Things in books that instantly made you put it down

[IronTeeth]

I was reading a book, and it was OK (not brilliant, but had some interesting maybe potential.... and then this (image)

Ooh, you smell fresh, innocent like a good egg... not like a nasty spoiled one...

(The first in the Half-Moon Hollow series is “wry, delicious fun” (Susan Andersen, New York Times bestselling author) as it follows a librarian...)

I thought I'd take a peek at a couple of "best selling romances of 2021 so far" lists for some reading ideas. Almost all of the books featured seem to feature ditsy twenty something main characters who have jobs testing sex toys. Come back cupcakes, all is forgiven!!!

@AzraiL yes, that's put me off many a film/tv series too. @PinkG0ld that book made me faint. I'm not going to describe the bit that did it in case I go again!

@Gilmoregale

I thought I'd take a peek at a couple of "best selling romances of 2021 so far" lists for some reading ideas. Almost all of the books featured seem to feature ditsy twenty something main characters who have jobs testing sex toys. Come back cupcakes, all is forgiven!!!

Perhaps the ditzy heroines use the sex toys to bake their cupcakes? There's a (brilliant) novel by Lorrie Moore in which the student protagonist is bequeathed a weirdly 'round and round' type vibrator by her flatmate when the flatmate moves in with her boyfriend, and the protagonist is mildly revolted and keeps it in the kitchen to froth milk.

Two bugbears - bad geography. A book that was set locally. One of the characters had a minimum wage bar job in a town 35 miles from the town where the book was set. Yet she would jump in her car and drive the 35 miles to cover an hour's shift "because she needed the money".

I also get very annoyed when it turns out the the baddy in a psychological thriller is a psychopathic secret billionaire who can use his vast wealth to cover his tracks, transport his victim across continents etc etc.

I've forgotten the author/title but it was published a few years ago and it's about a group of mums. Not too far in to the novel the author refers in a joking manner to Myra Hindley and schoolchildren. I was appalled, the author and editor clearly didn't live through the 1960s and the after effects of the Moors Murders.

On a lighter note, I couldn't carry one with the first of the Seven Sisters series because of the name Pa Salt, so irritating. I know it's supposed to be an anagram of Atlas except it isn't.

And more recently SPOILER ALERT - 'One by One' by Ruth Ware. This is an editing mistake so I did actually read the book. In the first few pages it refers to a newspaper headline 'Four BRITONS killed in ski resort'. One of the characters is mentioned several times as being Dutch. Without giving too much away, I kept waiting for a twist that never appears due to that headline!

@Emmelina

Second part of the prologue, first sentence. "So setting the scene it was Halloween, and as usual the teenagers of the village were having their annual Halloween party in, surprise! Yes the village hall.“

and not much later:

"I'm a good aim, what can I say? But if I can't kill you! You you disgusting, condescending, vile, patronising, what? What are you, by the way? Ew!" She then freaks out even more, by spluttering "Oh no, we didn't I mean, did we?... And the goat thing, and the horns...ew ew ew ew ew!"

I wanted it to be good, a self-publish of a local woman who happened to be a friend of a friend. But I don’t think I made it a quarter of the way through.

That is priceless!

When characters "lean in" all the time. Maximum twice per book is my limit.

My recent one is books that are fiction but based on a real life incident or people, where the event/people are used because of a lack of imagination on the author's part to come up with their own ideas.

I'm just reading a book called the Mitford Mysteries where its a cozy mystery type book but has the Mitford sisters as main characters. It is terribly written and so bland with very wet main characters. There is no need whatsoever to have the Mitford family involved at all - it is clearly a marketing ploy for people like me who will be drawn to the book because of the mention of the Mitfords. It also seems as if the author couldn't be bothered to come up with her own names/characters so just borrowed the Mitford's.

@LittleMimi

The need to describe every female character’s breasts. Why?

I get sometimes it might be relevant if it’s about high school and there’s some bullying or something like that and they’re picking on a character for being small or big chested. But I read a Stephen King book recently where he did it with a few female characters and I just didn’t see the need. Always male authors funnily enough.

Also in that book there were teenagers who were supposed to be from the present day and they talked like they were from the era when the author was a kid and also gave references to things that were dated even for me (I’m in my 30s). I think some authors get so famous that their editors don’t have much power and their work suffers.

