Reading peeves

I know that's why JK did it- that the early books were meant to be shorter and more accessible to younger readers, but I still hold (and I see it with Cormoran Strike) she is untouchable by editors.
It's kind of like JRR Tolkien and his (feels like ) extra 300 pages of elvish poetry. Or Twilight and the bloody werewolf legends.

Wolf Hall is one of few books I never finished which annoys me intensely because I wanted to. Yet A Place of Greater Safety is one of my all time favourites.

JK could have done with someone reminding her how perfect the Chamber of Secrets was lengthwise when she plonked the building brick that is Order of the Phoenix on the editor's desk.
That's slightly unfair. DD was the perfect age for HP: she was Harry's age and 'grew up' with him as the books were published each year. The first book was an easy Year 7 read but as he (and she) got older they got longer and darker.

Somebody who really needs editing is Hilary Mantel. I found all those irrelevant wanders off piste so annoying that I gave up the will to live and have never finished the book. If it was fiction I might have stayed the course but it's history: I know what's going to happen so stop delaying the inevitable!

I would read the half fairy/half ferret book...

JK could have done with someone reminding her how perfect the Chamber of Secrets was lengthwise when she plonked the building brick that is Order of the Phoenix on the editor's desk. Ootp is my favourite HP but sometimes, less is more. I think she had become so important by then nobody dared do any editing.

I hate it when you star at the end, for example with the death of the main character. Then you scroll back in time to find out all the events leading up to it. You've lost me. I no longer care. I'm not invested in the character because I know they're going to die. Wish they'd stop doing this.

Also putting recipes in just as page filler. Lazy. As if I'm going to read the damn recipe.

Think they coud easily have been have 1,000 fewer pages, A Suitable Boy possibly even fewer No need for minute detail over everything.

I seem to recall in A Suitable Boy there must have been 50 pages on a party, 20 where the preparations, 10 on one single song and 20 on what people thought about the song and party.*

Game Of Thrones had ever outfit described in such detail costume designers would be able to reproduce them exactly. Also have them completed by the time the average person takes to read the passage.**

• numbers might be an estimate ** might be exaggerating

Historical fiction where all the characters you're supposed to like have 21st century liberal attitudes to everything while the baddies are classist and sexist. The further back in history the book is set, the more jarring this is.

Americans who have clearly never set foot in a British school writing about them. The latest offender was a traditional boys' public school which had, among other implausible things, one lone girl attending the school for handwavy reasons so that she could become the teenage protagonist's girlfriend. Just set the book in a mixed boarding school!

'Chosen one' narratives, especially when they join an organisation of some kind and are immediately catapulted to the top of it despite knowing nothing. The character who objects because they've been training and hoping for promotion for years only to be overlooked because of the super special newbie is portrayed as jealous and/or bullying.

Ian McEwan thinks he is A Great English Writer.

yy to Ian McEwan. Loved the early short stories but 'The Children's Act' was truly appalling.

What's with the prologues these days? I don't want to know what happened (or at least partly) let the plot unwind naturally please!
Oh, and the use of the word 'tendril'. Does anyone ever refer to tendrils of hair in real life? No.

Anything by Ian McEwan post Atonement. Saturday and Solar gave me the serious rage. Lazy writing and terrible endings.

Poorly edited books. Too many novels ruined because the editor did not tell the author it needed to be 100 pages less and less repetitive.

@Luckingfovely I’m with you on Elinor Oliphant. Dreadful tosh.

Talking of lifestyle; in psychological thrillers particularly, the heroine is always an Oxford/Cambridge eng lit graduate (who was low on self esteem but tutors thought was brilliant) who are in crisis having given up their job in PR or advertising and now looking after her small children. The husband is always extremely handsome and called Jack or Nick, and is a successful highly paid architect (or similar) but works long hours so she doesn't know whether to trust him or not. There's always a scene where she discusses her theories with her old friend, while sharing a bottle (or two) of wine and eating bread and olives from the local fabulous deli just down the road from their Edwardian beautifully decorated south London house or charming rustic cottage they did up after she got married. Lots about how the sex has changed since kids.

Overhyped books. Those light summer read type books. Celeb biographies.

Repetitive sentence forms piss me off.

MJ Arlidge's crime novels - every bloody chapter ends with a rubbish cliffhanger like 'Or so she hoped.' or 'It was time' or 'They were completely fucked' as a single sentence paragraph.

I do love Harry Potter but JK Rowling never met an adverb she didn't like

And bad grammar drives me nuts. Fucking comma splicing should be punishable by a swift kick in the knackers.

I’ve read Black Rabbit Hall too! Ok, I won’t despair!

this is often the case when there are two interlinking stories being told, one in the past (often in the form of letters or a diary being read by the modern day protagonist) and one in the present

This has reminded me of another peeve - where there are pages and pages of the letter/diary printed in italics. Italics are OK for a paragraph or so, or in their rightful place for emphasis, but they're really annoying when they go on for a whole chapter.

Seconding any novel where information is held back from the protagonist for the purposes of the plot/suspense but there's no real reason.

One I recently read: someone gave the main character a diary which would 'explain everything' but he couldn't tell her in person because it was so complex. She was too tired to read it, then she started but hadn't got to the relevant bit, then she lost the diary and couldn't get hold of him because he was away on a business trip. It turned out the big reveal was that he was having an affair hmm

Oh yes, so much! This is often the case when there are two interlinking stories being told, one in the past (often in the form of letters or a diary being read by the modern day protagonist) and one in the present, and reading the whole of the past story will tell the protagonist something about their current situation - but for some reason they decide to read it incredibly slowly - a bit at a time and then off they go to make their own plot happen for a bit, then come back to read some more. I can cope with this if what they are reading is really long but I just finished one where the priest was reading the incredibly important letter that would tell him everything and wasn’t that long but decided to read it a paragraph at a time and then go off and get attacked, or whatever.

You’ve read it Saucery? Set in London and the Forest of Dean? I like the bits set in the past...

The Binding was god awful.

I’ve just thought of another one, the book I’m reading at the moment has a character who has just separated from her husband of 20 years and her mother is in a coma, however, there just happens to be a man who plays guitar on his canal boat under her new apartment balcony. I’m just not interested in having a shite love story thrown in.

@Badnessinthefolds, Murakami creeps me out the way he writes women characters and male characters' interaction with them. If he was living on your street he'd be the peeping Tom with brown trousers and halitosis that has a strange relationship with his mother.

When the book is about a journey (geographical), and the author kindly provides a map , at the end of the book. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an example, I resorted to the atlas while reading it.