Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme where every Tuesday we look at a particular topic for discussion and use various (or more to the point ten) bookish examples to demonstrate that particular topic.  Top Ten Tuesday (created and hosted by  The Broke and Bookish) is now being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl and future week’s topics can be found here.  This week’s topic is:

10 Things that make me pick up a book

The author – this has to be the first reason.  Certain authors are just naturally on my ‘go to’ list.  I always keep an eye out for their next piece of work and as soon as I hear the merest hint of a book on the horizon, even the far horizon, like, so far on the horizon that it’s barely even a dot, I’m am all about that book.  I want it.  I want it now.  Give it us preciouss..

What’s that you say?  A new book, tell me more…

Bloggers –  I follow a lot of you folks and you definitely keep my TBR in a perpetual state of ‘impossible to complete and dangerous should it ever fall over’.  Yes, I’m talking to you – you know who you are!

Photo taken from Irish Times

The cover – Yes, I know this may sound very fickle but, in my defence, cover art can be a seriously beautiful thing, it’s the first thing that draws your eye on a shelf, you can usually find a description for the book, the price and quite often some information on the author – so yep, I stick by this.  Covers are the bee’s knees and the camel’s hips – here are a few of my more recent lovely looking covers.  Are you not entertained:

Sales/discounts/giveaways – If you buy books on an almost constant basis reductions and giveaways are always nice.  I like to support authors so even though I receive a good number of ARCs I usually buy two or three books a month and I also pay a monthly subscription to Audible.  So discounts and giveaways = happy me.

Next in series – I realise that I have a lot of uncompleted series in my stacks of books.  I think I have completionist issues or something!  But, sometimes the final book in the series might not yet be released – I’m just trying to find excuses for not completing all my series really.  I actually need help.  Send help.

The description – see the cover item above – I like to read the blurb.  Sometimes they can be a bit over chatty, sometimes they can lead me in the wrong direction (usually by my own determination to go down the wrong route to be fair) and sometimes they can be spot on and incredibly enticing.  Those ‘spot on’ blurbs give me a serious case of the ‘grabby hands’.

Publisher invites/catalogues – I can’t help wanting to accept invites.  It just feels rude not to!  And catalogues – you simply have to browse them.  It’s actually compulsory – you just have to.  Tell me I’m not alone in this.

Hype – we all like to jump on hype and generally cat-call and boo it from the stands, but then at the same time we can’t help but be drawn to the books that are receiving all the hype – nobody wants to miss the next ‘best thing’.

If it’s being adapted to a movie/series – as soon as I see that one of my unread books is being made into a film or series it makes me desperate to read the book first.  Don’t ask me why, but once I’ve seen the adaptation I just can’t go back and read the book.  I have a mental block.  Check out this rather wonderful post for a list of forthcoming (or already released) adaptations.  I’m very excited for some of these.  NOS4A2 looks particularly scary – I’m going to have to pick up the book very soon.

What about you?