Suggested by Jennysbooks:

Something I’ve been thinking about lately: “What words/phrases in a blurb make a book irresistible? What words/phrases will make you put the book back down immediately?”

To get straight into it, I find it incredibly difficult to think of words that would make me put a book back down, because the books that go back on the shelf are the ones whose blurbs aren’t memorable. That being said, if I see something along the lines of “an explosive new thriller” or “from the motion-picture” or anything unashamedly mass market, the inner snob in me cringes just a little.

I’m going through the last few books I’ve read/bought: Heliopolis by James Scudamore has a blurb on the inside cover that describes it as “By turns comic, violent and poignant, it is a rags to riches tale like no other…” (I dislike the word poignant, but ‘comic’ and ‘violent’ won me over.)

When I first bought Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell many years ago, I was not aware of its cultural significance. I bought it because Peter Quennell wrote, on the back, that “Orwell shows himself a powerful satirist; and the message that the book delivers has not lost its force today.”

I must love the word satire, because that’s the same word that popped out when I bought We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

And before realising what a pile of crap Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, was, I was drawn to it from a review quote: “Hilarious and well-written…sex always seems to be an option.”

To summarise: Words that I like seem to include satire, political, violent, comic, sex (and if something has been described as ‘cult’ I find it hard to resist). It would be interesting to go through all the books in my collection and undertake some sort of content analysis on the most common words/phrases from blurbs.

Do you have any words or phrases that either attract or repel you to a book? What about endorsements – who would you trust? I personally love to see George Orwell or Stephen Fry endorse something on the back of a book.