Ideally, the experience of reading a book is entirely driven by the author’s narrative choices. In actual practice, there are many elements that can complicate or undermine the process of transforming arbitrary marks on paper into a guided hallucination. Don’t believe me? Here are five, arranged in order of increasing importance to me.1
But first, a disclaimer! None of the following are under the author’s control, so please keep that in mind.
A bugaboo I discovered when I began collecting the books published by the otherwise exemplary Haikasoru imprint has to do with the orientation of the book’s title on the spine of the book with respect to the text inside the book. In short, if the title on the spine is right way up, I expect the words on the page to be right way up when I open the book. Opening the text to discover I am holding it upside down kicks me out of the reading experience. Haikasoru eventually stopped orienting their titles in an idiosyncratic way, yay…but until then it was a distraction.
Don’t let that stop you from running out and buying every book in the Haikasoru line. The works themselves earned their places on my shelves.
Until I began my “Because My Tears Are Delicious to You” reviews of works I’d read as a teen, I had no idea how much it bothered me to read a familiar book in an unfamiliar cover. This is completely stupid, like getting annoyed because the Christmas wrapping on a present is wrong. In a lot of cases, the art on recent editions is far superior to that available on ancient editions. Yet, some part of my brain seemingly immune to concussion and anoxia insists the cover is a core part of the reading experience and that reading a familiar book with novel art is a different experience from the original reading.
Ideally, every book in a particular series should have a pleasing consistency of format and size. In reality, there’s probably a law named after a famous collector that this is almost never true in practice. The publisher opts for slightly different heights, or jumps from paperback to trade to hardcover2, or the series itself jumps publishers and the new installments look radically different from previous volumes. The perfection of ones’ bookcases is unavoidably marred.
I’ve largely come to terms with this issue3, except when I suspect that the reason for the change is that the publisher knows about people like me and hopes I will rebuy the series from scratch. Happily, my twitchiness about cover art immunizes me.
From time to time, publishers will discover to their alarm that the venerable classic they are considering reprinting displays its age in some troubling and unacceptable way. One answer is to have some hard-working editor pore through the text to replace the choices of a bygone era with setting details and vocabulary more appropriate to the modern day4. It can be surprisingly difficult to do this seamlessly. When mishandled, an update will introduce tooth-grindingly vexing continuity errors. In particular, I remember a series split between two publishers, where one publisher diligently removed references to the Cold War, while the other…didn’t.
Finally, if a book is part of an ongoing series, I want to learn this before I purchase the book, not when I reach the final page to discover a notable lack of ending. Most of the issues I mention above are arguably merely matters of taste5, but this one isn’t. It’s just good manners to let readers know if they are purchasing a complete experience or a single episode in a narrative too mighty to fit between two covers.
***
No doubt many of you have your own little quirks that affect the reading experience far out of proportion to their actual importance. Feel free to regale us with them in comments before (but as always, the moderators ask that you keep the tone of the discussion civil and polite…)
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]What happened to font size issues, you ask? It has been relegated to a footnote. It used to be that sufficiently tiny fonts could deter me from reading on account of my terrible eyesight, but now we have ebooks and I can zoom text up until I can see it. Not that there aren’t upsides to vision issues. For example, I am now familiar with a much wider range of ways optometrists can put an upbeat spin on cataracts, corneal scarring, and what may be a retinal birthmark.
[2]Particularly vexing if the format difference is sufficiently dramatic as to preclude shelving sequential books together.
[3]Related peeve: “What do you mean, there’s a volume after the complete omnibus?”
[4]I absolutely understand the urge when it comes to certain epithets. Anyone planning on reprinting “The Past Through Tomorrow” may be interested to know the N-word gets tossed around in one story. A terminology change that annoyed me far beyond reason was Poul Anderson’s decision to replace the instantaneously propagating gravity in “The Enemy Stars” with tachyons. There is no justifiable reason for this to annoy me as much as it did. It’s just that I don’t want to read in an Eisenhower-era SF novel a physics idea from a decade later.
[5]I will argue about matters of taste for hours. Days. Mountain ranges may rise and sink. Ask me about hex maps and square grids…
Philip Palmer Hellship full of aliens yet every species knows the meaning of red light and green light even though they may not see this particular section of the spectrum or even have scenes to do so.
Re updated books: as I recall, Fred Pohl updated Kornbluth’s Not This August to set it in the 1980s, or at least a 1980s, but he left the not particularly venerable protagonist a Korean War veteran, which gave the impression McArthur was drafting boys out of grade school.
I have the spine direction issue, because a significant number of my books are German, and German books are printed so that the words run up the spine when they’re shelved upright. I’ve grown accustomed to this when a book is lying flat; it’s a clue to the language the book will be in. But this means that titles on my shelves run both up and down, which means I have to keep changing the angle of my head when perusing my shelves. (No, I’m not going to shelve the German books upside-down. That would be weird.)
So which is worse, Christmas wrapping on a birthday present or vice versa?
