What makes you pick a book up?

[WallabyWay]

What features, cover designs key phrases or author names draw you to a book?

I'm a complete sucker for anything with French flaps. I almost always have to have them.

Also for some reason I love illustrations of fruit on a book. I've no idea why as I don't especially like fruit.(While I'm here may I mention how much it pains me that Pineapple Street has an orange on the cover and not a pineapple.) Also plants,

I also love wallpaper patterns on covers. I know that I shouldn't judge books by them but I still can't resist a beautiful cover.

Deckled edges on the other hand, are a complete turn off. They make me feel ill.

I rarely buy books on impulse. When it comes to fiction, I follow the advice of the critic Harold Bloom. Also, I’m sick of the way bookshops now promote anything woke or left-wing. Too often, you will see the same types of books turned to face the customer, or put on stands by the left-wing staff, to encourage you to buy them. Critics and arts journalists are as bad. I can no longer trust their advice. They no longer judge books purely on merit. They are more interested in who wrote them.

I also tend to work though books by favourite authors. For example, I love Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde. I have loved these writers for 25 years, yet I’m nowhere near reading everything they’ve written.

Most books I buy are either book club choices or 99p on kindle.

The ones I choose are from favourite authors or just have an interesting title or book cover. I then usually read the synopsis and maybe reviews.

@JaneyGee

Couldn't agree more-if a pile of pure shite was written by someone with the correct woke credentials, it is given prime spot-and this happens all too frequently.

I heard a book tuber recently try to push a book that sounded rubbish-I checked the first few pages on Amazon and it is-because it was written about a First Nation person. She ended by saying that as she wasn't a First Nation person, she hoped she would be forgiven for having opinions on it. 'American Dirt' was also given a dissing because the author wasn't the nationality she was writing about.

A good job Tolkien isn't writing today, as he wasn't a hobbit and publication would have been refused on those grounds.

In these cases, I always give a thumbs down to the video and, when in a bookshop, put another book in front of/on top of the offending article.

So sad that books are now judged to have merit, not on the plot or writing but rather than the author. I wish we could go back again to the times when it didn't matter what the author's opinions are but judge the book on merit alone.

Reading this has just reminded me of the new Oscars diversity rules for films.

I'm left wing but I agree with Richard Dreyfuss who says the new Oscar rules "make him vomit"

would never buy a book just because of its cover, I look for authors I know, recommended books, sometimes the write up on the back but mainly now I use the option of downloading a sample on kindle, has saved me a fortune on books that looked good but on reading the first few chapters definitely weren’t

Well they say you should never judge a book by it’s cover…but I’ve found plenty that way but tbh there’s always more to it than that - I mainly buy used books as I enjoy mulching around in bookshops - I never “need” anything and rarely have a specific book in mind that I want to buy… it’s all too easy to find something though. I like used books that look like they’ve been read, the bookmarks, the marginalia, the dog ears. In most books I also look for a good index, good chapter construction but that’s mainly for nonfiction but with the thin poetry collections I like interesting titles or ones that seem to give me an real clue as to what they might be about, I also like biographical sections - who wrote something and why matter to me. I don’t but that many new books but I get emails from newspapers and other book review sites and make a note of things that I might try look for a few years down the line in used book shops. For poetry I look for Bloodaxe the publisher and I like translated poetry from all over the world.

Good typesetting and typography help make a book look attractive. I like it when an author/publisher has really made an effort to try and make the book look like an object to desire - small drawings or quotes in the chapter headings, extra’s like a bit of biography, a readable forward, not just as list of thank-you’d.

@WallabyWay I found this wonderful book and poet in a used bookshop primarily from picking up the book because of the cover
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-mystical-rose-271

Thank god I'm not the only one who has noticed. Harold Bloom, the great literary critic (and one of the few reliable guides to literature) was warning about this fifty years ago. Back in the 1970s, when he was a Harvard professor, he watched literature departments taken over by left-wing academics. He also noticed the way arts journalists were over-praising certain novels because the author ticked certain boxes. Today, it's much, much worse. In fact, I pretty much ignore things like the Booker Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. And I rarely buy new books. The literature professors and book critics have completely lost my trust. They ought to have been barricading the streets when Roald Dahl's books were re-published in a 'corrected' form. God, it was like something out of Stalin's Russia. And if anyone thinks it's going to stop there, they are naive. That was merely the beginning. They were just testing the water. Now they know no one will stop them, all the classics will be up for 'correction'. After that, the next step will be banning books altogether.

The woke left are now making a serious effort to replace the literary canon. That's their long-term project. Ideally, they'd like a kind of Year Zero, in which we build a new, 'approved', woke canon. In the past, books lovers left their politics aside. They loved and revered literature too much. George Orwell, for example, uses the example of a right-wing Tory critic who gave a glowing review to a novel by a Socialist. Even though he hated the man's politics, he recognised his artistic genius. Such integrity has gone. The literary establishment has surrendered to the left-wing/woke mob. For example, I got an email last year from my old university telling me they planned to 'de-colonise' the university library. I mean wtf!!!? It's like something out of Orwell's 1984.

Anyone who loves and cares about literature needs to fight back. Forget politics. Great art is above politics.

Books that are recommended by an author i Trust.
I chose one recently where the blurb said ' for fans of Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler etc etc' . It was very good.

Agree with pp, the vilification of the American Dirt author really annoyed me. And the trouble with it is that a lot of (young) people have opinions on it, from sm, despite never actually reading the book.
I find that it quite cathartic to read a book , sometimes from only a few years back that hasn't been censored as it would be today.

Totally agree. I usually read non-fiction and can't stand the tendency of authors to ram their opinions, often on unrelated matters, into the text. I'm not referring to memoirs. Of course, you'll often be able to tell where their sympathies lie by what they focus on etc, but it's the blatant smugness of it that I find troubling. The assumption that all "right-thinking" people must surely agree and so on.

I used to think that the fact that I generally read much less than when I was younger (I'm now mid-50s) was down to age or difficulty with concentrating, but have realised recently that it's often this style of writing which is turning me off. When I read much older books I've found my old love of reading return and am easily drawn into them.