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?

Conversely jenthelibrarian books that have bits of French / German / whatever and get them wrong. FFS it's not hard to get hold of a French person to check. My favourite was a Patricia Cornwell which managed four mistakes in three words of German.

Oh and also the character descriptions of the women that are pretending to be negative :

She gazed critically at her reflection in the mirror and pulled a rueful face. Her red hair would not stay straight whatever she tried and tumbled in unruly curls to her waist. Her eyes, far too large for her heart-shaped face, gave the illusion that she was only just put of her teens; being taken seriously by her fellow Barristers. She longed to be able to go braless like her flatmate but her breasts were far too large for such simplicity, not that they needed the support oh no blah blah continues for 3 pages

Whoops that was meant to say that being taken seriously was a problem for my poor distressed young beautiful genius.

Loved I Don't Know How She Does It and was so upset when I started to read How Hard Can It Be. Kate's kids have a completely different age gap and her husband has a totally different body shape, not through diet or exercise but because of sloppy writing/editing. I was so frustrated by this lack of continuity that I never made it past chapter 2 of the second book.

Similar to the op.
Letters that say how long they are when they're clearly not.
"Cathy sighed as she turned the fourth page over, Joey really had overdone the writing thus time"
Exept you can se all she's just read and it's about half a side of writing paper.

I was reading a book about a quintessential English man set in a small English town, the author had painstakingly researched a lot of detail and then spelt pyjamas, pajamas. Only a small thing but it put me off the whole book

Slight derail to children’s books, of the read-aloud variety, and dipping my toe into the regional accent debate that I read last week: I find it really grinding when words that in my accent don’t rhyme, but obviously must in the writer’s accent.

In my accent, giraffe doesn’t rhyme with scarf, and strain doesn’t rhyme with again.

Balloonslayer why is soar incorrect? Is it not just another way of saying glide? What am I missing?

My ultimate pet peeve is when they leave a major character appearance detail until late on, and by that point you’ve already decided what they look like and you just have to ignore the fact their hair is black not ginger for the rest of the book!

BalloonSlayer Is it because you would soar at height?

Product placement jolts me out of the flow - can't remember the books but it was repeated references to the make of car which was totally irrelevant

....he pulled the Ford into the kerb and got out......

.... she gunned the Audi down the motorway......

Also "scalding" as in......she drank the scalding coffee...or stood under the scalding shower....

Yes damn!

Posted this before...once read a book which was about a character who overeats.In one scene she buys two bacon sandwiches to eat on the way to work “two bites and they were gone” ...WTF?!

Soar means to rise up into the air.

You cannot soar downwards just as you cannot plummet upwards.

Robotlady, the Millennium trilogy books were the absolute WORST for product placement. I hope you've never read them, you'd give yourself an aneurysm

Books that take unnecessary artistic licence around geography.

Can’t remember the title, but I read one book where the protagonist was apparently heading down to the West Country from Paddington and the author mentioned that the train stopped at Didcot Parkway before continuing on to Reading. The detail was completely inconsequential to the plot and also completely inaccurate as the trains from Paddington stop at Reading first...

The worst for me is when the author writes dialogue in the accent, complete with missing letters, abbreviations, excessive slang etc. The only book I've given up on in recent memory had this and my brain spent so long trying to work out what they were trying to say because the speech was so butchered it was barely readable. Just tell me they are Scottish at the beginning and I will supply the accent myself, thanks.

Couldnt agree more flakey, pages and pages of surplus and unnecessary text, just padding. Really annoying.

Oh yes MrsRuby, dialect - the rather strange rendition of Yorkshire dialect is one of the more off-putting parts of The Secret Garden. (James Herriot however gets it right, presumably because he spent so many years listening to it). It's reassuring to writers who can't do dialect that reading it is probably not worth the effort of trying to write it.

Boyskeepswinging is the age gap in How Hard Can It Be wrong then? Maybe I should check. What jarred for me was that Kate's daughter seemed to act a lot younger than 16. The social media/best friends nonsense was the sort of thing my DD and her friends went through at 13 or 14.

"BluthsFrozenBananas

I’m throughly fed up with books which are narrated from the first person and a mysterious something has happened in the past, which the narrator knows all the details of but it’s only revealed to the reader in bits and pieces."

These are usually the books where chapter titles alternate between "Then" and "Now" with a random "2009" thrown in so you're really confused

Also love the wobbling the flab to pop master plot line. I'd buy it!
Actually I was reading a series of books where the main woman put on flab! Was very refreshing

Marketing blurb that refers to plot twists that you won’t see coming. Well, I might have missed them before (unlikely as this tends to be used to promote books with twists you could probably spot from 100 miles away), but now I’ll definitely see them BECAUSE YOU HAVE JUST TOLD ME TO LOOK FOR THEM.

And breathe.

Oh! So many!

I hate this too: Also, when characters stand in the mirror and appraise themselves in a weird way.
I like the suggestions offered upthread. The reality is that you note your sagging tits, the way your top doesn't cover your belly, that the "tiny hole" in your jumper actually reveals your entire boob and you need to change it and - yes - you actually DO look as hungover as you hoped you didn't.

But 'bad' doesn't cover Wilbur Smith. As I know, because I've read one. And "Red Moons" continue to stalk me throughout my life [as in "she had not yet seen her first red moon"]. If ever there was an author who wrote with one hand holding a pen and the other stuck down his trousers. As he described girls of around 9 - 12 years of age. This is probably deserving of it's own thread!

And there was a book about the Plague where the author was using "olde English" except when she forgot. That was annoying! "Mistook" She was mistook a lot. Except a few times, when she was accidentally mistaken.

BUT the reason I joined this thread (and this is probably too serious) is a properly niggling flaw in a book I loved.

So the book is We Need To Talk About Kevin, which i think is brilliant. And for a lot of the book, the principal character is writing letters to her husband from whom she is estranged, and we don't know why for most of the book. And this is interspersed from things going on in her life day-to-day. And each of these is a chapter.
And at one point she starts a letter and confesses something terrible she's done to her child (she's broken his arm). And half way through her confession, the chapter stops and another one starts on the next page. And this is probably too nebulous for this thread, but just - NO NO NO! Try describing a traumatic experience in your life to someone. Like, actually do it out loud. It doesn't have to be too terrible, but it does have to be something that is real to you.
You will ABSOLUTELY find that you might struggle to begin and you might struggle to finish, but if you're telling someone something that is important to you, once you get into the flow of your 'story' you will absolutely NOT stop abruptly and then restart. Even if it aids for dramatic purposes.

You just won't.
I still think it's a brilliant book, though.

The contrived thing in thrillers where someone almost says/asks/thinks something that's key to the plot, but gets interrupted/distracted/can't quite remember it.

This probably says more about me that authors but I cannot stand when novels take place that is like reality but missing key modern features. Like mobile phones. And google. The number of times I think you’d just bloody google that or text him and tell him you’re going to be 15 mins late. I don’t think it would be impossible to write those things in.
Says more about me as a frustrated writer who can’t wrote plausible plot