1: The now obscure tabletop roleplaying game Other Suns provided, among other things, the visual range of each of the intelligent, tool-using species in the game. I was amused to notice the L’Dray and Altani didn’t see redder than orange, so they wouldn’t be able to see human stop lights or see in human emergency lighting. To balance this, L’Dray liked to run stuff using psionic controls most humans couldn’t perceive or affect.
Oooh! Clickable footnotes! First time I’ve noticed this.
“Happily, my twitchiness about cover art immunizes me.” This statement brought a smile to my face. My book-buying habits are driven by a massive collection of quirks and foibles, many of which I don’t even think about consciously. Recently, Baen shifted a long-running series by Chuck Gannon from trade paperback to hardcover. While I prefer the hardcover, now it irks me that the books do not match on my shelf.
My biggest foible, however, is only buying books on paper. It irritates me when something appears that I cannot find in a physical format. I know that makes me like a caveman who clings to his club instead of switching to those newfangled stone axes, but there you are…
Clickable footnotes have been around for a while! I assume other articles could have them too, just most of the article writers don’t have James’s propensity for footnoting.
(I’m always slightly annoyed when I read articles on his site and the footnotes aren’t clickable, so I have to scroll up and down by hand.)
I wish American publishers would switch over to the German system of putting names on the spine that DemetriosX mentioned above. It means that when a series is shelved in order, I tilt my head to the left and read the titles going downward, whereas with American books I have to tilt my head to the right and read upward, which is unnatural.
The last one FTW. I no longer consider Gene Wolfe because of this. (I’m told it was his publisher to blame, nonetheless…)
The rest seem to be personal quirks I don’t share.
7: I love the convenience of e-books (I’ve been trying to get my hands on a physical copy of The Best of Gene Wolfe for a month) but I’ve discovered paper books have benefits ebooks cannot match.
8: I have tried to have embedded footnotes on James Nicoll Reviews but they get broken in the cut and paste stage. I could probably do it by hand using the html-view mode but when I do that, it looks horribly confusing to me.
@7 – I also only buy books on paper. I have tried reading e-books and I just don’t enjoy the experience, at least not with currently-available technology.
I’m getting seriously tempted by the idea of creating dummy books that only take up about 5mm of shelf space, have the title and author on the spine and a note on the front ‘cover’ saying things like “This is actually in your e-book collection” or “This is on the too big for the standard height shelf shelf” or “This is on the ‘Who thinks making books that tall is a good idea?’ shelf”. Maybe print out the blurb and stick that on the back too…
Am I the only one who hates cliffhangers? Have ongoing story lines and conflicts in a series, sure, but don’t have someone dying or in the midst of a dramatic moment, awaiting possible rescue, at the end of the book. The worst offender, whose title I don’t remember, was a book that was published as one volume outside the US but broken into two volumes in the US, so the first “volume” literally stopped in the middle of the story. But sometimes truly complete books end that way, too.
My biggest peeve with mid-series design changes is when the publisher decides to revamp their logo on the spine, making it 20% bigger or randomly moving it from the top to bottom. Everything else is annoying, but it at least has an economic or marketing justification. But publisher logos are invisible to readers until you get the books lined up on a shelf and the last three look different from the first five.
Those (sometimes minute!) differences between series entries? Goodness, they get me. Millimeter height differences, slightly different colophon/title/author placement; I’d almost rather have the big differences like switching formats, except that my hardcover space is very limited and then the books can’t be shelved together.
Is there a universal meaning for “collected stories”? It seems clear that “selected stories” means a subset of the author’s complete oeuvre selected by the author or an editor, so I always took “collected stories” to mean, well, everything. But after buying some collections like that, I will find there is a “collected stories (volume 2)”. Now if they had put “(volume 1)” on the first one, that would be okay, but the lack of that information feels somewhat deceptive.
Having the final volume in a series only be in hardcover (or ebook) after you’ve bought all the earlier volumes in paperback also engenders very negative feelings toward the publisher. A lesser but still annoying trick is having later volumes with obviously different cover art and/or physical dimensions.
For item 5, I also want to know whether I can go back to the bookstore or library and get the next volume of the series.
And, if the next volume isn’t available now, does that mean it’s coming out in six months, or at some unknown future date because the author hasn’t finished writing it, or maybe never because the publisher is waiting to see how well the current volume sells before deciding whether to buy the next one.
That last is particularly annoying because (a) I don’t want to buy something that ends with a cliff-hanger if the next book may never exist, but (b) when people like me act on this reasonable preference, that makes it less likely that the next book will ever appear.
There is of course a wide range here, from “this is one story that wouldn’t fit comfortably between the covers of a single physical book, so we’re calling it a trilogy,” which goes back at least to The Lord of the Rings; through “this is a story with a natural endpoint, but also the sequel picks up three days later”; to series of mystery novels where it may make more sense to read them in order, but you can start with book 4, or jump from there to book 7, without missing anything important:.(For example, Sue Grafton’s alphabetical title books about Kinsey Millhone.)
