The Book Rioters call it the wheelhouse. I tend to think of certain settings, plots, characters, and tropes as booknip. I cannot resist books when I run across certain things in a book review. This has gotten me into trouble a time to two, when it turns out that the booknip is the only good part of a book.
Here’s what sends me running to add a book to my to-read list:
- Books set in places, times I’ve never read about before (unless it’s the ’50s)
- Metafiction
- Fantasies set in and around libraries, bookshops
- Ethical dilemmas
- Russia during the Revolution and Civil War
- Picaresques with brains as well as silliness
- Reincarnation featuring several characters who keep finding each other through the centuries (unless it’s a romance)
But if I spot these things in a book description, I will immediately stop reading the blurb:
- Stories of dysfunctional suburban families or crumbling suburban marriages
- “Contemporary romance”
- Were-anything other than wolves
- The 1950s
- Cosy mysteries and/or mysteries that have terrible puns in their titles
- Rich people problems/first world problems
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