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...)

BRAND NAME DROPPING.
Went to Boots, swiped left on Tinder, grabbed a Coke…
Ageing, lazy, and limits the reader’s own visualisation.
Pisses me off every time.

i started reading that christian gray book. can't even remember the name of it. he was a multi bulti gulti millionaire and he bought the girl a glass of pinot. bloody pinot.
i never read the rest

also harry potter i wouldn't entertain as he was locked in a cupboard which seems a bit child services phone the out of hours helpline to me. dd said that harry triumphs over advertsity (not her acutal words) at the end but i said that's not the point. children shouldn't be locked in cupboards for "entertainment" (jk rowling - i'm talking about you).
my daughter thinks i am a funsponge though. she's mostly right.

@sweatervest I don't think Harry was locked in the cupboard for entertainment. It was part of the early plot to show how horrible his aunt and uncle were

@sweatervest

i started reading that christian gray book. can't even remember the name of it. he was a multi bulti gulti millionaire and he bought the girl a glass of pinot. bloody pinot. i never read the rest

also harry potter i wouldn't entertain as he was locked in a cupboard which seems a bit child services phone the out of hours helpline to me. dd said that harry triumphs over advertsity (not her acutal words) at the end but i said that's not the point. children shouldn't be locked in cupboards for "entertainment" (jk rowling - i'm talking about you).
my daughter thinks i am a funsponge though. she's mostly right.

That must limit your reading somewhat, though. No fairytales (it's not nice for unloved stepchildren to be left at home to scrub the cinders, or abandoned in the middle of the forest etc), and no fiction and non-fiction at all in which children (do you include adults and animals?) are mistreated?

I mean, you get that Harry Potter isn't real, right? That no actual child was locked in a cupboard in order for JK Rowling to write about him? And that the novel doesn't approve of the unpleasant relatives who do lock him in a cupboard and punishes them by wrecking their social occasions with obstreperous house elves, trashing their house via magic, making their child grow a pig's tail etc.

Oh goodness @Emmelina - that is awful! I guess it's not surprising given a lot of people today struggle to even talk.

I'm not a fan of books that reference contemporary brands, but sometimes it's OK. When it's more of a name drop it pisses me off.

Bad grammar or US spellings immediately put me off a book, unless it's written by a US author, of course.

Almost everything in this thread describes all the top selling books from the last ten years, by the way. You can write beautifully subtle stories that don't centre on a forgotten incident or a shocking moment or a will-they-won't-they relationship or cupcakes but you won't sell any books...

I read After series before letting teen DD read them (they are teen romance books based on one direction fan fiction) main character is British from London but it’s all American- driving car at 16, drugstores etc. I’m sure she could have found one English person to proof read.

I bet someone's mentioned it already but "inner goddess" from 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. It's a ridiculous novel anyway but that just made it sound like a Venus razor advert.

Every crime novel where the killer turns out to have multiple personalities.

I was an avid reader of Kathy Reich's. Accurate science in the genre is rare. But when she trotted out that lazy trope a few books back I was devastated and lost a lot of respect for her work.

I bought a book at the supermarket by Tim Winton - he wrote 'The Riders' which was superb - a guy searching across Europe for his wife. His latest effort was entirely written in dialect, which I can do about a page of....it went straight on Ziffit.

This is a goldmine of information for anyone who is writing a book or planning to do so.
It could be made into a list of “ What puts readers off”.
I read somewhere, that your top priority as a writer is to get the reader to turn the next page.
Sounds so simple, but clearly is not.
Top turnoffs for me are self referential subject matter, writers writing about being writers/ journalists/ etc.
Desperate, harrowing, struggle stories.
Celebs autobiographies.
I’m sure there are some books out there that manage to combine all 3 of these nightmares.
I can see it now, a celebrity writer, with a highly traumatic life story, writing about being a writer!

50 Shades. Read it when I ran out of books on holiday.

Repetitive sex was one thing - I knew that was on the menu - but the grim back story and the thing where she resists eating all the time?

'I'm not hungry'

Ugh. Creepy.