Conversely, even if it’s been several years between volumes, if book 3 ends with a cliff-hanger, book 4 should make some attempt to tie that up, even if it’s an off-hand “that was a tough scrape but thank goodness it came out OK” rather than going back to where the previous book ended. That does feel like it’s at least partly the author’s fault/choice.
17: You remind me of a detail that vexes me every time I read one of Dozois’ Best SF books. He consistently calls them collections. What they actually are is anthologies. I am no fanatic on this detail but (sixteen hundred words of increasingly incoherent ranting).
The lack of info about a book being a series is one of my pet peeves, too. I tend to not like to read a series because I don’t have time, and I am inevitably waiting for the next book to come out, and by the time it does, I have to go back and reread the entire thing again…
I am still vexed at the marketing for Pohl’s Eschaton series.
I now assume that all new novels are part of a series, unless I have some explicit and authoritative information to the contrary. It’s not always a correct assumption, but it is a case where I would usually be happy to be proven wrong, so it works out.
A sub-peeve of the changing cover issue – when you go on abebooks or similar to buy a long-lost title and the cover icon is the cover you remember from childhood but when the book arrives it has some other cover. The most recent example of this for me was The 22 Letters by Clive King; here it is on Amazon with the cover I remember, but I bet of the seven second-hand examples actually available most if not all will have some other cover.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/22-letters-Clive-King/dp/B0000CMXVR
It’s interesting that rock albums tend to keep the same artwork forever… I don’t suppose anyone has tried to release Sgt Pepper or In The Court Of The Crimson King or Close To The Edge in artwork different from their original 1960/70s releases, even though something like Yes’s Close To The Edge is a very dull cover. Definitely the cover of an album and its music gets melded in my mind in some sort of pseudo-synaesthetic way.
If I buy a book in a series and it won’t fit on the shelves with the rest of the series then it’s time to re-organize the shelves. On a sufficiently cold and rainy day when I will have the time.
E-readers are good for books I get from Gutenberg, and for travelling. Otherwise I prefer Real Books. Especially as I have come to realize that some books are “read once” and then donate to the library.
I much prefer a book, even if part of a series, that is actually a complete story in and of itself. Exceptions for stories such as LoTR that simply can’t be reasonably printed in one volume. Yes, I’ve seen the one volume versions. They are both suitable for household defense, and require use of a magnifying glass. No thank you.
I’m not so obsessed with uniformity of packaging. As long as I can read the title and author on the spine, I’m good. Bad covers, though, are the marketing disaster all authors want to avoid. One romance author had an overweight Naval officer on her cover, and it was not a good look. She ended up marketing the horrible cover as a horrible cover, and she sold books.
35: Unfortunately, most authors have no input into their covers. Bujold sure would not have picked this one.
(insert standard Jack Vance cover art story)
To reinforce @18’s point, it isn’t so much if the book is part of a series, but whether or not the rest of the series is available that bothers me. And I get the times that the series isn’t selling well and it ends without a conclusion (something we also have to deal with in other media), but I will never understand older series where only two of the three trilogy books are readily available (or one or more of a longer series), while the third is no longer published. Bonus points if the missing book(s) are at the beginning or middle of the series and you just wind up with a random gap in the storyline.
Some time ago German publishers used the cover images of one book for a completely different book. It was confusing when you saw a familiar cover in a bookshop but the content didn’t fit at all (sometimes a SF cover on a fantasy book).
When you order English books in Germany you always get some books in the series with British covers and some with American covers (and of course the size is different).
German translations often split one thick English book into two to four German books. The first WoT books are split in different places in the German translation and the English two-volume editions.
If a series isn’t numbered you often don’t know in which order to buy/read the books without first looking it up online (which I can’t do in a bookshop or library because I don’t carry around a cell phone).
My main pet peeve these days are books that are too large and uncomfortable to hold. This has nothing to do with the thickness or number of pages, but rather the width and height of the book. There is absolutely no reason for a paperback to be taller than 8 inches. Also annoying are paperbacks with rigidly hard covers and spines, which makes it so that they won’t stay open when laid flat on a surface and the edges of the cover dig uncomfortably into your palms or fingers while you hold them. I also don’t understand the paperbacks that have the same physical dimensions as a hardback. They’re floppy and unwieldy and just unnecessarily large. (Ironically, Tor publishes a fair number of these gargantuan paperbacks.)
A lot of hardcover books these days are also bigger than they need to be. And it’s not as if the print is any larger. This is made evident when you open them and discover vast amounts of margin space.
This trend toward oversized books seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. I’m sure there’s a particular reason behind this design choice but I don’t like it.
Stiff, tight-spined and uncomfortable-to-hold books are simply a scourge.
28: My US mass market paperback of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and UK MMPB of The Technicolor Time Machine come to mind…
I still have the first book of a series that will never be finished because of a publisher being a dog in the manger: somehow the author doesn’t have the right to even look for a publisher that WOULD want to try the next one, because of something in the contract for the first book. I am more peeved by this than everything in the OP combined.
