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...)

@blackheartsgirl I have enjoyed other books by Kate Atkinson since, although I'm not as keen on her detective series.

A God in Ruins for example is an incredible book.

I think she is a good writer but the subject matter of that particular detective book was just too sensitive for me at the time.

Sorry if anyone had already mentioned it already but ‘According to Yes’ by Dawn French was ghastly!

If you haven’t read it, it’s about a chubby but bubbly woman (sound familiar, Dawn?) who takes a nannying job for a very straight laced, upper class family, and gets them to lighten up (by teaching the kids to shout and swear). She proceeds to sleep with her charge’s eighteen year old brother, their father and their grandfather, gets pregnant, and destroys the poor posh grandmother’s life.

I hate the over-use of adjectives - the perfect meal, the beautiful sunset, the delicious cake etc.

Also dislike books written from different perspectives or time periods when badly written. Some work okay, but in some books, there’s no indication that you have changed viewpoint.

Does anyone remember the ‘Molly’ thread that had a tongue-in-cheek look at books and all the cliches?

Molly thread

Found it!

@Missillusioned

I couldn't continue with a Kate Atkinson novel because it starts with the murder of a family. The baby boy was the same age as my baby boy at the time.

I love Kate Atkinson, the books are very well written, but I couldn't read that one after that scene.

I have chosen a kate Atkinson too - love her style but for me any book with trafiking of women and children. It’s such a bleak topic I can’t read it in my time out.

Crime fiction where the bad guy stalks the cop(s) or their family.

What BS.

Anything to do with sex trafficking children. Too disturbing when non-fiction & Huge lack of imagination salaciousness when fiction.

The book where a woman's son is abducted and she immediately has hot standing-up sex with the detective who comes to her house.

@SomeKindOfFloppyWeirdo I was going to point out there were several female MCs in The One, but to be fair there's so little to differentiate them that you could be forgiven for thinking they're all one person. And yes, it's all 'men writing women' territory. My favourite moment is when a woman randomly starts telling her (adult) daughter's new boyfriend about the daughter's teenage breast development.

I did finish the book but there was one I read which took place in a parallel non-covid universe, yet talked about "social distancing". That annoyed me, along with some sloppy editing and too much use of Gen Z slang and textspeak, so the opposite scenario to the one Little Mimi said.

Books where it's obvious the author has never lived in the setting or bothered to study it much. 'Outlander', for example

Oh yes there was a bit that jumped out at me in one of the books where they managed to drive from Oxford to Inverness in 5 hours. Ha ha.

Female middle class authors - working class people are always depicted as sly, criminal and ugly (eg. acne scarred). The educated characters are always morally upstanding and after some trauma involving the rat faced working class, have sophisticated suppers that include a glass of crisp white wine

Omg, yes! It's not just middle class female authors though. Now you've mentioned it, a lot of authors do it. And their speech is always in the vernacular, usually cockney or some generic northern accent.

@ThatLibraryMiss

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, as an audiobook. Not a minute in and I was rolling my eyes at Myfanwy, which the character concerned insists is pronounced Miffany-to-rhyme-with-Tiffany. It didn't get any better and luckily Audible has a nice returns policy.

In non-fiction, The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places by Neil Oliver. I'm used to history books being based on actual facts but Oliver takes myths and builds on them and somewhere on the way, in his mind, they become facts. So, from the myth that Pontius Pilate was born in Britain, he starts by pointing out that there was a considerable Roman presence in Britain at the time (true) and conjectures that his father was one of the officers (wait, what?) then goes on to find a British chieftan who at that time might have wanted to build bridges by marrying off his daughter. Presto! We have not only the assumption that Pontius Pilate was a Brit but also his parents’ identities, presented as fact. All from a 2000 year old myth. Once again, I was grateful to Audible for allowing me to return it.

The mispronunciation is part of the story in The Rook. The audiobook was correct to use Miffany.

@InpatientGardener

The author using 'there was' rather than 'there were'.

I don't get this one, sorry.

There are times that "there was" is correct (past singular). "There were" is past plural.

This: SomeKindOfFloppyWeirdo ‘ Writing women describing themselves with a male gaze is fucking annoying. ’.

Absolutely. A complete failure of empathy, to not realise that women don’t view themselves the way men think about them- how disappointing that so many big, successful names are so poor at writing women that women can’t bring themselves to read on.

Especially when the British characters say sidewalk or parking lot - ffs find an editor who understands the difference between American and British English.

The reverse happens, too. Books by British authors where the British characters go to the US for a holiday or sleuthing expedition and encounter Americans saying things like "where are the toilets?" or "I'm meant to" or "bespoke".

I read a lot of British detective fiction and I have noticed of late that fewer authors are using American English for British expressions. I used to order some of my favorites from the UK to avoid that, but it happens less now.

I think I stopped reading the world according to Garp because it has something about a 12 year old boy getting a blow job, like it was a good thing, I think - but it was a long time ago

There is a series by CS Harris (?) I want to get into but I can’t get passed the first few chapters. A woman has been raped and murdered (off putting in itself) but the author keeps mentioning the smell of Semen! Ug! Not once, multiple times. I could not continue.

I have always had a problem with books where the narration is written in the present tense. I just find it irrationally irritating to read."John walks into the room. John sees Jane knitting in a corner. Jane does not look up." I realize that I am just used to the convention of novels being in the past tense, and present is used to create a sense of immediacy, but sometimes it just seems very contrived and intrusive to me. I abandoned Wolf Hall because of this.

I have somewhat managed to get over this with the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths. I'm on the fourth book now, and she is such a good story teller that I notice it less.

@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...?)

My guess, from the ghastly "Oirish" name, is a characterful pub that sells Guinness

Oh goodness, I was just about to say the same thing and I noticed it was you, @SenecaFallsRedux! It's just so off-putting. I really dislike that present tense narrative.

The shopaholic ones pissed me off. I mean, just stop buying everything... think I missed the point.

I hated the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for that reason. It was ludicrously inaccurate in its portrayal of post war Britain and had characters hopping on a flight from London to Australia, for example, in 1946!! Utter rubbish!

Yes yes. I also hated the film for being shot in Devon and nit actually Guernsey - which I know very very well and can recognise (as I can devon to be honest). All in all a disappointment.

I hate those psychological thrillers that are so predictable that you can work out what happened and who done it after 10 pages.

Books written in the present tense. Just can’t do it.

@Maireas, but ‘shenanigans’ isn’t an Irish/Hibernian-English word, though... Does it code as Irish to you?