Too Ugly to Read

You can’t undo your awareness of something. Like when you hear a new word and then you start hearing it everywhere. People must have said it before you knew it existed, only you weren’t cognizant of it and therefore it didn’t penetrate your brain.

That’s how I feel about type sometimes—where I’m aware of how bad it is. I’ll be at the library and pick up a promising looking novel only to realize that the type inside looks terrible; the font is too heavy or too large or just plain wrong. Or the leading between the lines is too crammed so it’s uncomfortable to look at. It could be any number of things, but something about the type irks me to the point that I have to quickly shelve the book because I can’t stand to look at it.

How-to books (on crafts, sewing and knitting) sometimes make me sigh in disappointment. I’ll open a book only to be overwhelmed by how clunky and how difficult to read the directions appear…which only motivates me not to want to do it all. It can be quite depressing to look at type that is so blatantly bad and information so poorly organized (that I can’t help but wonder how the book got published at all).

The main focus of any book should be the content, but if the type isn’t right then it distracts me from that content to the point where I don’t want to read it at all. It may seem like a minor point, but it’s hard to ignore terrible type. As time passes I am less and less forgiving about the ugliness of things that could have been so easily fixed.

How-To Fill Two Minutes

Like most people, I find TV commercials an unhappy interruption during my TV program. It’s rare to find a TV commercial that I will watch of my own free will. [If it’s an amusing one, I may actually pay attention…but how often does that happen? (Pause.) Practically never.] No, most commercials are dull or stupid or repeated so many times that you can’t bare to watch it one more time.

To me, commercial time means that I have a couple of minutes to get a drink or I might check to see what other shows are on. But most often I’ll just mute the TV until my program comes back on. Silence is sweet when the alternative is hearing about “consulting your doctor about the side affects of this drug” or something equally riveting.

If it’s one of the few TV shows that I actually watch (rather than half-watch while I’m doing something else, like cooking, knitting, drawing, crafting, etc.), then I generally have a book nearby to read during commercial breaks. Because if I’m watching a TV show in its actual time slot (that lasts an hour), then a good quarter of that time is filled with commercials. That means I have at least fifteen minutes to kill, and reading a book is an easy way to fill a couple of minutes until my show comes back on.

I’m sure advertisers hate people like me, who try to avoid their very expensive commercials. [Pause.] My response is: make it better. If it’s not interesting, then I’ll just find some other way to amuse myself to avoid the white noise that is most commercials.

Give It Up Already

Through shear determination, I used to try my best to finish books that weren’t very good merely because I had started them. Despite the bland or stupid characters or the inane plot points that made me roll my eyes in annoyance, I hoped things would improve because I had started off so optimistic; the book had a good cover, it received positive reviews and the synopsis sounded intriguing, so I wanted to like it. And 50 pages in, I was still waiting for the book to get good. By the middle of the book I realized this book wasn’t going to get good. And by the end of the book I wondered, “Why did I just waste my time reading this stupid book?”

So now I believe in giving up. Reading for fun is supposed to be fun; it’s not supposed to be a chore to read. If a book doesn’t capture me in by page 50 (okay, sometimes it’s closer to 10), then I’ll put it down and start a new book, because I don’t really want to waste my time with a story that I’ll inevitably give “The Sigh of Disappointment” to. (You know the sigh. Everyone has one. It’s that long drawn-out exhale sigh dripping with disappointment and perhaps laced with a dose of irritation or resignation. I use it often when I’m unimpressed with something—and a bad book brings it out…a lot.)

Gone are the days where I plow through a bad book in the hopes that it somehow gets better—because it doesn’t. It’s just an exercise in torturing yourself, and then all I’m left with is the bitter aftertaste of successfully finishing something that wasn’t worth finishing to begin with. There are so many other books out there. Better books. As soon as I realize a book isn’t for me, I have no qualms about giving it up. The sooner I can get rid of it the better, so I can replace it with (hopefully) a better book.  

Marked Up

Every so often I’ll be reading a book and I’ll notice something wrong with the text, whether a misspelling, incorrect punctuation, or using the wrong word (e.g. “I” instead of “It”). I’m sure any book goes through multiple proofing stages, but with so many words it’s inevitable that not every error is caught. While the overlooked mistake may take me out of the story for a brief second, I then quickly move on without a second thought.

However, some people can’t let it go. It always makes me laugh when I’m reading a book from the library and someone has marked it up with proofreader marks. I can’t help but wonder, was someone reading the book and noticed an error and had to get up and find a pen to correct that mistake, or does that person always read with a pen in hand, ready to catch any and all mistakes? Either way, that person had to care quite a bit to actually do something about it.

I suppose everyone is irked by something and feels the need to fix that something (if possible). I can’t help but notice the design choices that are everywhere (e.g. book covers, food packaging, signage, stationary, ads, menus, etc.). I admit that I’m irked at times with poor typeface choices, a lack of readability, awkward kerning, terrible color palettes or bad photography, and while some of it might be personal preference, much of it is just bad design. If I could, perhaps I would whip out a red pen and mark up the problems I see…but that would be defacing property. [Pause.] I can’t really do that. So all I can really do is just sigh in disapproval and move on (and hopefully get distracted by the shiny pretty delicious design out there instead).

Book Attack!

A love of books was ingrained in me at an early age. I read often and enjoy going to the library or bookstore and discovering new books. I admit that I often pick up books with pretty covers (I just can’t seem to help it—its allure lures me). But then I’ll skim the first few pages to see if the content and writing appeals to me before taking it with me or returning it to the shelf. Usually at worst a book can do is bore me. [Pause.] Usually.

Recently, with a hardcover book in hand, I was reading in bed. Normal enough. And then I somehow lost my grip of one side of the book and the corner of the book smacked me in the lip. It hit me hard enough that it not only hurt, but it also made me bleed. That’s right, a book gave me a bloody lip. How sad is that?

I didn’t see it coming (literally). I expect to accidentally bang my knee on a table or prick myself with a needle, but getting hurt by a book? No, a book is not a weapon (unless wielded improperly as I did). It was totally lame to get hurt by such a normal and benign object. [Sigh.] Lame enough that I could see it as a B-horror movie: Book Attack! (It would have a simple plot of a young woman librarian who stumbles upon a magic book that brings all the books in the library to life. Perhaps the books grow teeth to eat tasty humans or maybe the book characters become a part of the real world and zany horrors ensue.) It would be a fine cheesy film. 

TV Money Notebooks

When I was a kid, my parents tried to get my brother and me to read more and watch television less. I was probably around seven or eight years old when they instituted “TV Money” (where my brother and I had to pay to watch television). TV Money came in thirty and sixty-minute increments, and my dad designed them using family stuffed animals instead of American presidents for the faces on the “money” bills.