Reading peeves

I am enjoying this thread immensely!

How I wish I had swishy, lemon-scented hair.

I must respond re Emma and One Day- I grew up in the 70s in a Northern, almost entirely WC town, and I had several friends named Emma at school, all born early 70s. I didn't know a single Beverley or Donna though. Many, many Karens (which is why I find the "Karen" meme jarring, as they're not "I'd like to speak to the manager" types at all).

I'm that age where I don't want sex myself so I certainly don't want to read anybody else's at it. With their "sheets heavy with the perfume of their love" the morning after , when we all know that means "feck this is minging get them on a 60 wash with extra Lenor"

Main characters in chick lit who are always a bit quirky and have swishy lemon scented hair. (Freya North looking at you)

I use a HP paragraph when I do my story writing module with my teens as a kind of what to do but please don't do it like this example- Again JK, for every verb there is an -LY adverb, for every noun two simple adjectives.
Harry runs quickly. Or slowly. Or happily.
The cold crisp weather
The hot steaming sex. Or jam Roly poly.
Etc.

I can't read Dorothy Koomson's books for her unrealistic dialogue. Or her unrealistic storylines i.e The Icecream Girls.

Oh yes to everything that's been said so far.

Gross errors of language and concepts such as an alleged Georgian character referring to ego, or saying "lmindblowing" or "sexy".

To be honest I've read so much now (I'm very old) that I feel irritation at every extraneous word, usually adjectives. "Light blue sky", "glowing iridescence", "trembling and shaking" etc: just use one or the other. Too much description generally and oh my god the over-use of similes is horrendous. I could not get passed page 3 of Hamnet with all the "like a" nonsense.

Any sex scene is horrific. Absolutely unreadable.

Books that have gratuitous and lengthy descriptions of murdered women. James Patterson......
Yuk. And I like psychological/crime/whodunnits.
Floaty fonts on a pastel book cover, accompanied by a handbag and a cupcake....
Agree with 'old men and rheumy eyes'
Rushed endings when the rest of the book has been v e r y s l o o o w...

Hagrid is another one who actually, thanks to Robbie Coltrane, didn't sound as much like a Wurzel on his combined 'arvester (for those old enough to remember) in the film as he did in the book.
I love JK for many reasons, not all of them HP based ;-) but as a fellow linguist her writing of regional accent is atrocious.

For a more recent dodgy regional accent example I give you Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell - I really like his books and enjoyed this one but how do you accurately portray a Gravesend born character? You get them to say ‘yer’ all the time to indicate their working class roots. Really?! Flipping annoying!

I agree @ScorpioSphinxInACalicoDress, magical realism can on the whole do one. Not something I pick up out of choice on the whole. And will give the ‘Artemis’ book a swerve.

Agree with books set in places I know. There was one in my nearest city and the number of times the streets were namechecked was bizarre! And in many cases, totally wrong. I know the local reference library has a ton of stuff about the area in ages gone by and the writer is from round there, so why he got it so consistently wrong was a bigger mystery than the one he was trying to write. It was like those crappy tv programs where they assume you’ve forgotten everything that just happened 3 minutes before the adverts and repeat it all over again.

Magic realism has me wanting to punch people. At least if you open a Garcia Marquez you know what you're in for. But randomly cropping up makes me growl.

If you don't want random poetry and quotes do NOT open The Artemis File. I bought it on Kindle because so many people on here < glares at the writer's relatives because nobody else could possibly recommend such utter dross> and not only does every chapter finish with a flourish of Hamlet etc but he drops them in the middle of paragraphs as well.

Another- using a character to explain things another character won't know but in a stilted fashion. I give you Ron Weasley whose sole role in life seems to be to explain the magical world to Harry. Unless it's something really crucial to the whole arc of their magic world of course. In which case Ron won't know and acts really surprised when he finds out. Which would be like a teenager today going "there was a war from 1939-1945, well I never".

Completely unnecessary quoted poetry cropping up out of nowhere - who bothers to read it?

