What's your pet hate in books?

Have weakness for pulp crime non fiction about girls being chained under beds in trailer parks in Idaho for decades and the like.....

Fabulous airplane reading.

'Auto' biographies - almost always written by a ghost writer - about people who don't have anything to write about: Jordan, Jade, etc.

WHO reads these?!

Nepotism books. In other words, books whose authors only got published because they are the Prime Ministers daughter, an actor or model or spouse of one, etc.

The thing I cant STAND the most happens with some childrens books. The ones written in the present tense are barmy.

A fairy story in the present tense is bizarre and I always convert it as I read or 'lose' them.

I find gratuitous talent in anyone I knew - however vaguely - at university is an instant off-putter for me.

Which makes visiting any bookshop rather difficult.

All those trainwreck 'My Childhood from Hell' books.

Wishy washy females - that's most of chick lit.

Someone put it perfectly in a review describing Drew Barrymore's character in 'Music and Lyrics' by writing that she was a sort of dozy neurotic men only find adorable in films.

Oh Ell,yes!
Fantasy!
What the hell is that all about?
I want to scream 'Grow up!!!!! it's just pretend!'
Ditto science fiction.Used to have staggeringly clever bf who was always trying to get me to read Ursula K Le Guin and shit like that.

Saw him the other day (20 years on,now Someone Important In The City) and he tells me his idea of heaven is still spending an entire day in a sci-fi bookshop.

I stopped reading key scarpetta when she gave up smoking. I don't know, she really became annoying.

Ohh UD - love (most) Iain M stuff......The Player of Games etc.....
Writers who just churn out the same story under a slightly different gise.....You get to the point that you can't remember which one was which (as if it really matters.....)
Da Vinci Code - complete twaddle, if you want to read the kind of stuff try Umberto Eco.....

Fantasy - interesting, hate it if it includes elves/dwarves et al, more keen when it moves towards ScFi. HATE bad ScFi (generally written in the late 1960/70s....)
Gratutious sex is usually a turn off too...

I always fall for the 'most gripping novel you'll every read' and 'twists and double twists all the way' blurb on the front.
It is seriously rubbish but at the back of your mind you think that there is going to be a fab twisty-turny ending but there never is.

Also agree about Patricia Cornwell's annoying present tense Scarpetta novels.

I read half a Tami Hoag book thinking it would be a thriller - turned out to be a terrible storyline squeezed in amongst lots of sex. There are plenty of books I can't get into, but not many I abandon half way through! I don't have anything against sex in novels, but this was just dull sex in a dull book.

Too much research = showing off!
Chick lit
Da Vinci Code and any derivative thereof
Soppiness / blatant tear-jerking / heart string pulling
Anything related to TV series
Almost anything that is endorsed by anyone on TV
Pages where the footnotes outnumber the amount of text
Wanky artworld pseuds' corner stuff

ummmm I'm sure there are more

anything that has 'suggested discussion points for bookgroups' at the end - disappointing in the same way as the first chapter of the next book.
and bad research - eg loads of annoying things about the school in Notes on a Scandal that just wouldn't be true.

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Definitely agree with everyone about Misery Memoirs. And I really can't bear lazy proof-reading or bad grammar/punctuation - I'm an English teacher and I know a book is bad if, instead of losing myself in it, I'm itching to get a pen and correct it, give it a mark out of 20 and write some constructive criticism at the end!

Hate the books where the heroine begins fat and frumpy (and I identify with her ) but magically loses several stone and has a wondrous makeover before getting her man/ideal job/pay rise. Can she not do that and remain stout? And why have I never just 'forgotten' to eat like these women do for weeks on end??

Hmmmm.... I missed my time slot there by a good 20 years UD!

Can I add to my list... whodunnits where you never find out who did dunnit.

Really liked "Complicity"! - it was "Song of Stone" I couldn't stand. Was a real eye-opener as up until then I'd sailed through each of his books.
Not read the whisky one! I remember him getting VERY cross in an article I read (or maybe it was an extract?) about English people not pronouncing "Islay" properly and thinking it rhymed with "Outlay"...

Read any of his Iain M stuff, Pruni?

Ellbell - I think the ideal time to read LOTR is aged 12-15 - after that, adult cynicism has set in and you've just seen/read too many parodies and/or cheap imitations!

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There's a French novel by Michel Butor called La Modification which is written in the vous form. (Can't say I got very far with it...!) Can't think of any other 2nd-person novels, apart from that and the Calvino (which I really love).

I hate to dismiss a whole genre, but personally I can't stomach fantasy [shudder]. Not even 'good' fantasy. Couldn't get past chapter 1 of The Lord of the Rings. Just about acceptable in children's fiction (Hobbit, Narnia, etc.).

I've just finished Saturday as well and I quite liked it...

I hate lengthy descriptions of the countryside, bores me to tears.

Just read 'Saturday' by Ian McEwan and would like to add books written about the events of a single day (yes, I mean you too Virginia Woolf) and anything without a bloody plot!

"Horrid childhod" ones ARE a genre of their own - according to someone in publishing I was talking to, they are now officially known as "Misery Memoirs"! He didn't think the market could stand many more of them. Anyone read Andrew Collins's books? A delberate backlash to that sort of thing and very funny.

Pruni/Blackduck - are there many novels written in the 2nd person? I only know of two - Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller" (which I quite enjoyed, but then I was 20-ish and into intertextuality and all that pretentious crap at the time) and Iain Banks' "Complicity" (parts of it) - and I think his intention was to keep the perpetrator's gender ambiguous.

'With one leap Jack was free'

You know the sort of shit, the author spends half the book setting up an impossible situation to get out of, realsied that it is impossible to get out of, and has an utterly inplausable way out. John Gresham does this as lot!

The horrid childhood ones.

and OMG, the clan of the cave bear stuff. Muff diving in furs and she invents the needle.......dreadful