Petty things that have put you off a book

[RosieLemonade]

I have just finished a book based in 2017. Teenagers called Tim, Paul and Sarah. It really took me out of it.
Anyone been put off a book for a petty reason?

Someone on here pointed out how many female characters 'pad' around the house and now I can't unsee it. Women are padding about everywhere!

I'm listening to Holy Island by L J Ross and I don't know whether the things that sound like glaring errors to me genuinely are, because I don't really know anything about Lindisfarne or pagan ritual or policing except from a lifetime of reading detective novels. But really, would the police employ a civilian consultant about ritual sacrifice who conflates the neolithic, the dark ages and early medieval periods? The 'expert' seems to keep it all very fluid. Also, she is shagging the policeman and her sister was murdered by a serial killer and it doesn't seem to bother her very much. AND the police had to wait while scene of crime photographs were developed on the mainland before they could look at them. It's set in 2015!

@KelKachoze

Inclusion of dialogue withou speech marks really annoys me. What is the bloody purpose of omitting just that one bit of punctuation - one that aids navigation and comprehension hugely - but retaining all the full stops, commas, question marks and all the rest? It's just ridiculous stylistic posturing.

Totally agree with this.

Just realised when PP mentioned a train and Cornwall that I’ve read the book in the OP too but the names of the teenagers didn’t really register as unusual for the age group.

I read a book about a missing person which I though was set in the 1920s. The family were interviewed and didn’t know anything about the missing fathers job (it’s not the sort of thing one asks of their parents) and made it clear that they only ever travelled by private car as they couldn’t possibly get on a public train with the great unwashed. It’s set in my hometown, which is a commuter town outside London. It was only after the detective left the house and checked her mobile phone that I realised it was set in the modern day, and then the family made so sense whatsoever.

@Arbadacarba

Also- any author that has pet phrases.

Yes, I agree with this one. I read a book recently where it was 'a beat of silence'. Every time someone paused, there was 'a beat of silence'. Fine to use once or twice but it got more and more annoying as the book went on.

Yes I notice this a lot and it really irritates me. Again, you need a decent sub

@JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn Roddy Doyle writes convincingly from a female perspective, I think.

I read a book set in a department store. There was a reference in the opening chapter of the shop having "survived two wars" when it had only opened in 1937. Now I know that there were other wars in the 20th century, but surely references to two wars usually mean WWI and WWII? It was otherwise quite a good book, I just couldn't believe something like that had slipped past the editing and fact checking process.

@WonkyCactus

I read a book set in a department store. There was a reference in the opening chapter of the shop having "survived two wars" when it had only opened in 1937. Now I know that there were other wars in the 20th century, but surely references to two wars usually mean WWI and WWII? It was otherwise quite a good book, I just couldn't believe something like that had slipped past the editing and fact checking process.

Was the shop located in the UK?

A book in a long series; one of the main, recurring characters; not a ‘lead’ as such but was in every book suddenly disappeared without explanation. Lead character in said series was then the victim of an attempted murder where she was buried alive, in a town she didn’t live in, in a church she didn’t attend, with a Vicar conducting a funeral that her friends attended with no question, no death certificate issued or anything.

This series was written from mid-late ‘90s until 2018 and frequently young people (teens/20s) would have names like Phyllis. The last Phyllis I heard of was in Coronation St and was in her 70s. There was also an intriguing back story with one of the recurring characters but this was totally forgotten about after the first mention of it.

I also used to like the Brighton set detective series (Roy Grace?) but got bloody fed up of how sodding perfect his new GF was. It made her a very one-dimensional character as she had no flaws at all, just constant perfection. The missing wife angle was exciting at first but turned into a damp squib. The last one of those books, I read the first and last chapters and didn’t feel I’d missed much.

@Toddlerteaplease

In the Thursday murder club, they plan to just dig up and build on a grave yard. Err you can't do that. The book is crap anyway.

