Reading peeves

Not just books but also a film cliche. Female character has unprotected sex and instead of taking a pregnancy test like a normal person, is convinced she has stomach flu as she's throwing up every morning. It usually takes a friend to ask her if she's pregnant, at which she's astonished at the possibility.

Lazy writing. (Looking at you Noughts and Crosses.)

This trope of one-time-sex-deffo-preggo is the reason as a teenager I was convinced that if you had sex even once, even WITH protection, there was a more than reasonable chance you'd end up pregnant or HIV positive.

"Books where old men always have rheumy eyes."

Ewwww, what are you reading?! 🤢

Endless designer name-dropping - 90s chick lit was terrible for this, not sure whether it still goes on as I gave up on chick lit long ago. I don't care if the jacket is Armani and the bag is Gucci and the shoes are Prada. Shut up about the clothes and tell me something interesting.

Dodgy depictions of regional accents. Generally occurs in Dickens or Hardy. Makes me want to just skip huge chunks of the book.

Was coming on to say about The Occupation's Relative books and The Starry Sunshine Cafe by The Sandy Sea bollocks. Loathe both these trends.

Also hate when they change a really nice book cover for the poster of the film adaptation. No. Fuck Off.

OP, I was just talking yesterday about 100 Years of Solitude. I had read and loved Loved in the Time of Cholera so was eager to read 100 Years. I think I started and gave up on it four or five times because I was so confused by everyone having the same names! Well done to you making it half way through.

I’m also annoyed by lack of punctuation, with a particular hatred of authors using dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate speech or, worse still, using nothing at all. Why? Why?

Literary authors who think the beauty of their writing is enough to sustain an entire novel without any form of plot at all. It sometimes is, but very rarely. Actually, it’s really the editors rather than the authors I should be taking issue with on that point.

Overuse of brackets. Yes Anita Shrieve, I am talking about you.

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!

I am not a massive fan of the present tense, which is annoying, as it is everywhere. I can get over it if the writing is good, but it takes an effort. I do feel like some authors just feel like the present tense is cooler, or easier to write, rather than considering whether it fits their story.

women with unruly hair and slightly upturned button noses who have no idea how beautiful they are. Ugh!

Yes, this too x a million! These heroines always inhabit an alternative universe where they're too slender and willowy, and their neck is too swan-like and their eyes are too big and such a weird emerald green colour and of course, that damn untameable Titian hair! Of course no man ever looks at them 'cos they only like girls with big boobies and perma-tans ! Feck orf ...

Can we include words which are annoying? "Thrummed". A thrumming heartbeat usually. Tells me the author probably started off writing fanfic (said as a reader and writer of fanfic).

Misuse of the unreliable narrator device.

Acceptable use of unreliable narrator: exploring conditions such as depression, mental illness and so forth.

Unacceptable use of unreliable narrator: Part 1 - My goodness, however is all this totally weird, intriguing and frankly impossible stuff happening? Part 2 - None of it happened.

Not keen on photos of the author, particularly of females with flowing locks of hair. I don't care what the author looks like;I care about what they have written.

Books that have short sentences. My attention span wants more. I hate them. All pithy and abrupt. Stop it.

We can hold whole sentences with complex phrases in our heads and follow the flow, stretching our imagination and flying with the author - let them expand, let our minds build a glorious picture... please...

P.s. did anyone else think this was going to be a thread about a poltergeist that didn't make it from the page to the screen?

Anything described as "hilarious" on the cover usually isn't.

And crawdads is vastly over-rated imho

Idiotic, lazy descriptions of characters. Men with cool blue eyes who 'grin' and women with unruly hair and slightly upturned button noses who have no idea how beautiful they are. Ugh!

Long descriptions of dreams, especially those which have no relevance to the story.

Books set in real places with completely made up geography. I once read some terrible chick lit or other that was set in West Hampstead, while I lived there. It was very specific about names of roads and routes, but they made no sense in real life.

Overhyped books where the author (usually a youngish woman) gets a huge advance. The books end up being edited to appeal to the greatest number of people, to justify the hype. Recent examples are "The Confessions of Frannie Langdon" and "Tangerine". Both just awful.

Books which got so much attention that I was suckered into reading them, and then couldn't stop until I'd reached the end to find out if they were really as bad as I thought they were.

I'm looking at you, Goldfinch, and Elinor bloody Oliphant.

Never again will I be fooled by the popular press!

Books about missing children, usually girls, often involving a body of water.

Novels where significant portions of the text are in eye-boggling italics (Ruth Hogan’s twee Keeper of Lost Things), novels where the characters all met at Oxford but the author hasn’t done even the most basic research (Helen Foley’s The Hunting Party), novels which hinge on ‘And then I woke up and I was all a dream!’ (some Anita Shreve novel whose name escapes me where one of the two POV characters turns out to be a figment of the other’s imagination).