Reading peeves

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

Another bugbear is when two characters meet up and one "doesn't have time to tell you the details now" because they're going somewhere and then they get killed before they've had the chance to talk. Really how long does it take to say, "I think my brother's the murderer" whilst you get in the car?

Also yes to the pp who mentioned jobs not being accurately portrayed. I once read a book where a primary school teacher got 'someone' to cover her class at short notice so she could go shopping for a new outfit for her date.

I should read better books!

And all that riding all over Lancashire while pregnant in The Familiars! It also takes a real person and makes up a story about their life, which is another bugbear of mine. The history of Gawthorpe Hall is interesting enough without doing that. It’s like a teenager with a National Trust membership wafting around a stately home making up stories in their head.

When authors writing historical fiction use words not fitting the era. I don't want thees, thous, and ye olde English, but please leave out the modern phrases and colloquialisms.
I can't remember the specific example, but I think it was in The Familiars; Stacey Halls (?) used a couple of phrases that just jarred with me and made me shudder.

Perfectly good plots ruined by the addition of an unnecessary 'love' story.

Male characters described uncritically as having fallen deeply in love with a female character they have seen once and exchanged 3 words with (yes William Boyd, Love is Blind is guilty of this).

Male love interest rolling up his sleeves and protagonist admiring forearms.

Author switching narration perspectives and forgetting when we should/shouldn't be able to hear an inner monologue.

Mismatches between characters' wealth/implied wealth and their lifestyle / spending habits

My personal bugbear is chick lit set in Ireland where none of the characters have actual Irish names and all the place names sound more like English villages than Irish ones.

I started a book recently which was supposed to be set in Outback Australia, but the town’s name was a version of Little Whinging, which not ever how Australian towns are named. There were a lot of those kinds of errors, so I gave up.

My personal bugbear is chick lit set in Ireland where none of the characters have actual Irish names and all the place names sound more like English villages than Irish ones.

There's lots of this stuff around and it's clearly written with an eye on sales
in the US and the UK as it's assumed readers wouldn't be able to pronounce realistic Irish names.

Oh, and I hate inconsistencies such as the main character has blue eyes in chapter one but by chapter six they are brown. It's sloppy editing.

The adding the review into the title drives me nuts as is telling me how I’m going to feel about the book before I’ve read it, “Girl in a Sandwich Shop: the book you’ll be up all night reading and will harass your friends to read until they start avoiding you and you you’ll end up living alone with only this book for company”, kind of thing.

I quite enjoy a bit of urban fantasy, but it’s a genre inhabited by writers with the patience of a toddler seeing chocolate.

There’s no slow burn or gradual world-building; no tease or gradual reveal, it’s all in the first two pages. She’s a half-fairy, half-ferret with inexplicable powers she can’t control and enormous shoe collection and red locks and the world is full of monsters and she belongs to a shadowy agency devoted to doing something because, “oooh her nethers are drawn inevitably to that sexy half rabbit-shifter who won’t marry her because of his traumatic past and because they met ten seconds ago” and oh goodness she really loves pizza and her 1970s car also saving the world when she stops thinking about he-man’s lips and look at that, she’s the fucking chosen one.” Page 2 and it’s all over. Aaaasgh!

^^ this! Love this thread - all so true!
I also hate books where what people are wearing is described in great detail all the time, when it's really not relevant. Or when a physical feature is endlessly referenced. In fact, a book which met almost every single criteria given on this thread for being totally peevish was Ben Elton's Time and Time again, which literally had me shouting at the book. I read at night and I had to stop because it got me so wound up that I couldn't get to sleep. It has the accents (kill me now - the Scot); it has the boob bouncy women crap; it has the terrible plot twist which makes the whole book an utter nonsense; it must mention the size of a female professor's bum about twenty times in as many pages; I could go on but I'll be up half the night again in a rage...

The amount of focus on breast size was enough to raise an eyebrow.

Ah, yes - the "she breasted boobily down the stairs" technique!

www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/740ypq/she_breasted_boobily/

The amount of focus on breast size was enough to raise an eyebrow.

Any novel at all where the main female character is very beautiful and her appearance is described in detail in the first chapter (usually by her looking in a mirror).

These books are uniformly shit.

I just can't understand people who want to read the same book over and over again. Lots of them have been referenced in this thread. A recent trend has been all the titles similar to Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train - all with matching covers and all cynically marketed to a certain audience.

I picked up a Joanna Trollope "aga saga" to read in a holiday let not too long ago. It felt as light as a puff of smoke and as if anyone with the formula could have trotted it out in a matter of days. Just trash.

Novels in the second person.
Anything which has the full Kindle title "The Feelgood Novel Of The Summer The Cafe By The Sea".
I think they've given up on "Miss Smith You Are So Beautiful Without Your Glasses" but "heroine is so busy she forgets to eat and loses loads of weight and "Oh Emma You Are So Beautiful Now You've Lost Weight".

