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.

Speaking of Barbara Trapido, I've had an enduring crush on Jacob Goldman for years. But he's a sexist git too.

@sueellekr it's entirely possible I was reading two irritating books at the same time and conflated the bits that annoyed me.

iklboo, maybe you should become a copy-editor! It pays peanuts though, I warn you.

@IntermittentParps

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.

i'm sure there has been, but i used to read a fair amount of chick lit.. cheap books you could get from Tesco, or freebies on my kindle.. like others i'd read Aherne, Keyes...etc but that was when i was in my 20s.

These days when i do read, i dont tend to go for the chick lit stuff.. i'm a sci-fi/fantasy fiction person, think the only current/modern stories i've read recently was an attempt on a couple of my moms Jack Reacher and i found them boring as hell and went back to my sci-fi.

With kindle being around, its MUCH easier to self publish, and i think some authors now are just churning out books to fulfill contractual obligations and i agree, it means they lack in content.

But i also know, if i went back and read some of the bollocks about catching a man and shopping i read in my early 20s, i'd wonder what the hell i was wasting my time with because they just wouldn't resonate with me as a 40yo divorcee with 2 kids!

I read one recently (which actually was a really good book) but the mother of the family got sick of being taken for granted and buggered off for a holiday. But before she left, she put a cooked lasagne on the table and the next day her family when they discovered it reheated it and ate it.

I was like WTF!!!! Food poisoning!!!! Your need to refrigerate things lik that overnight!

It's beyond the parameters of this thread, but I'm not really convinced you do need to refrigerate a lasagne overnight. I think it's unlikely in a normal 18-21 degree home that it wouldn't be fine, especially if it had been covered and was pre-cooked.

Anyway, as you were.

@Collidascope

Speaking of Barbara Trapido, I've had an enduring crush on Jacob Goldman for years. But he's a sexist git too.

Oh, he really is.

But he was born pre-war, so ... I dunno, I can forgive.

It makes me feel so old, though!

I wish she'd write more. I liked her newest one, but Frankie and Stankie didn't quite do it for me.

IntermittentParps - can you do it part time (evenings / weekends)? Might be fun. Then again, I might have to read & copy edit some of the crap mentioned below and I don't think and edit comment of 'what has humanity done to deserve reading this bollocks' would go down well

Loved the classic Jilly Cooper (Riders/Rivals/Polo) but HATE the line in Riders when Jake comes home from hospital and the dog (Wolf?) has a single tear running down his brindle check. Dogs can't fucking cry!!

@FuriousWithTheNHS
Yes it really annoys me when things don't add up around people's ages or different generations . Also when you are reading a book which is part of a series and the author forgets things that they have previously told you about the central character e.g. the name of their ex wife, siblings etc

With kindle being around, its MUCH easier to self publish, and i think some authors now are just churning out books to fulfill contractual obligations and i agree, it means they lack in content.
This is two different issues really. Self-publishing often means you don't have contractual obligations as you would to a publisher. But yes, self-publishing also means there is no quality control, and some of the stuff they ask you to pay money for on the likes of Amazon for self-published stuff…
iklboo, I don't see why not, although you'd have to be very aware of how long jobs would take you (which would include extracting proper details and a full brief from clients, and that is often not easy...); you always work to deadlines and often tight ones. It'd be easy to say yes to stuff and underestimate the time it would take, and if you can't be flexible and put in more time during the day then you'd be a bit stuck.
And yes, you certainly do need to cultivate at least some diplomacy It's not my strong suit either but I've learned and keep learning to try to do it.

Yes, I started to read a book recently where there were flashbacks to the protagonist's childhood in 1966, when she was 10. The book was written in 2012 and there was nothing about it that suggested it was set at any time other than the present, so I was thinking she must be in her mid-50s. But then she started worrying about her upcoming 40th birthday, so it must have been set in the mid-90s. But she and her husband communicated entirely by text, which I'm sure wasn't a big thing back then, even if you were an early adopter of the technology. You got charged 10p per text and you could only send about 100 characters in one message. I did wonder if the author was quite young and didn't realise how limited mobile phones were back in the day!

