when reading. I’ve been better recently, specifically using bookmarks, but in the past, I normally just found whatever semi-flat object was sitting near me at the time as a bookmark. That was as crazy as I’d go, though.

Unfortunately, there are some people out there who will use much more horrid ways to mark their place in a book. I think the worse is dog-earing a book. What is dog-earing? That’s when you fold the corner of a book down to mark your page. Notice how I said you, not me. I would never. Dog-earing a page ruins that page forever.

Of course, I’ve always been the person who hated marking up a book in literature classes too. I love books, love the smell and feel just as much as the content. While I do think books are meant to be read, I hate the idea of doing anything that might ruin the physical integrity of a book.

In the last year or so as I’ve collected more books for my library, I’ve come upon a few more pet peeves. Let’s say a book is pretty popular and some network or studio picks it up for a show or movie. Usually, new editions of the book will be released, nothing changed except the art on the cover. Suddenly, instead of the gorgeous art originally there, stills from the new media are on the cover instead. While I’m always happy for the author and the obvious boost in sales for them, as a reader, I don’t want someone else to dictate how I see these characters and their world.

Sticking with the cover art, I’ve noticed that some book series will change the cover art partway through a series as the books become more popular. A popular example of this are the books by Sarah J. Maas.

I have been reading her series “A Court of Thorns and Roses” since the beginning. I bought the books as they came out. Suddenly, the books started to become more popular and the cover art changed. While I have the first four books in the series in one style of cover art, the fifth book was released in a completely different style. Any later editions of the earlier books had the new art work instead.

I love the old artwork and won’t be selling those older editions any time soon (despite many copies of one book going for five times the original price). However, because I have been with the series from the beginning, I won’t ever have books that completely match. Who knows, with the series still on the rise and not yet complete, maybe we’ll have to deal with another change in art.

Another pet peeve goes with my preference of paperback books. Books are almost always published as hardcover first. This isn’t true in all countries, and when a new book comes out that I can’t wait to read, I’m jealous as European readers post their paperback copies online. It’s especially irritating when I start reading a series in which multiple books are already out. Because later editions are primarily in paperback, any later book I get in a series when it first comes out will be hardcover and therefore not match.

I know, a lot of these annoyances are stupid, first-world problems, but isn’t that what a pet peeve is supposed to be? There are plenty of other, even smaller ones, such as the differences in height between different books, but they don’t make me quite as angry as these five do.