That there is some kind of middleman between reader and author is fine and they serve a useful function. I accept that. A publisher hosts this virtual space we are conversing in and I appreciate it. But when a publisher becomes an OBSTACLE between the reader and author, that is — well, I’d say unforgivable, but I haven’t actually looked up which publisher it is and boycotted everything else they publish, so I guess I wouldn’t really mean that. But it’s definitely obnoxious.
It’s too rare to count as a peeve but I have a mass market paperback from the 1990s that was double spaced, perhaps to conceal how short the novel(la) was. Bad enough but it also had a self-congratulatory note from the publisher about how by making their books non-returnable, they were saving the environment. Unfortunately, unnecessarily doubling the page count meant they killed as many trees as a shorter, returnable book would have killed.
(Naive readers will be happier if they don’t ask what’s meant by book returns)
On a related note to the unexpected discovery that your book is the start of a series and the complaints about cliffhanger endings, I’m also a firm believer that sequels should include a recap early on to remind you what happened in the previous book(s). You can give me a simple recap at the outset or work it creatively into your early chapters, but odds are that I’ve read many dozens of books before your sequel finally came out, and I need a refresher. Very few authors seem to actually do this, but the ones that do have my deep gratitude.
Count me as another peeved by books that don’t admit they’re part of a larger whole. A true series isn’t necessarily a problem; sometimes the pieces are discrete enough that I don’t need all the events of the previous books fresh in my mind. (And sometimes a skilled author will subtly remind readers of salient points from previous books, but that skill is uncommon IME, as @33 notes.) But a single story in multiple physical parts is very aggravating if it arrives without warning. (The ones that do warn have a special place on my TBR shelves where they can wait for their conclusions.) Gregory Maguire recently returned to an old story with something that’s obviously part 1 of a new story, and I was … jolted … to find that after five Foreigner trilogies there was one story that took only two books — but this wasn’t hinted at in the format of the past-titles listing at the front, and I was depending on the next book (which was only the first half of the next story) to get me through a long trip.
@2: that was … unthinking — especially since by then Pohl would have had an example of how to do it correctly: MacDonald allowed the backstory hints of Travis McGee to drift from serving in Korea to serving in Vietnam.
@30: words are inadequate to express my confusion at a publisher thinking that a moonscape with rockets was appropriate for a novel set largely in the medieval North Atlantic (when it’s not in coastal California). Do German readers not expect any correspondence between cover and story, or was this an aberration?
<< getting annoyed because the Christmas wrapping on a present is wrong >>
My family reused several boxes from Christmas to Christmas. They were common useful sizes; for example, the empty box that had had a check reorder was good for a present roughly the size of your hand. As kids, or as a new in-law, it was very confusing and slightly infuriating until you learned that you were not actually receiving a box of checks, or an electric can opener, or a pair of shoes, or whatever.
Back-cover summaries written by someone who apparently doesn’t read science fiction, or in some cases, apparently hasn’t read the book.
Related to unexpectedly finding out that a book is the beginning of a series, but worse to me, is finding out a book is in the MIDDLE of a series and earlier books aren’t available!
@33: The best recaps I’ve seen are in Julian May’s Pliocene books; the recap in the fourth book is over 20 pages (as I recall) getting the reading fully up to speed on the dozens of characters and plotlines.
@30: At least for Moon, that’s an illustration of a plot-relevant location in the book (the first copy I read was this hardback).
Regarding updating books, there was the notable case of recent editions of “Childhood’s End” which updated the prologue from being about a 1960s era Moon launch to a 21st century Mars launch – but left the rest of the book, taking place decades after the prologue but featuring characters who remembered WWII clearly, unchanged. Another more recent update occurred in Gerrold’s “Man Who Folded Himself” – he moved the setting forward by a few decades, but doesn’t update lines that imply that someone born in 1980 is impressed by color tvs.
Some of my odder views on series involve series where I began with an intermediate volume like Dune Messiah.
I had to give up on the Rivers of London series because it appears as novels, comics, trade paperbacks of collected comics, ebooks, and some of the comics are graphic retellings of all or part of a novel.
The stories are good though and the characters are excellently written.
40: Not a complaint as such but I have to be very careful when linking to reviews of translated Japanese works to link to the correct format. Successful properties have a habit of appearing as manga and prose, and often anime as well.
One of my more unpleasant experience reading for the Hugo Awards (aside from the Puppy years) was one book which I was struggling to get through but forging on because for the Hugos I like to read every word of every work in the four story categories (once again, the Puppy years were an exception to this). Finally, about 85% of the way through (there was no indication before then that I noticed), something in the book made it obvious that this volume wasn’t a complete story and was going to end in the middle, and I finally had a reason to give up.
@0, @3 Donna Leon’s Venetian detective Guido Brunetti perceives the alternate spine direction of book titles in a suspect’s library as a clue to whether they are being truthful with him about understanding a certain foreign language.
My peeve is when series don’t have titles in some rational order. I shelve fiction like a library, alphabetical by author, then alphabetical by title. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone books soothe my sorting soul.
