Let’s Talk Bookish: Predictable Books

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

These prompts are always so much fun, and this week’s is no exception! This is also the last Let’s Talk Bookish for November, which I can barely believe – December coming up, already? Time goes way too fast! And with December means, well, Blogmas, of course! But for today, let’s focus on…

Let’s Talk Bookish November 24th
Predictable Books

Prompts: Do you like guessing what’s going to happen in the books you read? Can a book be too predictable? Do you like to always be surprised, or can it be comforting to know what’s coming?

I love guessing, and I love it when I can predict things, but I also really love being taken by surprise! It has to be handled carefully though – I think sometimes twists can be a little too forced, or feel like they come out of nowhere at all, and that ends up frustrating. It also depends on the genre. I think horror comes with a sense of feeling unsettled, so you don’t want things to really feel predictable. Romance, on the other hand, hits certain beats, and I love when I can start piecing together how they’re going to go or at least when they’re coming up! And of course, if it doesn’t have a HEA, it’s not a romance!

Definitely books can be too predictable. Like I said, there are certain story beats romances tend to follow, but I like when the author manages to do something different with, say, a third act breakup. And if too much is revealed about a ‘threat’ early on in a horror novel, why am I going to care if we already know everything about it? The way I see it is you want the reader to be following a trail of breadcrumbs, picking them up one at a time until they stumble out of the woods and see the magnificent tasty house you’ve built to lure them in. I shouldn’t know, say, from early on in the book exactly how it’s going to end, but by three-quarters of the way through I should at least have some idea of how it all connects together.

I really do like a mixture, and again, it’s genre dependent. I like being surprised, but sometimes it’s nice to have something where you know the two characters are going to end up together blissfully living their HEA – when I need that though I do turn to romance, but I still like to be surprised a bit within the book itself. I feel like I read a fair mix of semi-predictable and really-not-predictable books, and sometimes it feels like an achievement to guess where a book is going, but that doesn’t always mean it’s predictable! I think I like when I can ‘see’ big picture stuff coming ahead – a third act breakup, or Protagonist Confronts Antagonist, or Everything Has Been Building to This, but it’s in the details where I really like to be surprised.

I’d love to your thoughts – do you like predictable books? Or prefer to be taken by surprise? Is it fun to guess what’s going to happen, or do you just settle in and enjoy the ride?