Random magic realism without any explanation. You’re reading along happily enough then all of a sudden you’re meant to believe after chapters of relative normality that a certain character is a weretiger.

Historical characters holding opinions they are unlikely to have had.

Oh women biting their lips That too

Stories written verbatim in patois. Can we imagine the way it’s pronounced?

Quotes at the start. No one cares

Characters aging oddly across a series. I'm re reading a series at present- the adult characters haven't aged. A female character had a breast cancer scare 3 years ago, when her daughter was half way through university. She's now just graduating. The age gap between the two daughters varies. A minor character has come back to life.... The murders etc are good though.

Books where there are 100 pages stuck in the middle that are a diversion and have no bearing on the plot/characters. I blame the publisher/editor. If it doesn't work as a 200 page short novel it certainly won't work with another 100 pages of fill.

Count of Monte Cristo broke me through never specifying if it was the elder or younger Monsieur de Villefort in the scene. Eventually one was dead, one was talking to the count and I had absolutely no idea which was which.

Books where the reader knows some crucial information for ages before the main characters figure it out. You should never be left wanting to grab the lead by the collar and scream at them to stop being so bloody oblivious.

@ScorpioSphinxInACalicoDressI
I agree about names that are completely wrong for the time in which the story is set. Not a difficult piece of research to do!
The first 2 words of a book were the female protagonist's age. Didn't get any further.

And in psychological thrillers and chick lit wine is always ‘ice cold liquid’.

Padding. Women (it’s always women) who pad downstairs. Just walk ffs.

And reaching a crescendo. Crescendo means gradually getting louder so you can’t reach one!

Anybody thinking they've reinvented the wheel by writing about "quirky things that happen when you're a mother" should have their typewriter removed. And yes, when DD was born I bought the whole shebang of them.
Fish fingers and me
The day my boob fell out in the Post Office
Myself, the double buggy and the neighbours

I paraphrase, but y'know

I am dreading the Covid memoirs.

**Also, it isn't so much the books but the surrounding publicity -but I have read so many interviews with writers about their books where they say "I wanted to tell a story about what being a mother is really like, all the bad bits that nobody ever tells you about, because that never happens" - it does! There are loads and loads and loads of books about the shit bits of being a parent, and there have been for ages!

Yes this!

Harlan Coben's detective dialogue! He does the "what's an old broad like you doing in a joint like this" clichéd beige raincoat and trilby 1950s thing with his male characters. He thinks he's channelling Raymond Chandler doing Humphrey Bogart.

Garlictwist- yes! Nobody has ever, in the history of the world, not even on Last of the Summer fucking wine, pronounced "up" as "Oop". Book as "buke" I'll give you, because my Derbyshire grandad did, but "oop" doesn't exist unless it's a southerner ignorantly thinking that's how we speak.

@SingingBabooshkaBadly completely agree re lack of speech marks! This is my current pet hate and happens in so many modern novels. Why? Just why?

Also, ridiculously long paragraphs. I've just started Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey and we've had both these traits in the first two chapters, so not sure I will persist with it.

Yes to all of these!

I even have a "shelf" on Goodreads where I stick "99p kindle madster psycho best friend" books (every time I promise not to buy another!)

DD has to read 100 years for school and asked me what I thought...I read it in 1997 and told her I was glad I did, but won't be rereading any time soon, and to keep the family tree handy.

Repetitive use of words I don't think even the author realises they are doing- one of the above psycho-bezzie writers (Lucy Clarke iirc) is fecking obsessed with "salt". Or salty. Or brine. Or salt kissed skin. Or..you get the picture. All her psychos are connected to the sea in some way (not a literary way, they just get done in in beach huts or move to the seaside etc but if she says "salt" once, she says it 800 times.

Names that jar. One Day. Dexter. Would NOT have been called Dexter. They graduated the same day that I did. He'd have been called Pete, or Ian or Darren. She was supposedly working class and northern. She would not be Emma. A decade later, yes. But 1988? Nope. Bev. Alison. Karen. Julie. Lisa. Donna.

Unrealistic dialogue- oft to be found in psycho nutter books.