Silly me, whilst browsing NetGalley I came across The Forever Song by Julie Kagawa and went in to see if it was for my region and to see if perhaps maybe I could click the big green request button. I did. But then my eyes betrayed me and I accidentally read a piece of the blurb and learnt too much about the previous book! I am currently reading The Eternity Cure, and am no more than half way through and now I know too much!
I don't usually read book blurbs, maybe once in a while, to see what books are about for Waiting on Wednesday posts, a brand new series or author I've not heard of yet. But now I don't know if I should do that, what if this wednesday someone posts a sequel (like I did last week, not that I read that blurb) and I read that blurb, book one is then ruined.
But then if I never read blurbs and continue to judge books purely on their covers I am going to miss some good books. There are many books out their with terrible covers but have the best stories inside and I will never know.
Am I being overly dramatic?
Should book blurbs for sequels be a bit more vague in their wording? or should we who haven't read previous books just try harder to avert our eyes?
What are your thoughts on this?
I don't think you're being overly dramatic, but I don't see how sequel blurbs could be vaguer than they are. People who read the previous books usually want to find out as much as possible about the next one. I try to read only standalone blurbs or blurbs for first books in a series but unfortunately sometimes things get accidentally spoiled when you don't expect them to. I had a similar experience to yours last year with The fiery heart/Silver shadows combination. Surprisingly the Silver shadows cover was already revealed the same day The fiery heart came out, and silly me decided to mark it as to-read on goodreads. What I didn't expect was a whole blurb to go with the cover. And there was nothing vague about it. It ruined the entire previous book for me before I even started reading it... :S
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, unfortunately avoiding blurbs often reduces us to just looking at pretty covers, even though sometimes the not so great covers hide some pretty great books, or pretty looking books turn out to be nothing special on the inside.