Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Things That Make Me Instantly Want (or Not Want) to Read a Book

Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is “Top Ten Things That Will Make Me Instantly NOT Want To Read A Book.” I just came back from my hiatus a few days ago and since I missed last week’s topic, I thought I’d combine last week’s and this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topics.

Book Turn-Offs:

1. Love Triangle – Raise your hand if you knew this was going to be on my list. I am not a fan of the love triangle. I have all sorts of feelings about this, but one of them is that I hate how it can unnecessarily pit two characters against each other while adding nothing to their character development.

2. Vampires – I’ve never read Twilight, so this is not where the aversion to vampires comes from. I’ve just always felt that we’ve romanticized these creatures so much and their darker, more sinister version are far more interesting.

3. Incest – I don’t even understand why I need to put something like this on this list, but I don’t get the appeal of books that have family members falling in love. I’m especially turned off by books where the characters have grown up together thinking they are related, but when they find out they aren’t, it somehow makes the relationship okay. No. Just no.

4. “Not Like Other Girls” Mentality – I need this trope to die in a flaming crash with nothing but the smoke from its incineration left to bear witness.

5. Insta-Love – I will almost never pick up a book if I think it has insta-love in it. There is only one case of insta-love that I will defend to the death and that is Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star.

Book Turn-Ons:

6. Magical Realism – I need all the magical realism novels in my life. I have not read nearly enough, but when I do, I fall instantly in love with the genre all over again.

7. Witches – Witches, witches, give me all the witches. I need more witchy books and more specifically, more modern-day witches would be amazing.

8. Latinx protagonist – There’s nothing like seeing yourself reflected in a book. Seeing more and more books with Latinx protagonists sometimes makes me want to cry a little because I almost never got to see myself reflected in media when I was a kid.

9. Friendship – Can we just get more books that focus on friendship? I love a good romance (I’m a sucker for the slow burn), but I also think that there are other relationships beside romantic ones that have just as much value. I’d love to see more books focus on this.

10. Something Different – This last one isn’t very specific, but there are some storylines that I feel like I’ve read multiple versions of, but if a story sounds truly unique, I’ll probably be interested in checking it out.

I missed last week’s Top Ten Tuesday, so what was number one on your list of things that instantly make you want to read a book? Do we have any book turn-offs in common this week? Let me know in the comments and be sure leave a link to your own TTT post, so I can visit.