Proper gammar, sentence structure, and typography. If the author doesn’t care enough to put the work into their work, I’m certainly not going to as a reader to make up for their lack of professionalism in their chosen craft.
It needs some kind of hook (like humor, or a plot, or ideas, or characters, or nice words), and can’t have disqualifying features, like agonizingly simple prose. I’ve also quit a book before because I hated every character. Not usually a fan of grim tales of nothing good ever happening, either (looking at you, A Song of Head Choppy and Eventual Dragons).
@InnocuousFarmer Harlan Ellison! That’s the author I couldn’t remember – wrote the other book I can remember putting down early. It was, just… extremely hypothetical torture porn, I guess. Not my thing, apparently.
It should have a good beginning sentence/paragraph that interests me. If it doesn’t pull me in with that, I probably won’t read it. At least, not voluntarily.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
“Tonight we are going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant. I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me. It is hard for me to resent my parents, although I envy them their naivete. No one even told them, when I was born, that they gifted me with an ill-luck name. Phedre, they called me, neither one knowing that it is a Hellene name, and cursed.
Pictures.
@nogoodwithnames Came here for this option.
Much like any movie - a book needs characters that I care about. I don’t have to like them, I just can’t be indifferent.
A good cover, so I can judge it!
A fantastic story wrapped around a bit of humor. Scalzi and Christopher Moore are great for exactly this.
@ruouttaurmind thanks, since I love Scazi, I’ll have to look up C Moore.
@mollama Have a peek at A Dirty Job. It’s the first in the Grim Reaper duology.
Pages. I am not nearly picky enough about what I read.
/giphy word!
With some exceptions to that rule
/giphy exception!
A Fix-it-Up Chappie named Sylvester McMonkey McBean.
/giphy sneetches
Beautiful pictures of interesting things, like cars, girls, or animals.
It better have a centerfold, with no staples in the wrong places.
@phendrick I think that is generally called a magazine.
Sparkling repartee.
An accompanying CD that goes “ding!” so I know when to turn the pages.
@mehcuda67 CD? Cassette tape or gtfo.
(j/k)
It doesn’t need to be ‘exciting’ per se but it does need to be compelling somewhere within the first 50 pages or so.
A movie or TV series, because I don’t read books.
The cats are optional…
Proper gammar, sentence structure, and typography. If the author doesn’t care enough to put the work into their work, I’m certainly not going to as a reader to make up for their lack of professionalism in their chosen craft.
@mike808
In my reader habits:
If I book does not contain those basics, it had better be hitting on every other possible cylinder.
This circumstance would be so rare as to be almost unknown.
It needs some kind of hook (like humor, or a plot, or ideas, or characters, or nice words), and can’t have disqualifying features, like agonizingly simple prose. I’ve also quit a book before because I hated every character. Not usually a fan of grim tales of nothing good ever happening, either (looking at you, A Song of Head Choppy and Eventual Dragons).
@InnocuousFarmer Harlan Ellison! That’s the author I couldn’t remember – wrote the other book I can remember putting down early. It was, just… extremely hypothetical torture porn, I guess. Not my thing, apparently.
@InnocuousFarmer - Harlan Ellison has written some things I’ve truly loathed, but he’s also… no, no I guess that’s about it.
#2 or 3
@readnj - I also like numbers in books - my favorite is 12.
It should have a good beginning sentence/paragraph that interests me. If it doesn’t pull me in with that, I probably won’t read it. At least, not voluntarily.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
“Tonight we are going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant. I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
@rockblossom Moar, please.
@djp728 Moar wat?
@rockblossom Chapterz
@rockblossom
“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
@djp728 Okey:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me. It is hard for me to resent my parents, although I envy them their naivete. No one even told them, when I was born, that they gifted me with an ill-luck name. Phedre, they called me, neither one knowing that it is a Hellene name, and cursed.
@djp728 @rockblossom
Happens to me every fucking morning.
/giphy animated cockroach
@rockblossom The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Compelling characters. I want to care about the people in the story.
All of the above minus cats plus what @dptalia said.
At least for fiction books. Non-fiction needs to have an interesting exposition.
I don’t just read books. I read authors. i find an author I like, research chronology, and then read everything by that author in order.
@rtjhnstn You ever read Neal Stephenson? You’d think he’s two authors. (I like both, can’t figure why I haven’t read more of his books.)
pictures