Absolutely Ridiculous Things in Books

[SmidgenofaPigeon]

I’m reading (it’s painful and I will use it for kindling when I’m finished) Just My Luck by Adele Parks. I actually used to enjoy her books back in the day for a bit of mindless escapism and the characters were well-written but they’ve slid into lunacy over the last few years. Think twins pretending to be the same person and getting married to one guy (or something like that) and a mum’s glamorous 45 year old mate shagging her 17 year old son and getting pregnant while they all live under the same roof.

The latest one they win the lottery and calamity ensues in the most implausible ways possible.

The daughter in this one is musing over the fact that her boyfriend has turned into a bit of cad and she’s moping about, and musing over missing ‘the musty smell of his balls’

THE MUSTY SMELL OF HIS BALLS.

The character in question is FIFTEEN. She was ONLY FIFTEEN YEARS OLD (in the voice of Micheal Caine)

Please add, there must be loads, and we can have a laugh on this horrible wet January afternoon.

Capitalism is ruining the publishing industry. It's all about creating hype and shifting as many books as possible with no thought to quality. I haven't read a single newly published author who I thought was any good for years.

I hate it when authors throw in random bits of completely extraneous detail. It’s even more irritating when the extraneous detail turns out to be wrong.

I read one book where someone was travelling from Paddington to Bristol (fine), except for some reason the author thought that the train stopped at Didcot before Reading. There was no need to mention either station in terms of the plot - and it’s actually the other way round anyway!

I’m so relieved to find that really the general quality of things being published now are just dross. I thought I just didn’t enjoy reading anymore. But actually genuinely haven’t had a proper can’t-put-down-page-turner for years and years. I never know how some of these offerings make it into the bestsellers but it doesn’t help when you e got reviews on the bank going ‘SPELLBINDING! An absolute MASTERPIECE’ and ‘I was hooked!’ And then you read the book and think ‘what?!’

Crochet, that is annoying but personally I never blame an author for stuff like that; what worries me is that it presumably got through at least one in-house edit (a bit more understandable as they're generally looking at the bigger picture, but you'd still hope they'd brief the subsequent editorial people to look out for accuracy in transport and other details); then at least one line editor/copy-editor; then a proofreader.
A fellow freelancer has a theory that a lot of publishers are just skipping copy-editing these days, to save money and time. I sometimes think she's right. Again, though, you'd still hope a proofreader would pick up stuff like this. When I'm proofreading I pick up some proper howlers that have clearly not been past a copy-editor or have been past an incompetent one.

@XDownwiththissortofthingX I think I saw the movie!!

I used to enjoy the Roy Grace books by Peter James but they have got very samey and his marriage to Cleo is just too good to be true.

He also writes supernatural novels which started out being quite good but jumped the shark long ago. I read one called The House on Cold Hill which was shite. An 18th century ghost with an understanding of modern office technology which would type things like “in your dreams”.

Otherwise, not chick lit which seems to dominate, but there's a big in Barbara Trapido that really bugs me. In one book Jonathan is described as having blond hair; in the next it's 'coarse black spirals'. I really like her writing but that jars me every time.

@SarahAndQuack, which Barbara Trapido is Jonathan described as blonde in? I love BT and am racking my brains! He's definitely dark- and frizzy-haired (though in adulthood a more sophisticated poodle-ish clip) throughout Brother of the More Famous Jack, which I recently reread, and I thought he remained so in Travelling Horn Player...?

Thank you Killjoys Dutch
The idea of killer clothes piques my sense of the perverse. Shame about the casual racism, but I still want to read it.

i wonder, those of you bemoaning what writers are like now, compared to 10/15/20 years ago...

Maybe the writers haven't got shittier, maybe you've just grown up/got older/more jaded, so the same cliche, trite shit just doesn't do it for you any more.

@Deadringer

Yes it always annoyed me that orphan Jane Eyre, who was alone and friendless in the world, stumbled upon her cousins in the middle of nowhere. (Well they stumbled upon her). And then was left a fortune by her uncle i think. In Oliver Twist tbf the man who took him in was not related to him iirc, not in the book anyway, he had known the mother though, and had been in love with her, he was drawn to Oliver because he reminded him of her. I think for tv they made the old man Oliver's grandfather though, for simplicity i guess?

To be fair, this isn't that farfetched for the early 19th century, particularly in West Yorkshire.

Prior to the advent of the railways, which allowed people to move around en masse, West Yorkshire had a fairly small population that lived in small towns and hillside villages, and had been in place in the area for hundreds of years.

So everyone knew everyone, and pretty much everyone was related in some way. Indeed, in more rural West Yorkshire towns and villages, there's still "clans" of surnames.

This kin effect became more pronounced if you move up the class structure. So Jane, though she is an orphan, coming from a middle class family, was likely to be kin to other middle class households in a wider area, purely by default of the marriage pool, according to class, over the previous two hundred years.

I mean, it's still a stretch, she'd be more likely to be found by a game-keeper prowling for poachers, but not that utterly bizarre.

Years ago I started reading a book called 'The Cat Who....' (can't remember the rest of the title).

It was one of a series of books that had a cat solving crimes. I could have suspended disbelief if the characters had had normal names. Everyone had a name beginning with Z - Zoe, Zachariah, Zebedee.

I got hacked off after a chapter and put the book down.

He has 'a small well-clipped tortoiseshell moustache' when he sits with Katherine in the hospital cafe after visiting Jane (that's the bit with the hair clipped poodle-style, both of which details make me seriously question BT's taste in men, though I do admit I 'get' Jonathan in this respect).

I would say tortoiseshell implies pale hair, doesn't it?

Though, I will check to see if there's anything else to indicate.

(He's never blonde, though - I think she's too good on languages that use gendered endings to make that mistake).