<< getting annoyed because the Christmas wrapping on a present is wrong >>
Years ago, my wife and I were invited to my brother’s girlfriend’s house for Christmas, since we were in town. Her mother over-wrapped all of the presents so that they matched the colour-scheme of the tree, which matched the ivory and gold colour-sheme of the house. I still wonder if the two dogs were picked to match the house, the decor was picked to match the dogs, or it was a coincidence.
That relationship didn’t last too long. I remember my parents celebrating after the breakup.
@44 It took me most of my high school years to realize that Skylark Three followed Skylark of Space as the second book of the series, and I was NEVER going to find a copy of Skylark Two.
I don’t mind ongoing series. Series like the Rivers of London make me feel that once I’ve read the first one or two the rest will continue being written forever and can be read out of order or not at all.
But if the author is intending to write a trilogy, I want to know it up front. I will delay reading the first volume until there is, at least, a second volume already published. I also expect reviews (cough cough Tor) to mention whether it’s part of a series and what volume it is.
James, earlier: “I had no idea how much it bothered me to read a familiar book in an unfamiliar cover.”
Comment 32: “(Naive readers will be happier if they don’t ask what’s meant by book returns)”
While I cannot deny the wisdom James offers in Comment 32, I wonder what he would have made of World of Ptaavs, Star Well, and Robert Crisp’s WWII memoir of tank warfare in North Africa, Brazen Chariots— all excellent books– and Robert Silverberg’s collection Needle in a Timestack, an adequate book, had he first encountered them the way I did.
In 1969 I frequented a Miami five-&-dime-type store called McCrory’s. At some point, they filled a bin with Ballantine SF paperbacks and other books. Sadly, and, to us teenage readers, cryptically, these paperbacks were naked; their front covers had been torn off. On the other hand, they were priced very, very low. And they still had all their words inside.
I read them eagerly, in some cases multiple times. But I wondered for years what their covers would have looked like, had I been able to see them.
Today, ISFDB or image-googling can answer this question in a blink of an eye. At the time I was browsing in McCrory’s and counting up how many quarters I could spare from my bus money, there were nine IMPs on the Arpanet.
Had James been in my shoes, perhaps no cover for any of these books would have looked right to him.
I also resent 1) books in series that aren’t numbered when it’s relevant (i.e. Poirot mysteries don’t need numbers because order doesn’t matter, Sanderson series definitely need numbers because order definitely matters) and 2) publishers radically changing the sizes and shapes of books, especially within a series.
I’ve been told that publishers do the former because they know most readers, if they’re browsing, won’t buy a book from the middle of the series (why they think this will encourage repeat business from customers irate from the deception and disappointment, I have no clue), but in my case, the joke’s on them, because I don’t buy books till I’ve read them anyway, so all their devious scheming does is cause me to curse their name when I’m standing in the library shelves five minutes before closing, trying to figure out which book in the series I’m supposed to check out next.
In the case of the variously sized books, I get extra annoyed because not only does it make shelving hard, but it makes packing them for moving even more difficult. I always start out with neatly filled boxes of the trade-sized paperbacks all stacked nicely and then find myself with all the oddballs that I try to organize optimally but that always end up wasting space. And that’s not even addressing how it splits up authors and series even more viciously than shelving aesthetics.
@23: I’ve always thought that the sleeve for Close to the Edge was inside out; the cool Roger Dean illustration on the gatefold should have been the cover.
Re: series — yes, books in a series should be clearly marked as such. Ideally with their position in the series… a concept that Terry Pratchett could have laughed his ass off over; I’m pretty sure that he deliberately made the reading order of those books pretty much fraught. At a minimum, though, there should be one of those “also by” pages in the front matter, listing the books in order.
Of course, you then get to the question of chronological versus publication order… I tend to favor the latter; putting The Magician’s Nephew at the head of the Narnia series is wrong in sooooo many ways. Curse you, evil publishers! (Even though Lewis stated in one or more of his letters to children that he preferred that order. Authors can be wrong about their own books.)
@29 “vast amounts of margin space” – on the outside margins, yes, but on these “stiff, tight-spined” books, as you put it, the gutter margins are often way too narrow, so it is hard to read the text near the binding without cracking something.
Related to this and @24’s comment about a single-volume LotR, yesterday I was going through my late parents’ effects and saw a book that originally belonged to my great aunts: a 1904 Oxford hardback miniature edition of Milton’s Poetical Works. 4¼” tall, less than 3″ wide and less than 1″ thick, but it manages to have 1,054 pages, be clearly legible (without a magnifying glass), opens well and also has good gutter margins. And the obviously very thin paper (526 leaves in less than an inch) is nonetheless dense enough that you only just get a ghostly sense of the text printed on the other side of the leaf if you look for it.
I first (and several times later) read LotR in one volume; a 1971 Book Club Associates (London) hardback edition, 1,077 pages, very clearly printed “in 10 on 11 point Pilgrim type” – so that’s the edition, cover and typeface I always associate with the story – and everything else is obviously just a fallen shadow of the ideal. (I like the spiky but also pastoral Pauline Baynes cover, though not the text for the title). The gutter margins are narrow but the book opens well, so that’s OK.