I gave up on the book in the end because the sloppiness was too annoying. It might have been explained later, or perhaps the flashbacks would have turned out to be of another person with the same name as the heroine, but that would probably have pissed me off even more.

On the other hand the most recent Christmas book by Trisha Ashley is better than usual. It's still basically the same plot but it's not so obvious, there was also some serious vocabulary including whelming and some word I've forgotten but had to look up.

My least favourite thing in any book, is when the first page of the first chapter is devoted to the weather, as if that can set the scene for the whole book.

The rain always lashes down, the sky is grey to the point it blends in with the misty hills or the leaden sea. Alternatively it will be a perfectly fair day with a slight breeze which with agitate the protagonist's tresses as she determinedly strolls to work, ready for a 'standard' day at whatever unusual job she has got.

No! The weather so rarely reflects our mood and even if it does, there must be more interesting things to capture my attention with. Let's have a car accident or the beeping of the train door or the screech of the barista's milk frother or something. I need a cold open.

This is kinda niche but I read a crime novel once where the hero deciphered and translated 20 pages of closely written 18th-c Spanish notes in an hour. That would be, like, at least three or four days' work.

Most couples in these sorts of books seem to have met at uni, usually I think so they have a shared friendship group that always comes into play as they’re all harbouring a dark and terrible secret.

It annoys me though because there are lots of other places to meet a life partner than in the quad at King’s College, branch out a bit 😂

I'm sure I read (or read about) a book where they across the sea to Italy and dock in....Como. (Not geographically possible!)

Characters who light a cigarette, 'inhale deeply', say one thing, and then when about a minute would have passed, stub it out. Usually they 'grind it out', angrily.

The rain always lashes down, the sky is grey to the point it blends in with the misty hills or the leaden sea

And the perennial favourite; 'The sky was like a bruise'

Lol! I'n cuckoo by Julia crouch the main woman character has a one night stand with her neighbour. He started by 'pushing his whole hand inside her as if she were a glove puppet' 😂

@Sarahlou63 lol! His brindle cheek

😂😂😂😂 at the glove puppet vagina

Characters who light a cigarette, 'inhale deeply', say one thing, and then when about a minute would have passed, stub it out. Usually they 'grind it out', angrily.

I read one book where the antagonist lit a cigarette and was then 'puffing away merrily'. He's supposed to be a psychotic megalomaniac, not a small gauge railway steam engine on a day trip.

Glove puppet vag 😂😂

Every women's fantasy

I have just finished (very begrudgingly), a book I borrowed digitally from the library. I am truly at a loss to describe it, it's called The Shelf by Helly Acton.

The blurb reads
'Everyone in Amy's life seems to be getting married (or so Instagram tells her), and she feels like she's falling behind.

So, when her boyfriend surprises her with a dream holiday to a mystery destination, she thinks this is it - he's going to finally pop the Big Question. But the dream turns into a nightmare when she finds herself on the set of a Big Brother-style reality television show, The Shelf.

Along with five other women, Amy is dumped live on TV and must compete in a series of humiliating and obnoxious tasks in the hope of being crowned 'The Keeper'. Will Amy's time on the show make her realise there are worse things in life than being left on the shelf?

A funny, feminist and all-too-relatable novel about our obsession with coupling up, settling down and the battle we all have with accepting ourselves

So it's hailed as feminist, but the first few chapters made me RAGE. Even at the end when the women are happier, realise they don't need the hapless men they were with, carve out careers and are successful, I still find it almost impossible to get past the fact that it took a mans action to make them realise this in the first place.

Are we being led to believe that a woman would continue to exist in their lives (unhappily), only until action is taken by a man?

Maybe I have misunderstood what the author was going for, but it doesn't sit happily with me

@DonttouchthatLarry

I read one last week where a character spotted a man walking a spaniel 'dripping with sweat'! Dogs don't sweat through their skin, only the pads of their feet so a wet dog is wet from water, not sweat. It's not a horse ffs!

Was it perhaps the MAN who was dripping with sweat?

Like the woman who opened the door in her nightie...