Happened in my town when a church was converted into executive housing - they exhumed a small number and, along with a couple that had been unmarked and found by accident, had them reburied, along with removing the gravestones and setting them into the walls surrounding the churchyard. Actually, thinking about it, another 2-3 churches in the area have been demolished for various reasons (housing, a roadbuilding project) and the long term occupants of the bit out the back have all been relocated.

Anytime there is a new building phase for a church, there's the possibility of finding unmarked burials as well. And plenty of construction projects have older burial sites either known about or discovered in the process.

I'm sure the book is crap. But digging up and building on graveyards isn't absolutely unheard of.

Covers ... if it has a boring cover i won’t bother reading it

I liked Martina Cole books , read a few, then watched an interview of her and now I can’t read her books without hearing herDanny after Eastenders accent

Danny Dyer accent

Inspector Morse is sex mad in the books definitely not like that on the tv

I stopped picking up any books that have a nanny in, as inevitably they are there to be a perceived or actual threat to a happy family. I was a nanny for over 15 years and never once mat another nanny who wanted to or had slept with their boss!

I stopped reading a book set in my home town, because it talked about waiting 10 minutes for the next bus to come along! I can forgive shops being in the wrong place, there was a description of a pub that definitely doesn't exist here, but you have to wait 2 hours for the next bus! It's like that tv trope of there always being a space right where you need to park, forgivable in tv and film due to timing and story but in a book, why!

@garlictwist

My mum just finished The Thursday Murder Club and complained that it featured a Lidl delivery van when "everyone knows Lidl don't deliver".

Yes, because that's the only chink in armour of plausability...

I thought that exact thing too. I wish Lidl delivered.

A dog sweating heavily.

Dogs don’t sweat. Really annoyed me. It was a thriller about a child going missing from outside school and I was furious the whole way through the book because of this sweaty dog on page 7.

Also The Thursday Murder Club. RO clearly knows Kent and Sussex as some placenames are real and some you can guess their identity. Except that he refers to Waitrose in Tunbridge Wells. Now you might expect there to be one but there isn't. Didn't put me off the book but jarred a bit

And it was a book club one so felt compelled to finish it.

Certain cliched and over-used titles put me off. My current two hates are anything with an occupation eg The Carpenter of Cairo, The Birdkeeper of Paris or The Beekeeper’s Step-Daughter, etc, and the oh-so-not kooky titles like The Extraordinarily Exciting Life of Bertie Blisscumber, An Utterly Amazing Day For Cuthberta Flumblestumps, Biffy etc etc.

*Was the shop located in the UK?"

Yes it was @Arbadacarba, sorry I should have said.

@IEat

Inspector Morse is sex mad in the books definitely not like that on the tv

I love the Morse TV series and thought I'd read a book from the library. It failed my 3 chapters rule - awful!

People crossing 'the North Sea' between Calais and Dover in a bestselling book about a historian and vampires.

Fiction that uses the names of death camps in the title.

@BreatheAndFocus

Certain cliched and over-used titles put me off. My current two hates are anything with an occupation eg The Carpenter of Cairo, The Birdkeeper of Paris or The Beekeeper’s Step-Daughter, etc, and the oh-so-not kooky titles like The Extraordinarily Exciting Life of Bertie Blisscumber, An Utterly Amazing Day For Cuthberta Flumblestumps, Biffy etc etc.

I think this is why I stopped reading novels about ten years ago...

I really dislike books written in present tense. I just find them hard to read.

WonkyCactus 'Two wars' makes no sense in that case, I agree. I don't think any of the wars that happened after WWII would have affected a shop in the UK. Perhaps they'd originally made the shop older although assuming the book was reasonably contemporary I can't see why the exact year it opened would have had much significance.

If a novel is set in Britain, the main character is British and has lived in Britain since birth, it puts me off when they speak or narrate in American English or mention something that doesn't happen in Britain.

Examples:

• referring to the London underground as the subway and/or a character paying with a token.
• referring to universities as schools and/or a character being on a full scholarship.