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Over-reliance on coincidence is another of mine. For example in one book by an author (whose other novels I actually really like) the protagonist was on holiday in a tiny town in Lake Como with her new boyfriend, which she had booked as a surprise for him. Turns out not only that new bf's ex happens to be working at a hotel in the same town but also protagonist just happened to have treated her for a miscarriage at a London hospital sometime before 🙄 ok then. In another, again by an author who I really like, the heroine is involved in a car crash which it turns out also kills the adoptive parents of the daughter she gave up some years before. I just find it lazy - if you can't find a way to bring the strands of a plot together without relying on a ridiculously improbable coincidence then you probably need a new plot.

Oh, oh wait!! Just recalled another. Ridiculous syntax (anyone read Half-formed Girl ).

The Hunting Party (again - it annoyed me!). Breaking a sentence in two with another doesn't fit to well sentence with a em dash either side.

Also the Hunting Party didn't create a sence of place too well. At the start it referred to "this part of the journey" but had at no point set up anything about the journey. No mention of it.

Hate it when something is mentioned in a familiar way and you think you must have missed it being brought into the story, so go back (many times) to discover it just hadn't been mentioned before.

One of mine is where there's an event that's happened (or in a time-hop) book one that's going to happen) and you done get given all the information but the event is referred to frequently.

Such as the narrator is all sad and not able to have a great life because the "the accident". Or in the book I've just read (The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley) someone is dead in the future but you don't know who or how. It worse when it's supposed to be a 'twist'.

Another thing is where the writer uses a word that's not an everyday word and uses it repeatedly. Much word when it's a unusual word! This occurred to some extent in The Hunting Party too with 'also-ran'. Other one I recall was The Walking Dead "supine" was used appropriately 5,986 times.

Mary Shelly does it in Frankinstien too but I can't for the LIFE of me recall the word at the moment.

I too dislike the currentl gone on too long trend of titles being "The Occupatuon's Female Relation".

Byllis- many years ago I was really slated for saying I though the Kite Runner/whatever the other one is were badly written and it seemed like the writer had googled 10 things you must include in a novel about the horrors of Afghanistan.
I stand by it- a serious subject does not automatically make a book great, or even good, literature.
I am just totally confused by all the basketweaver of Minsk books that seem so prolific these days!

Ahhhhh I’ve loved this thread. Agree about endlessly mentioning hair. V annoying.

I mentioned in a previous thread about overrated books that I don't like books which seem to get extra intellectual brownie points because they've been translated or written by a non-Anglophone author. It was pointed out to me that translated books aren't a phenomenon, so let me be clear I'm not talking about translated books. Just authors and books who get treated as though their low or medium-brow work is serious literary fiction when it just isn't. The Bastard of Istanbul is a great example (not translated, but a Turkish author). Serious theme, but stuffed with cliches and really quite lightweight overall.

Similarly, any non-UK/US/etc. novel clearly written for an international audience. Characteristics of these are plentiful references to food handily explained ('she savoured a mouthful of chicken yassa, the delicious rich and spicy stew popular in Senegal') and tourist hotspots (main character passes the Colosseum and Trevi Fountain on their way from home to the office). Don't make me feel like I'm reading a brochure produced by the tourist board.

I don't get annoyed by the Chess Player of Belgrade / Lutemaker of Zagreb / Basket Weaver of Minsk-type novels as the twee titles alone mean I've never read one!

Poorly researched jobs where the job is significant to the plot.
EG The follow up to Me Before You, the love interest is a London paramedic. At one point he gets in trouble for going on a personal errand in an Ambulance because another crew saw his ambulance outside the protagonist's house and called control to enquire.

1. There are 500ish ambulances on duty at any one time pan London. No crew would bat an eyelid at another Ambulance being parked outside an address. They would also not know who is in which Ambulance as they are allocated on the day.

1. Control know where all the Ambulances are at all times.

1. You actually are allowed to run errand within reason as long as you're not on a call.

He also gets shot which is ridiculous. Its London, not Johannesburg. If any paramedic got shot or would be national news.

This is obviously specific to my own job, but I imagine it applies to many others!

The gardener (it's always the bloody gardener!) having floppy blonde hair - get a fucking hair cut!

A good book with a weak ending is infuriating

Phil- that's it you see. I was born in 1965 and so graduated on the exact day Dexter and Emma did...and remember the first Emma I ever knew, who was about 5 years younger than me (we called her Baby Emma ) and my grandmother was "ooh fancy bringing back an old fashioned name like that"
Lord knows what she'd make of the Mabels and Elsies now!

Agree with all of the above peeves, but my biggest one is when an author messes up their dates, or weird ageing as a pp called it. E.g. In 1970 James is 20 and his brother is 22, but in 1983 James is 36 and his brother is 40, and the daughter he had at 25 is now 12. I won't stop reading the book because of it, but it completely throws me.

Books about tortured young women who have complicated relationships with food/sex. I've read faaar to many of them recently and often end up wanting to slap the protagonists... Ordinary people was the worst for this. I'm not even interested in my own relationships in the detail that went into.