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.

@IncludeWomenInTheSequel - no, it's definitely me! Everyone I know seems to rate it very highly and I know it's widely acclaimed. Whenever I've argued these points before, people say much as you have, and yet... I can't put my finger on it, but I wasn't persuaded by the characters' psychology. I'd probably buy the narrator's ambivalence more if the rest of it was a more credible but as it is I find certain bits in particular cartoonish like the oafish husband and that leads me to doubt the whole thing.

I'd like to see the film though. Suspect that might suit me more.

@Coopz

Bridget Jones also had a scene with a dinner party gone wrong (although not that menu). I suppose it was trying to get away from the notion that women were natural cooks, but who attempts to cook a sophisticated, complicated dinner for 6 on their first try

It was an opportunity for her friends to prove they love her anyway, and Mark Darcy could say not to worry because everyone was coming to see her...she even noted that Cleaver would never have said something so nice.

Love this thread despite not having read any books in ages and never really reading chick lit! Probably the last I read was a Kate Morton, old house with secrets etc, was enjoyable enough.

As a pp mentioned, the boobed boobily thing comes from 'male writers writing female characters' (Twitter? originally from Tumblr) thread from years ago - the quote is "Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards."

There's a MN user with the username 'breastedboobily' I think!
www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/740ypq/she_breasted_boobily/

sorry if this has already come up, but where the protaganist goes through all sorts of shit and still ends up staggeringly beautiful. See The Disappearance of Esme Lennox and Where the Crawdads Sing.

And Ruth Jones wrote a book set in Edinburgh. That paid absolutely no attention to ... the geography of Edinburgh.

Oh well, it's a fair exchange. 'Robert Galbraith' had some ???? moments in the only Cormoran Strike book I've read, which could have easily been avoided by looking at a map/using the tfl journey planner.

Has anyone read Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough? I actually really enjoyed it until the most unbelievable and ridiculous twist at the end to do with body swapping. I can't even begin to explain!

@Collidascope

I downloaded one free on Amazon. I think it was called Rachel's Pudding Pantry, or something like that. Dire. The whole "single mother in financial difficulty living in an idyllic place" trope. Her mum bakes, and then a new man appears on the scene.

I think there was one called The Likeness (?) by Tana French whose first book (Into The Woods) was decent. This one however depended on the murdered woman looking exactly like the detective investigating, so that the detective could pose as the dead woman, tricking all her housemates, and trap her killer. FFS.

Sophie Hannah's books can also stretch plausibility.

The Likeness was televised along with the previous novel as 'The Dublin Murders'. I remember thinking what a stupid plot device it was.

I was sure 'the Hunting Party' had been on tv too, but I'm thinking of 'Stag', which sounds similar? www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b072vx6z

@Cocolapew God yes that rings a bell. Patricia Cornwell book where the cat of the main character has an internal monologue intermittently throughout. Stares out the window recalling when cats were revered in Egypt or something? Just.....why?

looked up the reviews for the Jane Green book I mentioned upthread and her 'fat' character is actually a mere 14 stone, but is described as having huge fat rolls and a double chin, and unless she's 4ft 2, which is unlikely, as our heroine is usually tall (not always though), it's not that grotesque, or wouldn't be in real life. She ends the book as a 'curvy' size 12

Is that the book Jemima J? I remember reading it and hating it. She lost loads of weight to impress an american bloke she'd met online and then it turns out he actually has a "fat bird" fetish and is in love with his overweight assistant. Utterly gross book 🤮

[quote PickleC]@Cocolapew God yes that rings a bell. Patricia Cornwell book where the cat of the main character has an internal monologue intermittently throughout. Stares out the window recalling when cats were revered in Egypt or something? Just.....why?[/quote]
Yes! That's it 😆

Becky Bloomwood cooks a disastrous meal too, soggy exploding Cous cous to impress the cold but devastatingly handsome Luke. A used tried chick lit plot device.

[quote HyggeTygge]Love this thread despite not having read any books in ages and never really reading chick lit! Probably the last I read was a Kate Morton, old house with secrets etc, was enjoyable enough.

As a pp mentioned, the boobed boobily thing comes from 'male writers writing female characters' (Twitter? originally from Tumblr) thread from years ago - the quote is "Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards."

There's a MN user with the username 'breastedboobily' I think!
www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/740ypq/she_breasted_boobily/[/quote]
I can't read that subreddit. I know it's funny and making a point but it all just makes me too angry.

Ed McBain had some fun escapism but was so, so bad at writing women. All his characters were tropes and cliches, he was a product of his time and in his way he was on our side, because it was obvious from the books that he was very pro-choice and pro fidelity, but God, the way he wrote women. Breasted boobily indeed. (I remember the phrase "thrust of breast, aristocratic tilt of nose",or the beautiful undercover officer who rang up a male colleague the night before a dangerous mission to tell him all about her rape fantasies. Though she did later on scare off a man who was ruining the sting operation by insisting on walking with her to pester her for a date, by telling him she was a cop and waving her gun at him.) Made worse by the fact that they released a couple of books comprising nothing but excerpts from 87th Precinct novels that dealt with female characters (titled Ladies and Ladies, Too), so you could have two entire tomes of women breasting boobily everywhere without even any narrative context.

I recently read I Am Pilgrim, which is fun Bourne-type moving around the world stopping terrorists and dodgy spies book, and I thought it might even give me an insight into how this world works. But then, in a government lab, the scientist looks at a piece of fabric contaminated with a virus, and 'sees' through the electron microscope the DNA and recognises that it's smallpox.

