Top Ten Tuesday – Reasons that have reduced my enjoyment of a story

The original prompt was for petty reasons that I’ve DNFed a book, however I don’t DNF books that often and I’m actually pretty easy to please when it comes to what I read. As long as I don’t find the book either boring or poorly written, or the main purpose of the book is to show me things that I would much prefer not seeing, I tend to enjoy the book. Like I have apparantly read books that are recomended by professors to their students to read and enjoyed them. Sometimes I do have complaints about what I just read and as I get further along in my writing I’m finding that I have more and more complaints. Many of these complaints are minor though and in the end I still enjoy what I’ve read to an extent unless its a part of the small handful of books I really don’t like. Also I’m including all story mediums in this prompt because there are reasons that I’ve not enjoyed a movie or show that could also potentially appear in books. At least one thing from my list is from an animated show and/or movie.

Anyways that’s my explanation for the changes I’m making to this prompt. This is a prompt for Top Ten Tuesday which is currently being run by That Artsy Reader Girl. I’m trying to do as many of these prompts as I can, starting with last week, and I’m sure it’s going to be fun. I’m finding this list kind of hard, but I managed somehow.

Here is my list.

1. Having characters who have seemingly only been created to fawn over the protagonist

I’ve only seen this happen once. Basically in this anime I was watching there were two characters who only seemed to be around to follow and fawn over the protagonist in the way that animals fawn over Disney princesses. Their only character traits were that they weren’t very smart and they were flatter than a piece of paper. I was okay with it for a while because they only showed up occasionally and I found the worldbuilding interesting, and then there was an episode that centered around them. I couldn’t make it that far past that episode.

2. Getting spoiled

This is less a problem with the book and/or story and more a problem with me and the internet. Sometimes when I’m reading a long series I will look ahead to see how many books there, which book is the shortest, etc, and then I always get spoiled. It gets worse when I forget who a character is and think to myself “why not just Google that name”. It tells me and then there is more underneath that I need to force myself to ignore. There are other times I’m spoiled and its not my fault, like when I’m scrolling down Facebook and I’m met with a post with a link to an article that’s titled “How will [character name]’s death impact the future of this series?” or something like that, then I immediately click “don’t show me posts from this page”, but there are always more pages that feel no regret about spoiling something as soon as its released. By the way this doesn’t always make me enjoy a story less, in fact sometimes it makes me more excited to read/watch it, but when it does reduce my enjoyment its annoying.

3. Narcissistic protagonist

This one is pretty self explanatory. Last year I read a book in which the protagonist frequently thought about how awesome they were, how they were the greatest asset to their town, etc. I found this pretty annoying and I had a hard time getting through this book. There’s a sequel, but I’ve had little interest in going out of my way to read it despite the fact its on my TBR.

4. Not trusting the reader

Sometimes I read a book and it feels like there is very little trust being put in the reader. Like sometimes the cast splits up into two groups and you know where both of the groups are because the book moves between different perspectives within the cast. Then you have a character say “I worry about the others who are [name of place the other characters are]”. Like I know where they are, the character doesn’t have to say the location. They could just say, “I’m worried about the others,” and have that be it. This wouldn’t even be that annoying if this was the only repetitive detail and also in certain contexts, but often these books will repeat information constantly because they don’t seem to trust the reader to remember what’s going on and I find it annoying.

5. Preaching

One thing I don’t like to see when reading a book is having it tell me what I should be believing. I don’t really want the books I read or the movies I watch to preach at me or to push ideals that I go against what I believe in. I want to be able to decide things on my own. On the other side of this, I really like it when a story reflects multiple perspectives and either doesn’t present any of them as right or wrong, or if there’s something wrong with a perspective it shows why someone may think that way.

6. Having scenes that I find needlessly disgusting

There was one book I got from the thrift shop when I was in high school that I couldn’t finish. It wasn’t because I lost interest or found something better to read. No, I lost interest in this book because less than a quarter into the story there was a scene with an alien or something forcing its way out of a human host. This scene disgusted me and I just had no interest in reading further. I stayed away from that book whenever I saw I had a chance to read it, and weirdly it kept coming up. This is of course only about scenes that I feel are needlessly disgusting. There are some scenes that kind of need it to work, but usually these aspects are more understated in the books I enjoy.

7. Historical figures being reduced to a single adjective

I found a book all about Cleopatra in the Kindle store on sale and I bought it. Then I started reading it. There were two problems I had with how this book opened. It showed me all the different people who had something to do with how Caesar died. It showed the author’s imagining of a philosopher rushing through Rome to warn Caesar about what was going to happen while Caesar went to the Senate on the day of his death. This first part was mostly about the men in her life and it dragged on for such a long time. I just wanted to read about Cleopatra. There were a couple of flashes over to Cleopatra and what she would have been doing at the time. The other problem was how Cleopatra was being described. She moved sensually, everything she did was meant to be sexy. Yes, I know that that’s how she’s best remembered, but I also know that she was more than that. The other parts are what I wanted to read about.

8. Seeing other people bash the book on social media

Sometimes when people bash a book on social media it’s deserved, sometimes it’s a little less deserved, and sometimes its not deserved at all. That’s how the internet works. Either way, when I see a lot of negative attention on a book that I’m currently reading it makes me reluctant to continue and it makes me even more reluctant to pick up the book in the first place, even if I feel like the book doesn’t 100% deserve it.

9. Forced love interest

I just want to point out that I don’t think every story needs a love interest for the protagonist. In fact some stories are better without one. Sometimes you have a protagonist who is clearly not into people in that way and then they have to have a love interest just because. They should have just been left without one.

10. Stream of Consciousness

My brain just can’t handle reading stream of consciousness. I find that after a few pages I can’t remember anything that happened.