15 Days Book Blogging Challenge - Tell Us Your Deal Breakers

If you've been following my blog for the past two weeks, you know by now that I'm participating in the 15 Days Book Blogging Challenge hosted at Good Books and Good Wine. My introductory post for the challenge is here, and I've been having fun writing up these posts, though I've decided to write them all up ahead of time to post each day. Quite the departure from normal for me. I'm generally more of a "write and post right away" type blogger.

Anyway, today's topic is "Tell us your deal breakers?".

I'm only really aware of a couple of deal-breakers that I have. There may be others though that I don't even realize.

The two I know of for sure are tense and person.

Tense especially is the big one. I don't like present tense in a novel. "He says" instead of "He said", for example and the way one of my otherwise favorite writers has used it is like fingernails on a blackboard. This writer has used present tense for some points of view in some of his books and past tense for others, and it's the main reason I've gone away from two of his series.

The tense changes are something I really have to push past in reading those books and I just can't put them out of my head while reading.

The second one, person isn't as big of a deal-breaker in some cases. I just don't really like first person, and yet there are some books that use the "I" perspective where it really works and I do like the books. The biggest example that comes to mind in this case is Jack Whyte in the Dream of Eagles cycle. It's in that "I" perspective, but there's a framing set of scenes that set it up as a later written account by the main character, and it works.

Other books I've put down within a few pages because I can't get past the perspective. There have been a few books, and I'm not naming names here, where I actually get frustrated with myself, thinking "I should like this book because of...." but I just can't get past either the tense or the perspective.