And the book details how the terrorist uses, basically, one machine (I think it's describing a PCR machine) to whip up smallpox from scratch in a garage or somewhere homemade.

Also, in the Guest List, doesn't the groom dive into the sea to save someone then wander up immaculate in the same clothes and get married?

I read an obviously American written book set in the Scottish Highlands where a handsome single father is working his hardest to save up for his daughter's 'college fund'. Which would be free, in Scotland. Just one of lots of other eyebrow raising details that I can't remember now.

The mentioning of flabby books, with editors not cutting out- I believe lots of publishing houses refuse fewer than 80000 words now, so some authors are, literally, adding in unnecessary paragraphs and sections. If you think of some, older, tighter books- they wouldn't make it these days.

@littlemisslozza

Has anyone read Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough? I actually really enjoyed it until the most unbelievable and ridiculous twist at the end to do with body swapping. I can't even begin to explain!

This! The ending was ridiculous, I was gutted because it had been good otherwise

@rednsparkley

I've read quite a few of the books mentioned with similar thoughts about the quality 😂

No-one has mentioned Karen Rose yet; queen of the one-plot wonder. Every hero is (very) tall, gorgeous and damaged. Nearly every heroine has red hair, is slim and gorgeous and they all fall into bed after 24hrs or less, have mind blowing sex and say "I love you" in less than a week. All while she is being pursued by a serial killer that only the hero can save her from. Absolute tosh which she has repeated for 20-ish books. The amount of sex has increased with every book and it is ALWAYS mind blowing. I've read them all 😂😂😂

Is Karen Rose the one with the woman with a damaged past, the unattainable man (that she always gets at the end) and an outrageous storyline with a serial killer who is also probably the protagonist’s estranged husband?

I read through all those books a few years ago

The Stieg Larsson books really suffered when he died. The first book I liked. The second and third books I ploughed through thinking ‘I should’ when they were dire.

Highlights included a three page description of a woman, at the end of which we find out she’s the new copper assigned to the case. She was simultaneously six feet tall and an Olympic rhythmic gymnast, which while possible is quite unlikely!

[quote AngryBananaSund]@GnomeOrMistAndIceGuy

I read a crime novel recently (or what I thought was a crime novel.) It turned out people's clothes were killing them

Was this a certain male author with the initials GM?[/quote]
I’ll look out for this one I find some of his books well researched, informative about folklore/legends and strangely gripping.

Then there’s some that he seems to have written with a supernatural version of the 12 plot wheel, while seriously hungover and possibly suffering from flu and a very short deadline.

Guessing which style it will be is a game I play before reading

Oh god I’m on a roll now.

I remember a Karin Slaughter book I read donkeys ago, it was called crosscut or krisscut. I don’t remember the story line, what I do remember was the implausible end to the story (crime thriller) where it was something to do with closeted lesbians. Which they knew because during the PM the dead woman had an intact hymen.

I mean, I’m no lesbian expert, and while I suppose it’s possible that not having penis sex means your hymen isn’t broken in the same way - is it likely a 40 odd year old woman would be intact?

Anyway it ruined the whole story for me, but now I kind of want to read it again to remind myself what the rest of it was about...

@LucilleTheVampireBat Yes, Jemima J. Awful, awful book.

I mean, I’m no lesbian expert

That really made me laugh

@MustardMitt

Also have you noticed, those women that are padding about, almost always are in stocking feet? Not socked, not even stockinged, but stocking feet?

I read a book recently where the female character padded both to and from the bathroom, but at least the author didn’t detail the ensuing sex scene!

you are so right.

However my reality: ‘She got out of bed with a groan as she heaved her bulk onto the floor. The bed rose visibly and her husband grunted before resuming his habitual snoring. She staggered towards the bathroom with a dead left leg, tripped over the shoes he had abandoned at the end of the bed and swore extremely loudly.’ is unlikely to be a bestseller

However my reality: ‘She got out of bed with a groan as she heaved her bulk onto the floor. The bed rose visibly and her husband grunted before resuming his habitual snoring. She staggered towards the bathroom with a dead left leg, tripped over the shoes he had abandoned at the end of the bed and swore extremely loudly.’ is unlikely to be a bestseller.

I'd read it.

[quote PickleC]@Cocolapew God yes that rings a bell. Patricia Cornwell book where the cat of the main character has an internal monologue intermittently throughout. Stares out the window recalling when cats were revered in Egypt or something? Just.....why?[/quote]
Thank god I missed that one. Loved the early Scarpettas, and should reread them really, see how they stand up. Once the spoiler boyfriend died-but-didn’t happened for the second time I gave up.

TBF, I gave up before she even had a cat. Scarpetta’s Recipies was fun tho... probably still have it somewhere, I’m a bit of a hoarder.

@GeordieGreigsButtButtZoom

However my reality: ‘She got out of bed with a groan as she heaved her bulk onto the floor. The bed rose visibly and her husband grunted before resuming his habitual snoring. She staggered towards the bathroom with a dead left leg, tripped over the shoes he had abandoned at the end of the bed and swore extremely loudly.’ is unlikely to be a bestseller.

I'd read it.

😂😂 Just move in for a week and you can witness it It might end with me beating him to death with his shoe mind

Should I have included ‘13 stone bulk’ btw? I love early Jilly Cooper, but her description of Tory in Riders- ‘no matter how she stood on the scales she weighed 11 stone’ just made me want to chew up the book and the scalesin sheer ravenous frustration

Graham Masterton wrote some ok books. And some shonky ones. The Manitou (or the Manitou Returns) being memorable for the possessed bloke ramming his hand down a woman's throat, grasping her vulva and pulling her inside out. Which is some feat of anatomy.