Regarding covers, I find I tend to be emotionally attached to covers of books I first read as an adolescent or young adult (particularly anything by Jody Lee or Michael Whalen). In general, though I tend to prefer the more modern somewhat abstract covers to ones that provided realistic illustrations that were often laughably unrelated to the story (and, in older works, frequently managed to feature scantily clad young women in implausible poses).
I moved almost completely to eBooks a few years ago. I live overseas, in a non English speaking country, with small apartments and an incredibly humid climate, so physical books are expensive, have to be shipped internationally, hard to store, and get mildewed. I’m not a tidy person, but several years of library work as a teen resulted in a habit of exquisitely organized media – I have amazing metadata.
The updating of books generally irritates me. I like the old references, and enjoy reading books written in the 40s and 50s set in a future that is my past. Altering casual racist slurs and the like, however, can be a somewhat different issue, particularly for children’s books, although at some point the sometimes problematic attitudes of the day are so baked into the story that they can’t be removed.
@42 – I hate to give up on a book just for seeming to be obviously unable to wrap up in the space remaining because after all, it *might* be like the third book in Hambly’s “Darwath Trilogy” (Armies of Daylight), where I was sure that she couldn’t possibly wrap up the trilogy in the few remaining pages until she actually did, and very satisfyingly. Alas for my naive hopes, I am so often disappointed.
As I recall, in the context of the letter (to John W. Campbell ‘s nephew!) Lewis was talking about the order for rereading the books
In 1997 & 1998 when I reprinted the 6 volume Lensman series I put numbers on the spines.
@26: Bad covers are a special pet peeve. Both because one is lugging this book with its cover to the store cash register and because one feels pity for the author. Covers of the last few years seem to have gone into one of their periodic down phases. That’s not even taking self-published book covers into account. A lot of them now look more like commisioned graphic designer projects with clip art silhouettes sprinkled about than something produced by an artist, and others feature large youthful faces taking up most of the cover (bordered by outer space or lush vegetation or whatever). Then there are the isolated mouths with pointy teeth (with blood dripping down from one), and the ominous looking houses leaking other vile substances. I miss the days of the abundant Palencar, Craft, Canty and Dillon & Dillon covers.
@3, @9, @13: Yes – I have some books shelved in a white paper sleeve that displays the title neatly and consistently and readably, and I’m considering filing e-books on the real shelves that way, too. And some books, I’ve labelled with the year of publishing, for series order purpose.
@40, @47: I haven’t noticed a “Rivers of London” graphic novel or comics series that just repeats a novel story, although some of them quote scenes from other stories. They do maintain and exchange continuity mostly, although Ben Aaronovitch likes to share not strictly canonical scraps, and one of his “Tales from the Folly”, for the Olympic Games I think, has a problem date. So it does look like it’s all just made up. Also – some of the books “spoil” others that you should have read first. Also also – the first of the books describes deadly violence against people who don’t deserve it, it calms down later a bit, but that’s too late for some of the starting cast. And main character Peter Grant is very sexual, compared to me anyway.
Posthumously calling books by an author a series, just because they share an imaginary setting, then republishing them with numbers on them, as if they’re meant to be read in order. I’m thinking of Le Guin’s Hainish novels.
46: Pohl edited six Star Science Fiction anthologies numbered 1 to 6, one collection of novellas and a best of the Star anthologies called Star of Stars. Inexplicably, Star of Stars was retitled Star 14 in the UK. How many British readers were misled into looking for Star 7 through 13?
I fall on the other side of recaps: I don’t like them. I generally read books in a series together and dislike having to slog through recapping especially because it is almost always done very poorly where a character suddenly remembers something or the narrator reminds you of something very obvious. 3 I wouldn’t mind a recap where it’s all done up front and has a disclaimer stating that it’s skippable if you don’t need it.
My other big pet peeve are dust covers. They’re pointless and annoying.
At one point I had eight volumes of the Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” series in eight different formats (UK hardcover, Quality Paperback trade paperback, UK trade paperback, US trade paperback, US mass market, US hardback, audio CD, and Playaway Audio).
@30,
I would face both books out, so they were shooting at each other.
Thanks to James and the commenters for voicing many of my own pet peeves! :-)
One to add to the fold is what feels like a growing tendency to publish novellas as stand-alone books; 20% of the content at 90% (or sometimes 100%) of the prize tag. “Rivers of London” is a culprit here, but the series is not the only one.
The evolution of British-published paperback SF art can be seen as at least partially the opposite of that in the USA; whereas 1960s British SF art was often tasteful and symbolic, by the mid-1970s much of it (not all, of course) trended towards the lurid and pulpish – though without the energy and nostalgic attraction of the original US pulps and early paperbacks. It was also frequently wildly inappropriate for the actual content – babes in brass bikinis adorning an edition of a Joanna Russ novel, for example. I recall wincing and seeking out battered earlier editions of quite a few books in preference to shiny new ones.