Was that 'under the dome'? That annoyed me too. Stephen King needs to either set his books in the 80s or educate himself on what kids are into nowadays!

The "padded" thing... it drives me insane!
Since I spotted it, it seems to have appeared in EVERY book I read. Like some unwritten rule. Or a glitch in the matrix.

Jacqueline Wilson has her apparently contemporary characters speak like it's the 1940s.

"Ooh yum yum, thank you Mummy, I do love this cake ever so much."

DD (11) gets all twitchy about it

"Padded" - yes - and "Stalked"

Not quite what you're talking about op, but I've been reading the Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson and really enjoying them. Like the main character, until it mentions that once he had sex with his wife while she was asleep. This just struck me as something totally at odds with the character she had built. I've kept reading the series, but it's always in the back of my mind now and has really affected my enjoyment.

@GloriousMystery

The line 'What were you doing at Shenanigans?' would have cracked me up anyway. (May I ask whether Shenanigans is a nightclub, a swingers' motel, a bijou boutique of niche homewares...?)

its a bar in the book

@GloriousMystery
My own personal bugbear is the main character looking at themselves closely in a mirror in Chapter One. If you can't think of another way to incorporate a description of your character, then you shouldn't be writing novels.

oh yes - this is so true she studied herself in the mirror, she saw a pair of emerald eyes, above a dainty nose, with a smattering of freckles

Casual and repeated fatphobia - “small, piggy eyes”, descriptions of fat peoples’ disgusting eating, “waddling”, “huge bulk”, food down their fronts. Sounds funny but it is absolutely rampant!

I tend to lose interest in these sort of books quite quickly:

The female lead character leaves tragedy and her old life behind and sets of for a new life somewhere else in the country. Within a few hours of arriving she has some sort of argument (based on a misunderstanding) with the handsome but bad-tempered autocratic lord-of-the-manor type and promptly decides that he's a horrid chap with no redeeming qualities whatever.

You know exactly where it it going, so why bother reading any further?

That is absolutely shocking writing. Please say you didn't pay actual money for it. It's non sequitur salad.

Anything set in London where it quickly becomes obvious the author went to Leicester Square once in the 90s for a school trip, and did the rest of their research by watching Hugh Grant films.

I associate padding (verb not noun) with Mills and Boon! I read a lot of them as a teenager and padding around was rife! One other irksome phrase that stayed with me from M+B was "she swung the nose of the elderly Rover out of the drive" - it might have been that that put me off them!

@Winniewonka, One by One was baaaad.

Ken Follett is BreastMan. It is simply beyond the man to have even one, minor, female character without having to describe her tits every time she comes onstage. He's like a 13 year old boy when it comes to breasts. Probably worse.

"Cutely ditzy" female characters (because they're just so bloody irritating, as are "deliberately naïve and hopeless") and almost anything self published, for reasons @Emmelina has posted.

Sometimes I don't even need to read the opening paragraphs. The words "Kate Morton" on the cover is enough to drive me away because I know it will be awful.

@SoMuchForSummerLove

Cupcakes are always a Very Bad Sign

Indeed!

Also, stupidly long titles:

Death Comes to the Barnard Castle Home for Retired Ophthalmologists

Ginny McHinny's Tuesday Basket-Weaving Society for Greyhounds

The Orford Ness and District Blue Rinse Detective Club

Yes! The excessively long titles/sub-titles/DESCRIPTORS IN ALL CAPS that they put on Kindle Unlimited books now utterly reek of desperation don't they?

I'm my policy never to click on those books

Shit chick lit where the guy is occasionally shagging a woman who comes across as a bitch (probably because he's treating her shit). It's ok to dump her and not commit because he always eventually meets a manic pixie dream girl. And we're supposed to root for them to get together.

I think the last one I read like that was The Sight Of You about a guy who can see into the future (!) and how someone is going to die so avoids relationships (but is ok with shagging someone on the side and treating her like a wank sock) but then meets a girl who works in a cafe (where else?) and has a dog! So she is not like other girls and his principals about not dating fly out the window after about five seconds of her giving him cake. Hated it and didn't finish it.