I was coming on to talk about The Foundling and I saw someone already has - I'm only about quarter of the way through but I was really enjoying it until she decides to look for her daughter and LITERALLY THE FIRST CHILD SHE SEES is the kid she's looking for. So annoying! My DP charitably suggested an editor had told the author to cut out a chapter where she spends time looking...

There's a very common trope in about 80% (rough estimate ) of books I've read recently whereby the protagonist is harbouring A Big Secret from their childhood. Disturbingly, it often turns out to be that they murdered another child, possibly their younger sibling, except in the end you find out it wasn't them at all, but their troubled best friend. I didn't think child-on-child murder was very common, but in modern thriller land, it appears to be rife.

"We are all Absolutely Beside Ourselves"
The narrator is the sister of "Freya", who has gone from the family and not talked about.The sisters spent their childhoods together, precious memories, grief of losing her etc.
The parents were research scientists.
I discovered mid-book that Freya was a fucking chimp and she had been carted off to the lab for experimentation after years in the family.
I stopped reading.
"The Absolute Truth" by Peter May. His prose is great, but they are looking for the proof that God exists while some scientist has some chimps at typewriters typing in the hope that statistically, one of them will randomly reproduce the full bible. It's got to happen statistically, except they didn't have millions of apes doing the tying over millions of years.
Great excitement was felt when one of the chimps typed a comma followed by a space.
Reader, I didn't give a fuck end left the book on a local bench.
I'm not reading anymore books featuring chimps.

A lot of the women have flowing auburn hair. There is a very high percentage of ginger women in the fictional world. Only women though.

@Wrongsideofhistorymyarse

Years ago I started reading a book called 'The Cat Who....' (can't remember the rest of the title).

It was one of a series of books that had a cat solving crimes. I could have suspended disbelief if the characters had had normal names. Everyone had a name beginning with Z - Zoe, Zachariah, Zebedee.

I got hacked off after a chapter and put the book down.

Are you sure you're not getting 2 series mixed up? The "Cat Who" books are by Lilian Jackson Braun; the male protagonist is Jim Qwilleran, his librarian girlfriend is called Polly; and his Siamese cats are Koko and Yum Yum. Not a preponderance of Z's.

@Noranorav

The biggest pile of rubbish I read in recent years was The Shining Girls - a serial killer uses a house that travels through time to kill random girls that 'shine'. Utter drivel, plot made no sense, no explanation for the girls with the 'shine' or why there's a house that time travels, just a terrible book, no real characters or plausibility - just felt like a vehicle for writing scenes of girls dying.

I read that as a horse that traveled through time! Possibly more interesting...

@MrsHusky

i wonder, those of you bemoaning what writers are like now, compared to 10/15/20 years ago...

Maybe the writers haven't got shittier, maybe you've just grown up/got older/more jaded, so the same cliche, trite shit just doesn't do it for you any more.

I definitely think you've got something there. If I went back now and read some of the books I loved as a young adult I doubt I'd feel the same way.

As an aside did anyone have a book subscription with Mango? I loved getting the little magazine/booklet with all the books to choose from. I read hundreds of books from there.

The Absolute Truth" by Peter May. His prose is great, but they are looking for the proof that God exists while some scientist has some chimps at typewriters typing in the hope that statistically, one of them will randomly reproduce the full bible. It's got to happen statistically, except they didn't have millions of apes doing the tying over millions of years. Great excitement was felt when one of the chimps typed a comma followed by a space. Reader, I didn't give a fuck end left the book on a local bench. I'm not reading anymore books featuring chimps.

I think this is Peter James not Peter May.

Peter May writes crime thrillers mostly set on the Isle of Lewis.

i wonder, those of you bemoaning what writers are like now, compared to 10/15/20 years ago...

Maybe the writers haven't got shittier, maybe you've just grown up/got older/more jaded, so the same cliche, trite shit just doesn't do it for you any more.

While there is something in that, as someone who as well as being a recreational reader has worked in book editorial over this timeframe I have definitely noticed a slip in standards.

@TheSockMonster

I don’t usually read chick lit but fancied something lightweight and Christmassy on audible to listen to whilst wrapping presents in December.

I flicked past 10 or so variations on the Christmas Cupcake Cafe Bookclub theme before downloading Christmas Every Day which said it was going to be about a woman renovating a cottage in a forest.

I made it as far as the bookclub meeting where the big burly ex marine type guy declares his lifetime dream of baking cupcakes for the local cafe before deleting it in a fit of rage.

Ha! Your post made me chortle.

I had the same idea...hours of scrolling through reviews led me from Christmas in the cafe At Bunting-on-Sea to Emily St.John Mandel's Station 11 and Cormac McCarthy's The Road!
I actually "enjoyed" both

@MrsHusky

i wonder, those of you bemoaning what writers are like now, compared to 10/15/20 years ago...

Maybe the writers haven't got shittier, maybe you've just grown up/got older/more jaded, so the same cliche, trite shit just doesn't do it for you any more.

This in absolute spades.

SPOILER ALERT IF YOURE GOING TO READ IT:
The bride, who has literally just got married and spent the whole book going on about how perfect her new husband is, basically doesn’t give toss that’s he’s been murdered on their wedding day. instead she just comforts her sister (who she doesn’t even like) and whom she has just found out was shagging new (now dead) husband!

This isn't quite what happens. She comforts her sister because she finds out on her wedding day that her supposedly perfect husband actually shagged her sister before they met, ghosted her when he met the bride, the sister aborted his baby and was manipulated to keep his secret which led to her estrangement from her sister and self harming, and the bride just overheard her new husband say all this as well as threaten to publish nude photos of her sister if she tells, and also threaten to push her off a cliff.

It's a farfetched book but that particular part is fairly reasonable.