When a character - usually the protagonist - makes a decision that's completely ooc.
The one that comes to mind is Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance series. Now, to be fair, I wasn't loving the series. I picked up the first book because I'd heard so many great things about it, and then I spent the majority of the book wondering why there was so much hype because I really didn't feel engaged until page 750 (it's more than 100 pages) but because there was so much hype I pushed on just to try and figure out why there was so much love for this book. A few months later I decided to give the second book a shot,and I was enjoying it more (still not getting the hype though), but I got about a third of the way through and the protagonist that I liked the best that did something monumentally stupid. I put it down right there. I did go back and read the next chapter a week later but when that character was all surprised about everything blowing up in his face.
Don't get me wrong, I know characters need to make poor decisions for plot development and make characters relatable, but if you've written a character to have a certain level of intelligence and understanding for 1500 pages and the you turn around and write them acting contradictory to that, I have no time for your book. Find a more organic way of progressing your plot.
I've not touched it since.

@sweatervest

i started reading that christian gray book. can't even remember the name of it. he was a multi bulti gulti millionaire and he bought the girl a glass of pinot. bloody pinot. i never read the rest

also harry potter i wouldn't entertain as he was locked in a cupboard which seems a bit child services phone the out of hours helpline to me. dd said that harry triumphs over advertsity (not her acutal words) at the end but i said that's not the point. children shouldn't be locked in cupboards for "entertainment" (jk rowling - i'm talking about you).
my daughter thinks i am a funsponge though. she's mostly right.

Do you object so strongly to bad things happening to fictional characters?

Harry’s aunt and uncle are supposed to be terrible. (as some people are in life)

Sorry “Do you always object so strongly to bad things happening to fictional characters?

I'm with @Clawdy about the sullen teenager. Perhaps it's because I am in my mid-20s, but I find they are often stereotyped, and shown as lazy and disrespectful but with little to no positive character traits.

I've read to the end of the thread waiting to find out why argos was so objectionable! @Thelikelylass, come back!

For me it's any attempt to write in 'dialect,' or represent a specific accent. It never comes across properly, and always has a whiff of classism.

Agree with the posters about americanised words and names in ostensibly British-set books too, and just general absence of fact-finding.

Probably seems silly but I was reading a book and the truck took a sharp left turn and the character slid to the left. No, they would have slid to the right. It bugged me so much I stopped reading the book. My son thought I was being ridiculous haha

This won't put me off reading the book because it's a very small detail and I am really enjoying it. I am currently reading the first book of Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series. Simon's father doesn't feature all that much in the book (at least, not right now!) but when he is first given a name, it is Robert. With the next references to him, his name is Richard. I THINK that Richard is likely his name, as that one is used more. Similar thing in Nine Perfect Strangers, where one of the women at the retreat, Carmel, has a daughter whose name is at first Rosie and then becomes Lizzie.
But I love names so am just more likely to notice them.

There is a book set in Bethnal Green in c1942. I winced when a character paused a conversation when the church bells rang, but it was the person who saw bananas in a shop window and casually popped in for a couple (no queue) which made me give up.

Then there was the WW2 book where a character shelters from the blitz in a Jubilee line station...

Anything where a child is harmed. I don't get past the blurb.

Where they go far too much into the scientific / engineering descriptions of things or events. I like Robert Harris books but had to skip a lot of 'Enigma' and 'The Fear Index' as he goes into too much detail, the first about the Enigma machine and the second about algorithms and quants - whoosh over my head. I am reading his 'V2' at present and he's doing it again but it's still a good read!

These are so great. I am a book editor and love hearing about what annoys people in books. I often have to edit characters' names to stay consistent and make sure timelines work even when I am the last person to see something before publication. Thanks for sharing the humdingers you've come across! I'll keep my eyes peeled ;)

Books by Ellie Griffiths featuring a female forensic archaeologist who is so irritating and full of herself despite her obvious (not to herself of course) shortcomings. Grrr, I'm glad I don't know her.

@junebirthdaygirl

The Slap I hated it. It was anything that could possibly happen in a book all happened within the first few chapters. Too much! Just firing every scenario in to up the drama. I was on holidays with no kindle so getting up from my deck chair by the pool and throwing a book into the bin was a big move. I dreaded running out of books on holidays but that wasn't enough to make me persevere with that awful book.

Oh yes, this was awful. All the swearing too. I'm not averse to swear words, use them myself a lot and they don't usually bother me in a book, but this was just full of them. Horrible book