With regard to irritating updates of old fiction – I’ve been (very) gradually working my way through the collected “Jules de Grandin” stories by Seabury Quinn, published in “Weird Tales “ from the mid-1920s through to the early 1950s. All the stories in the first volume originally appeared in the 1920s, and most are full of contemporary references – particularly USA Prohibition. Indeed, that’s part of their charm (and it makes it easier to ignore the casual racism and dated attitudes in the stories that are rather less charming). A few however contain rather jarring minor updates, such as references to Prohibition being a thing of the past and to “The First World War” rather than the Great War. I suspect the changes were made in earlier reprints of the affected stories, but I still find them damn annoying.
@17: ‘I always took “collected stories” to mean, well, everything. But after buying some collections like that, I will find there is a “collected stories (volume 2)”’
Proposed subtitle for Volume 2: ‘the fecker went and wrote more!’
@63: I suggest a calming read of a classic novel, such as The Thirty-Nine Steps, 90 pages shorter than The October Man.
(Less obtusely: novels have gotten a lot longer than they used to be!)
What, no mention of Ace Doubles? Argh. Which way up do they go, which author takes precedence? Argh. Sure enough, I just went to look for the one I know I have (used to have more but, life, y’know?). Sure enough, I finally found it on the unfiled pile. But Philip High or Murray Leinster? Decisions…
Oh, and relevant to this site, I don’t actually remember owning any Tor Doubles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ace_double_titles
(88-91, I probably couldn’t cope with the format any more by then.)
Oh, and always glad to learn a new word: tête-bêche. Now, how to slip that casually into conversation..?
@66: Yes, it’s almost as if publishers should not be calling a book “collected stories” when the author is still writing. I guess they’re following the example of long-lived bands who produce multiple Greatest Hits albums over their careers (although “greatest hits” are plainly a selection, not a collection). Otherwise one might as well call every author’s first short story collection “Collected Stories” (then we’d miss out on interesting titles like Brian Evenson’s The Din of Celestial Birds).
I wonder if the Haikasoru decision was to somehow match the Japanese convention? Similar to the Germans and French, except they don’t just put the spine text in different orientation to the text, but run the whole book “backwards” from our point of view? I’ve seen some old English editions that put the title the other way on the spine, but not many – wonder when it became standardised, and why the French and Germans (and others?) do it differently…
The one about updating details reminds me of a comment by an author at a science fiction convention 30 years ago. They were discussing how the Nancy Drew books had been continually updated with each reprinting so that they would never seem too outdated, resulting in adults finding a copy of an old favorite and not recognizing their old favorite because the details were wrong.
“Sometimes, you’re the same, and the river is the same. It’s just that you’re not in Kansas any more.”
So, tell us, James, your thoughts on hexes and square grids…
Type too small. Margins so narrow you can’t open the book wide enough to read it without destroying the spine. Ink that comes off on your fingers. Acidic paper that goes brittle in only a few years.
Dark back cover type on a black or very dark background. Even small, spindly white type on a black background. Marketing departments–do you want people to *read* the back cover copy? Just asking. Oh, and with my current issue of Asimov’s in hand–Asimov editors, I don’t read the poems on solid black backgrounds. It’s just too hard.
Incomplete glossaries of terms invented for the book, and lists of characters, that never seem to contain what I am looking for.
But yes, I have become very cautious about reading books in a series till I *know* it’s finished and I have all the books in hand. Even so, some authors find it hard to resist adding more books after the “end.”
My biggest pet peeve about book format is quite simply the massive shift from smallish, cheap paperbacks that I can fit many of onto a relatively short shelf, allowing more shelves per vertical space, towards significantly larger trade paperbacks for twice the money that don’t fit my paperback shelves unless I put them spine up. Twice the money for less utility–and a bit harder to hold, and less likely to fit my jacket pockets (luckily my backpack is large), and all too many good books are only ever released that way. Grumble mutter.
It’s kind of understandable nowadays–the cheap, small space option is e-books. Sigh. But this shift was well under way a while before e-books became a significant thing. At that time it was just a money-grab.
As to old books with the n-word and other objectionable stuff . . . it’s going to have to be pretty significant in the history of SF or whatever for me to want to read it despite that stuff. But if I am going to read it, I’m going to want to see the book as it was made in the context it was written. If I read a falsified version I’m going to get wrong impressions of what that time was like; in a way I’m going to be more ignorant after I read it than I was before.
It’s not like someone being moronic in the 50s or whatever is going to make me adopt their moronic old ideas. And it’s better to face the reality of how moronic people were being in the 50s or whenever–especially since there are important, and dangerous, political strands who really do want to bring that stuff back, and whitewashing how it was is one of their methods (and yes, I used that particular term very deliberately).
I was talking to my oldest grandson about Huckleberry Finn, and when I mentioned the deuteragonist’s name while talking about the protagonist’s character growth, he said “You can’t say that word!”. Does Huckleberry Finn get bowdlerized these days?
