Bookish pet peeves #3

Do you go by book covers when choosing what to read?
I have several pet peeves concerning covers. Some of them will actually drive me away if I haven't already decided to read a book because of a recommendation or because it's part of a series, for example.

One of them has been haunting me lately - the cover filled up with text. I'm not saying by any means that this is a recent invention, it seems to me, however, that it becomes more and more popular.
Of course, I understand that it's a matter of marketing.
Tell me what else the author wrote. Mention a book by someone else it reminds of. And if there is a movie, by all means make sure to use an image from it for the cover and tell me that it's now a major feature film with a big star, even better two.
If famous writers, reviewers or newspapers and magazines inform me how much they love a book without actually saying anything about it, I'm sure to love it too. Use words like "groundbreaking", "exhilarating", "impossible to put down". Oh, and let me know if it makes you cry or laugh, please.
Add some "stickers" and award information (not removable on physical copies of course) and I will love it even more.

There's just one thing - I don't. I'm not interested in what those people say, mostly because there's a good chance I don't even know them. I also don't want to know if the book is a some book club's choice or on which bestseller list it is, actually not even that it is a bestseller.
For me all of that is visually overwhelming. It possibly makes me dismiss a book without giving it a fair chance because it makes my brain explode a little. Enough for it to become a pet peeve, well, and even write about it.

As a post without a picture always looks a bit sad, but I didn't want to call out books whose covers I don't like (although I already had a list), I chose one instead that I do like. A title and a name. A bit old-fashioned, just like me.

Seriously, though, how important is a cover for you? Have you seen books you didn't want to read because of their covers, if so, for what reason?


By the way, if you write book reviews or blog posts about other book-related matters - even movies based on books - please check out "A Good Book and a Cup of Tea", a monthly bookish blog link party that I host together with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings. You can find out more about it here.

Bookish pet peeves #2

"I don't need any special preparation, because I'm not nervous, I don't have what the Germans call lumpenfever, which is stage fright."
That's from a biography about Peter Ustinov and it was the last straw.
Let's talk a bit about foreign words in books.
You can imagine that I notice the wrong spelling or grammar for German words or phrases in English books more quickly, but this is by no means a problem of the German language only.
I've seen Germans do "interesting" things with the English language, English or German speaking people with the French language and so on, and those are just the languages I know something about.

This isn't going to become one of those "your/you're" discussions (although some things like those can drive me crazy silently, no matter who does it or in which language).
It's not about blogs or social media posts, either. Although I often look up words I'm not sure of at the moment, I make my share of mistakes and typos, no doubt (and correct even really old posts if I come across them again).
I'm talking about books by big publishing houses.

Do you know what lumpenfever means? Nothing. A German "Lump" is a "rascal" and "fever" is not German, it's, surprise, English. The word they meant is "Lampenfieber", literally "lamp fever".

Among the languages Ustinov spoke was German, and although it was not always perfect, which absolutely added to the charm, I wouldn't be surprised if his biographer simply got confused by the German "Lampe" being pronounced like the English "lump" and of course "Fieber" and "fever" sounding very similar.
What I don't understand - and that may be an idea from a mad librarian's brain - is why that kind of information isn't checked before printing.
I think Ustinov's biography pushed me over the edge because it wasn't the only German mistake in it, it was just the most interesting looking one.

Of course it's not only books, but articles, TV shows, movies, news.
I will never not cringe (petty, I know) hearing Geoffrey pronounced with an o for the eo as in George instead of Jeffrey in German dubbings, but that's just the first one that comes to mind because I heard it again in a movie not long ago.
Having non-German actors play Germans can be just as terrible to listen to as can be UK actors playing Americans etc. and the other way round or Germans mangling a regional dialect that isn't their own (which I'm sure also happens in other languages).
I also think it's a matter of respect to learn especially how to pronounce names that are foreign to us and of people doing that professionally I'd expect it even more.

Do you have a pet peeve like that?


By the way, if you write book reviews or blog posts about other book-related matters - even movies based on books - please check out "A Good Book and a Cup of Tea", a monthly bookish blog link party that I host together with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings. You can find out more about it here.

Bookish pet peeves #1

I call this #1 although I don't even know yet if this is going to be a series, if it is, it will probably be an irregular and rather spontaneous one about the little things that annoy me about books - just as today's post in fact.
It's not a new pet peeve of mine, but today I got something out of my book cabinets and there it jumped at me again.

Let me start with something a little (actually a lot) earlier and non-bookish, though.
My siblings and I used to have stamp "collections". I can't tell you anymore where those stamps came from exactly and I say "collections" because we were enthusiastic, but didn't know that much, also they were quite small. My favorite stamp series were not those that had colorful pictures of animals, flowers, buildings, inventions or whatever. Those were pretty, but I was drawn to those with the same design in different colors.
One of the extra benefits of having a pen pal in England who also sent little gifts sometimes was getting different stamps. The Machin series which ran from 1967 to 2022 was my favorite. So many pretty colors! I'm not the only one, there are whole videos on them, and when I just asked my sister about her favorite design, she didn't hesitate to name this one as well.

Public domain
via Wikipedia

This wasn't just limited to stamps, though. I liked all the colors for shampoo bottles, chocolate bars, if I gave it more thought the list would grow for sure.

Now to the books.
I'm sure you all know the stories about people going to a bookstore - probably not happening as much anymore now - and asking for two meters of blue or red books to complement the interior design of their living room. One of my fellow trainees at the library had been a bookseller before and told us that it had actually happened to her. It also happened that someone wanted an encyclopedia, but asked if it also came in a different color because it didn't match the couch.

Maybe you already know where this is heading. I'm absolutely fine with books looking different in my cabinets, it's a sign of the variety.
But ...
This are all books from Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series which runs from A to Y (as Grafton sadly couldn't complete it). I know there are only 24 books, that's because there are two novels in one of them.

If you go to her website, you have a list of the whole series ... and all the covers look the same. Oh, how I wish I had those!
My books, however, well, you can see it for yourself.

I started out with the German translations, but not in order. I bought one book, liked it and then added others from fleamarkets or used book sites. So there are not only two publishers, but also different editions from one of those. They were also the ones who decided to print the titles in different directions and in different spots on the spines, change to a larger format from the letter O on, and then drop the series completely after R.

So then I had to change to the English editions and had to take what I could get my hands on first. The result is even wilder than for the German editions.

Do publishers even know what that does to a brain like mine?