Book icks

When characters hold views that are too modern for their time!

I'm thinking of call the midwife here which is obviously TV here but...

Things like being accepting of people being gay, being feminist etc. Yes sure one or two people might have held those views, but the majority in wartime Britain would have been considered racist, homophobic, sexist, ableist and very conservative etc by modern standards.

I hate them too, and I absolutely loathe film tie-in covers (no I do not want my Anna Karenina to come with a cover photo of Keira Knightley looking totally 21st-century but wearing a 19thc ballgown!), but apparently they make a significant difference to sales, so hard to blame publishers/booksellers.

Or posting bail.

romance novels where the man is a billionaire playboy who won't settle down but everything changes when he meets the innocent/shy/naive/sassy virgin heroine. and every other woman is a whore/slut/bitch

Any UK-based crime novel where they mention "breaking and entering" or, worse, "pressing charges"

Something that gives me the "ick" enough to stop me reading the book is where a knight or baronet is referred to by "Sir" and surname rather than their given name. Reading "Sir Bloggs" instead of "Sir Joseph" grates on me so much I can't continue.

It's not everyone padding, it's always women. Usually padding from the shower to the bedroom, they never seem to dry their feet.

Normally intelligent characters doing incredibly stupid things

Oh yes. Dr Ruth Galloway, I'm looking at you here.

And any character who goes off to meet someone who might have information about the crime without telling someone where they're going....

YES THIS
Stickers are only acceptable if they have easy-peel glue that doesn't damage the cover. Printing them as part of the cover is so wrong

I'm sure you have a great name @MonsterSister! There's just something made-uppy about a lot ones I see in fiction. Or like a pp has said, that don't fit the time period/age of the character. Makes me think of Dwayne Dibley!

Normally intelligent characters doing incredibly stupid things just because the plot requires it, e.g. the husband who leaves a very compromising letter in the makeshift filing system in the spare room rather than shredding it, burning it or tearing it into small pieces and disposing of them in someone else's bin.

Yes, I agree icks can absolutely be part of the fun, to a certain point, anyway.

I adore the Chalet School series, and that enjoyment is in part down to them being one long series of icks -- repetitive phrases, authorial/editorial errors (longstanding characters arbitrarily changing surname or age, so that characters who are originally in the same form as others end up aging at a completely different rate and end up school years ahead or behind them), supposedly native speakers making endless beginner errors in their French, weird addictions to descriptive phrases ('pure, choirboy voice', 'eyes that had never yet needed glasses', 'dainty' cubicles) etc etc.

I have an alliterative name and I find myself very convincing, so I'm not going for that one, Dopaminego!

Stickers on books, or even worse, the current trend for stickers that are part of the cover! I’ve refused to buy books before because if this!

Also, when books change to the ‘film’ cover. Ugggh. Just no.

For some reason it really annoys me that loads of characters have alliterative names that sound really unrealistic. Dwayne Davidson or Jane Jefferson or Mark McIntosh, like the author spent 10 seconds coming up with a name.

Oh and clunky signalling of politics, pace Stephen King. 'The bad shit man stopped plotting a murder for the time it took him to climb into his car with the I LIKE DONALD TRUMP bumper sticker, as the affable private detective watched from behind his N95 covid mask as you couldn't be too careful, no siree-bob'

People who talk in a way that no one in real life would actually talk. I normally like Andrew O’Hagan’s books, but found the dialogue in Caledonian Road utterly unconvincing . No one talks like this, even arty London types. See also Rachel Cusk where people hold forth for hours with no one interrupting them and telling them to shut up.

I mean, it makes sense that more icks come from hastily produced contemporary fiction than fiction which has endured for centuries, probably. I mean, I do know and understand that Middlemarch is different from (and better than) Jill Mansell, and I've read both, but I know which I'd be reading on a plane or a beach, and to be honest, the icks can be part of the fun of the latter. That's why I and probably many others are enjoying this thread so much!

There's one I dislike that does occur in fiction of all quality though and that's 'he named a figure' or 'he named a very famous celebrity' - either make one up or just leave this out.

Also just in crap fiction: 'she punched a series of numbers into her phone'.

People do ask the most ridiculous questions. I’m sure that have a stock answer but I’d be very tempted to reply:

“Yeah we are! Isn’t it obvious?”

Or

”What makes you think that?”

Having a super rich love interest that seemingly clicks their fingers and gets everything within minutes.

female love interests that are written weak and feeble and need the man to bring them out of their pathetic shell 🙄

When there’s a handy billionaire who falls in love with the flaky heroine and fixes all her bad decisions.

jane green
Sophie Kinsella

No, I agree. There's no excuse for bad editing. I'm only saying you're going to get a lot more lazy, clichéd prose in commercial fiction.

Not really. People were complaining about the tendency in Russian novels to use patronymics and multiple names but that's just the novelists being accurate to the naming forms of the society they're depicting. You might struggle with it, but it's not a writing fault.

And in Wuthering Heights, the entire point of the novel is the repeating names down the generations and across the two households, especially when you have things like the original Catherine Earnshaw turn into Catherine Linton while her daughter will make the opposite journey a generation on. That's different to a lazily-written novel where a bunch of barely differentiated male characters are called Killian, Kieran and Kyle and you can't remember which one is the sweet clichéd gay best friend of the heroine, which the one she's in love with, and which the villainous boss.

What you won't get is Heathcliff padding endlessly through the Heights, or Vronsky curling his lip every page or two, or Mantel's Cromwell listening to an audiobook on his airpods and giving the thumbs up to Anne Boleyns' attendants Kylie, Kloe and Kyra, though!

Not a book but a film (sorry). Skylar in Good Will Hunting. Character played by Minnie Driver. There is no way a posh English student from a monied background attending MIT would have been called Skylar in the 90s. Annabelle, Kate, Elizabeth etc yes, Skylar absolutely not.