Maps in ebooks are a pain in the rear (I am pasting tiny bits of maps in the content of mine so people have a Clue where the protagonist of that section is). Footnotes in ebooks are also Fraught, especially with Terry Pratchett because his are so cool.
From footnote 1: ” I am now familiar with a much wider range of ways optometrists can put an upbeat spin on cataracts, corneal scarring, and what may be a retinal birthmark” As someone with one of these issues, what on earth is the upbeat spin on them?
“Oh, everyone gets those eventually,” “The scarring isn’t getting worse,” and “we don’t think it actually impacts your vision.”
@30 I had that Heinlein paperback, and I never thought it quite fit the novel. Of course, I was buying paperbacks in the 70s, and most of the SF (especially reprints of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein) seemed to have been given generic Vincent Di Fate spaceport or interstellar war images unrelated to the contents. After a while, I stopped expecting much from the cover art.
What I find most distracting on the page is bad font choices. A colophon is usually a good indication that the author or editor has at least made an honest effort to match the font to the tone of the work. Heavier blockier fonts create a somber, oppressive mood. Balance between the openness of the loops and x-height coupled with elegant serifs creates a strong and energetic feel, appropriate to an adventure, and prominent serifs simply scream that you are in an epic. Sadly, most novels produced today seem to just grab whatever font is available. The worst crime in fonts, to me, is a font with italics that don’t look like part of the same family. You can’t just tilt the letters and call it italicized (if for no other reason than that it changes the height of the letters).
@76 I can’t see a comment 76. Mine jumps from 75 to 77, no matter how many times I refresh or reload the page. What’s up with that?
When I don’t know how a characters name is pronounced, my brain will start saying it different ways, disrupting my concentration.
Once I preordered a book and they changed the cover before it was released it was a first in series. I hated the new cover, I still haven’t been able to make myself read it. In a strange twist, the rest of the series has been published with covers that have a style of the original but discarded cover. Maddening!
The late wife’s pet peeve was changing the name of the book. There were used book stores that had a lot of her money because publishers of Agatha Christ would use two or more names for the same book.
My peeve is cover art that doesn’t match the story. Things as small as character hair color will bug me. The book cover and back blurb are for a book what a trailer is for a movie. When it’s used to lie to me, I feel ripped off.
! am an Ebook devotee but I like being able to see the cover art and zoom it up to see details. That is the big downside of my Kindle, I have to use the phone or laptop to see the cover in color. Lately it seems many covers are using cartoon like art which isn’t as interesting as many of the old fantasy art covers were.
I agree with others about series titles with no indication of story order.
I had this very, very (very) minor peeve about a change in book formatting, where for something like ten years each new Patricia McKillip novel came out from Ace with a) a cover by Kinuko Y. Craft; and b) text set in the Centaur typeface. And then they switched to a different typeface, and I was very slightly disappointed.
@14: No, Avery, you’re not the only one who hates cliffhangers.
Unlike James, I don’t particularly want to know a book is part of a series [I despise being told on the cover “Volume 1 of the xxx series”, a practice that is rampant in self-published books, but more and more common in trad-pub], but it’s because I will refuse to read any new series where volume 1 doesn’t come to a reasonable conclusion (“new”, because of course LOTR doesn’t count…). I don’t mind series with overarching storylines, but the sub-plot being told in book 2 must finish in book 2. I’ve been burned too many times by series that can’t find an ending.
There’s many a book on my Goodreads shelves with a glowing 1-star review, where I essentially say “I loved the writing, loved the characters, loved the plot, but because of that atrocious cliff-hangar, I’m never reading a book by you again”.
@18: (For example, Sue Grafton’s alphabetical title books about Kinsey Millhone.)
Heretic! Surely Grafton’s books HAVE to be read in alphabetical order. My stomach gets all queasy thinking of doing it any other way [and for the record, I have not read a single one. Possibly, initially, because of the fear she’d never reach Z. More likely the fear that there’d be a letter in the middle I couldn’t find. Or even, the fear that like my father-in-law (who did read them) I wouldn’t reach Z.]
@75: “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been objected to ever since it was published, by various people with various objections for different reasons.
The second character’s formal name appears to be one word of three letters. Perhaps I’m mistaken. If you’re referring to a word of six letters… the story has been reproduced without mentioning slaves or slavery (I think you’re referring to a character who is a slave, who is deleted in that version) and also mainly intact but with the word “slave” substituted for the six letter word throughout. It occurs to me that sentences which already included words “slave” as well as the six letter word would require special attention. I think I remember that it was sold at the same time as an edition as Mark Twain originally wrote it.
And people keep adding “The” to the title.
While I agree with many of the author’s peeves, it appears no one has the big peeve I do — seemingly utter lack of proofreading and copyediting. Lots of stupid spelling mistakes take me utterly out of the story as I furiously mutter “discreet, not discrete!” to myself. I don’t blame the author for this either–everyone makes mistakes, that’s why there is supposed to be a proofreader. It also sometimes feels like when an author gets big enough, the publisher somehow feels they can’t be edited anymore, like they’re too famous to be edited or something. Drives me nuts.