Armchair BEA: it's giveaway time!

Yay, giveaways around the blogosphere! I love entering them, and I love hosting them when my bank account allows it ;) I always squee when I win one and from the reactions to the emails I send out to my winners the feeling is pretty universal, and I like making other people happy ^^

Since I think the book bloggers participaing in Armchair BEA come from quite diverse genres, I'm letting the winner pick their own book for once. It must be available from The Book Depository though and not over 10$ (as seen from my location). But please read the rules at the bottom!

Today's discussion is about literary fiction, but since I just wrote a sort of lenghty post on the Classics and don't really read contemporary 'literary' fiction all that much, I'm reverting to yesterday's topic that I missed: genre fiction.

As you know if you've been following me for a while, I love all things fantasy and paranormal. My breakthrough books were on the one hand the Harry Potter books, but after that it was those of a German author called Wolfgang Hohlbein. He wrote about all kinds of fantasy stuff: kids travelling to other worlds, beings from other worlds intruding into ours, high fantasy, computer games coming to live, a guy entering another world by walking across rooftops, creepy houses, elves, Arthurian legends, mirror worlds... I pretty much inhaled it all. Then came The Lord of the Rings (thanks to the movies), which I read many times, same as the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and other Tolkien texts. After that came my Stephen King phase.

Later I branched out to English&American authors like Anne Rice, Kim Harrison or Melissa Marr and discovered the whole vampire/paranormal/urban fantasy genres (both adult and YA)... and I was hooked! I read nothing else for years. I love the idea of the fantastical being part of our everyday world! Vampires, fairies, and demons are my favorites. I'm not a big werewolf fan but other kinds of shifters are interesting! I used to give zombies a wide berth but I'm slowly coming around to them, as long as it's not a zombie apocalypse thing. I've also branched out a bit more since becoming a blogger and now read contemporaries as long as they're not too heavy on the romance, and dystopians if their concepts stand out to me (I avoided them for a long time and am now catching up).

That being said, here are some suggestions for books you might want to check out if you win the giveaway. As I said though, you can choose whatever you like :)






Rules:

• open internationally, provided The Book Depository ships to you for free
• one entry per person / household. I check EVERY entry before picking the winner! You cheat, you're disqualified.
• you must be at least 13 years old
• the winner has 48 hours to respond to my email, otherwise I pick someone new
• I am not responsible for what happens with the book after I've ordered it
• the book must be 10$ or less, as seen from my location (Switzerland). Prices differ and sometimes I have access to editions that don't show up for US residents.

Have fun, and good luck!! 
If you have any questions or something doesn't work, tweet me! @Butterfly_Ghost
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Discussion: what ultimately makes you pick one book over another?

Hello lovelies :)

I've decided to try my hand at a discussion post again and I want to aim at making those a more frequent feature if I can. I really enjoyed the last one, where we talked about romance.

Today's topic is something I think about quite a lot and find really interesting to compare with other poeple.

What ultimately makes you decide you want to read/buy a book?

I'm not talking about finding it vaguely interesting, I mean that moment when you really make the decision 'I am buying this instead of the 10+ others around it' at the bookstore or put it on your 'I really really want to read this' list or the moment you choose it from the unread ones on your shelves. How do you decide what to read and what to pass on?

The cover
I think that's an important point for many people. We do judge books by their covers, for better or worse. Is it pretty? Shocking? Appealing? Does it stand out because of colors/font? Quite often I need only look at the cover to guess the genre.
Personally, I love looking at pretty covers. They often make me pick up a book and turn it around to read the description. But that doesn't mean I auto-buy the book. If I read the description and I'm not convinced, I won't buy the book unless I've read some great reviews. I've heard of people preordering/buying books by virtue of the cover alone though. How do you handle it?

The description
I think that's the most important thing to me. If the book sounds like 3 other ones I've already read (very frequent in YA paranormals/dystopians), I will get bored. If it sounds like tons of drama, I'll put it away. But if it intrigues me, I will buy it no matter how ugly I think fhe cover is. So one of my absolute pet peeves is books who have a lot of review quotes on their back instead of actual info of what they are about! I don't care what these people thought, the publishers only put the positive reviews on there anyway!
How do you feel about descriptions? Do you read them? Does a book sounding similar to another one you've already read make you more or less likely to buy it?

The title
This is tricky. If the cover got my attention, I often don't read the title before I've read the description on the back. I tend to skip big, bold text and get to the details immediately. Weird, I know. I often skip newspaper headlines. However, if the book is not lying on one of those tables but on the shelf, all you have is the title on the back of the book. So then it really depends on whether it sounds interesting to me. Is it funny? Does it have some of my favorite words in it? That will make me pull out the book to see what it's all about.

Length / how 'big' the book is

I don't own this picture. Source.

Some people like huge tomes, others feel daunted by that and prefer thinner volumes. As a teen I felt that anything shorter than 300 pages wasn't worth my time. Now I get fidgety at everything over 500 pages and have learned to appreciate shorter ones. Ultimately though, I don't really care as long as it sounds interesting and is well written.

Reviews / hype
If a book got great reviews from people I trust, I'm more likely to give it a shot even if it's not what I usually read. But I get a bit weary of a book being hyped too much or compared to other, really successful books. ('The new Twilight/Hunger Games!' Even if it has zero to do wit the book that sticker or whatever is on)
How do you feel about that? Does a hype attract you or put you off?

'Instinct'/'Feeling'
I don't know how to properly describe this but it's actually the most important thing to me. Call me superstitious but some books just call out to me. I see them and I know 'I have to read this'. It's like a jolt. When I read the description, I just know that I'm going to love it and I am right about 90% of the time. It's happened a few times that a lot of people got all excited about a title that just made me shrug my shoulders... and then the negative reviews began to trickle in and they pointed out all the bad stuff I had feared about the book.
Does any one else get this type of hunch about books? Or, you know, for some inexplicable reason pull one from the shelf only to think 'oh my god this sounds amazing'? Call me silly but I think that for each of us, there are books we are just meant to read, and they will find their way to us somehow.


There are many more factors that I think come into play, such as having read the author's other work, read an interview, the genre, your mood... feel free to discuss those too, or anything else you think I have forgotten! I'd really love to hear how you pick your reads :)