tiny niggles in books - do you have one?

[Lovestonap]

I was thinking today how much I hate it when events and speech in books don't match up. An example (I have made up rather than transcribed):

They ordered their coffee and sat down with it. Petunia took a sip

• 3 lines of dialogue follow -

Ben finished his coffee and stood up

"I'll say good bye then".

In real life drinking coffee with someone. particularly a friend or relation means lots and lots of conversations - even if there is the occasional pause. Usually takes at least 15 minutes. Are we meant to think they sat in silence apart from the 30 seconds of dialogue?!?

Clunky plot device which irritates me. I should probably stop overthinking these things......

Anyone else got anything that winds them up like this?

Am reading 'Watching You', Michael Robotham. Few chapters in, a character has just stated that as a child, he carved his name in a Jacaranda tree and its still there many years later. In Manchester. If anyone's ever seen a full grown tropical Jacaranda in UK I'd be glad to know about it.

Can't remember the book at all (was an Amazon suggestion) and I had to put it down a few pages in when the main character walked from her job as a fishmonger in the Manchester Arndale market to Piccadilly Gardens to get her tram to Saddleworth...

I live in Manchester and the trams don't bloody run to Saddleworth and if they did, you'd be able to get one going in that direction pretty much from right outside where the entrance to the market is and not have to walk two stops up the road!

It was petty of me but I just got the rage.

I've made it a rule never to read introductions to books before I've read the book itself. Recently I read a book where on the second page of the introduction they helpfully gave away the full plot. What on earth would be the point of reading the book after that?

A couple of niggles I have -

When the book title seems totally unconnected to the book, it's characters, location, plot or anything remotely plausible to explain why the book has been entitled as it has.

When chapters barely cover a page - what the hell's wrong with a paragraph or two?
Plus swathes of nearly blank white recto pages in a book which is really more like 256 pages long rather than the "blockbuster" 375 it purports to be. And which has 2417 chapters..