Things that really wind you up in novels

Messing with Christopher Brookmyre like that also means they couldn't carry on and do the sequels.

Have you read The Sacred Art of Stealing? (a non-Parlabane one)

I've read two books in the past month (I shall not name them as don't want to spoil it) when I have found out at the end that some of the characters have been dead all along. Ga! I am totally over that particular plot twist. It's so 1999.

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Mind you, I do love a male writer who can create plausible women characters. My two favourites, Phil Rickman and Christopher Brookmyre, are both brilliant at characters. (One of the reasons I was so furious with the TV adaptation of Quite Ugly ONe Morning was that they altered the book to make the two main female characters 'female characters' who only existed in relation to the protagonist. In the book, Sarah is the murder victim's ex-wife and Jenny the detective is a lesbian; in the TV version Sarah is the hero's ex-wife and Jenny ends up falling for the hero.

On another note to Mr King SPOILERS AND RANTING

Reading Mr Mercedes and oh I've cringed all the way through. I just can't cope.

There's a young black lad who apparently doesn't want to be black and to take the piss he talks in this old time stereotypical black slave language 'yassuh mistah!' and the amount of times the baddie calls him the N word is OTT. I mean i know he's portraying him as a racist but really? It's gotten uncomfortable to read now. The dialogue between the lad and the protagonist is cringe inducing - 'only you is sherlock, I is Doctah Watson!'

Cliche things

• like this retired policeman takes a notebook out that he once used and puts it in his pocket. The chapter ends with 'It fits just right'.How twee
• they do a profile on the killer and its the same old 'abused, impotent, higher than average intelligence'
• aging, overweight retired policeman gets the younger, rich beautiful woman who has hired him. She hasn't had sex in such a very long time after her abusive husband
• " go get em cowboy" "be careful cowgirl" BAWKKKK.
• 'He grins. There's a wavelength, and they're on it.'

The themes are repeated again and again it seems so clumsy. Older people not being able to use technology apparently, victim blaming to the highest degree, the way the lad who's black is portrayed.

I've not even bloody finished it.

In Harry Potter, the American versions say "Sorcerer's Stone" rather than "Philosopher's stone".

Other things I remember being changed in modern versions of the Famous Five, having seen a few original copies:

"Put iodine on that wound" becomes "put stuff on that wound";

"I bet I'll get an awful spanking" becomes "I bet I'll get an awful telling off";

"Julian's stentorian voice" becomes "Julian's voice";

"kit bag" becomes "rucksack";

and the children wearing "jeans" instead of "skirt" or "shorts".

It's a shame because I really enjoy his stories I just don't enjoy his writing as a whole.

I love Stephen King too but occasionally he commits acts of Creepy Objectification In Description Of Female Characters, when you would think he would know better.

Countertop microwave ovens were around in the late 60's, but in 1971 roughly only 1% of US people had them. (quick google). FAIL STEPHEN KING.. FAIL.

Regarding Stephen King: I generally love his stuff but Joyland seemed a bit sloppy in places. Most of it is set in 1973 but he mentions someone microwaving soup and I am pretty sure that microwave ovens weren't around until about 1979. Another general observation, with authors who have been writing for a long time, is that some of their later books can get a bit patchy around details WRT how younger people think, speak and behave, simply because the authors are older and getting out of touch.
Mind you, one of the reasons I love Stephen King's Christine is because it feels like such a brilliant portrayal of Smalltown US teenage life in the late 70s (though I am not a Yank and therefore don't know how accurate it might be - any US MNers in their 50s got any idea?)

Polkadotsandmoonbeams - The Belgariad starting with Pawn of Prophecy. Enjoy!

Almost certainly 5 shillings originally then; the books started being published in 1946!

I suppose it might have been! I would have read it in the mid1970s, and I definitely remember it being pounds!

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8006340/Enid-Blytons-Famous-Five.html Interesting discussion on the updating of the Famous Five books :)

I expect originally it was 5 shillings, theDudes - depending on when you first read it!

Yes I remember about Enid Blyton now. There is a scene in Mallory Towers where a girl steals five pounds. It is a strongly written scene that stood out for me as a child: she thinks to herself "FIVE POUNDS, FIVE POUNDS" and the crime looms larger in her head. You could feel her horror growing as she realises what she has done. When I came across it again recently it had morphed into fifty pounds. It just didn't sound right, it didn't have the same feel.

Layter, they did it to Enid Blyton too - the Naughtiest Girl in the School and the Malory Towers books, for certain - refusal to wear stockings turned into refusal to wear white socks instead of coloured, gym slips changed to school skirts, and the money changed yes. It was to make it relevant to the children reading, I suppose.

Continuity - for example in one of the Scotland Street novels Bertie described flying to Portugal on a plane, but then in another novel he said he had never been on a plane before when he flew from Edinburgh to Paris.
However, at the rate that AMcS churns his books out, it must be hard to keep track of things!
Excessive description of women's appearance and never of men's.

When an American has written a book while pretend to be British.
All the characters have names nobody has used here for years ( usually Nigel) and they use very odd phrases that are meant to sound English but just sound weird - annoyingly can't think of an example right now

I am infuriated by dates that are changed in later editions of a book. The worst culprit that I remember was some of the earlier Stephen King novels. He creates the atmosphere of the sixties really well so to slap a 1980 date is a right poke in the eye to the reader.

Some of the pony books that I read as a child did this too. Rereading as an adult shillings are turned into pounds and infrequent references to dates are modern. Yet the book is obviously set in the 1950's or thereabouts.

Why do they do this?

Oh some of these things would drive me potty and throw the book out of the window. Especially the inconsistencies they sound so sloppy. I normal don't read any chick lic(?)
After DSIL gave me a couple of books from the Times columnist (still is?) slummy mummy. Many years ago I found the columns funny. So the books were bought for me. The first might have been call slummy mummy. I enjoyed the first part of the book but then it was just so far fetched self absorbed crap. I don't read anything that looks like it might be written in a Bridget Jones/self absorbed style anymore, and by the sounds of it I'm not missing much.

I do have a secret guilty pleasure for reading the sort of teeny books by Sarah J Maas I have yet to read the little novels before Throne of Glass tho

I hate it when a book is set somewhere real that I know, but they move things around to suit. I don't mind fictionalising (Peter May did this really well in the Lewis trilogy - apart from adding a Uist to Harris ferry 40 years before it existed) but I do mind when it says, e.g. on west coast, but then says close to something I know is on east coast (for example). Iain Banks was great at fictionalising without screwing up. You could place where things were. More like that please. This doesn't just apply to places I know really, 'cos sometimes I look up the places if it's somewhere else, and I love accuracy. I can't tell you people who're rubbish at it, 'cos I don't generally finish the book then...

Yes, frequency does sound plausible.

On the subject of HP and Americanisation... The first script for the HP movies transplanted the lot to an American high school. Unsurprisingly, that didn't get made. It would have been unrecognisable and the fans would have hated it.

Oh yes, inconsistency. I love Charlaine Harris, but her 'Grave' series doesn't seem to have been edited at all: the baby sisters swap ages between books and she can't seem to decide (or maybe remember) whether the heroine spent her horrible childhood in a tract house or a trailer.