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.

The Reacher book that nearly made me lose the will to live was the one where he walks between two towns, named Hope and Despair. Pages and pages of him walking to and fro between these two towns, miles apart and usually at night.

I wanted to gouge my own eyes out every time he decided to, once again, walk between Hope and Despair.

What bugs me is random American words coming out of English characters’ mouths - a character in a Cotswolds village saying they’ve taken out the garbage, or a Victorian woman talking about ‘dropping by’. Pretty minor thing really but it does jar.

Yes I read a book set in England where the main characters keep drinking bourbon. Why not whiskey?

@SlatternIsMyMiddleName

The Reacher book that nearly made me lose the will to live was the one where he walks between two towns, named Hope and Despair. Pages and pages of him walking to and fro between these two towns, miles apart and usually at night.

I wanted to gouge my own eyes out every time he decided to, once again, walk between Hope and Despair.

Oh I quite liked that one

I've read a LOT of trash When I was in my late teens I used to get the bus to the town where I worked, do my shift at the supermarket then go to the Oxfam bookshop. Almost everything was under £1 back then so I used it like a lending library.

There were always loads of those 'Shadow Desire' books that were like a slightly-less-soft-porn version of Mills & Boon. I think my favourite 'oh dear god' trope was the delicate little redhead who behaves like a hellion but turns out to have a heart of gold and the stamina of a carthorse. She didn't need rescuing but after being rescued she discovered how in need of rescue she'd always been.

@EmpressWitchDoesntBurn I’ve just finished a book supposedly set in early 30s rural America. I didn’t hate it (it was a Jojo Moyes one so I knew what I was getting into!) but the language was just not right for the time. Ditto a book by Kristin Hannah, which was just...not good. I like historical fiction but knowing sound bites of the time is not enough.

I finished a book on page three when the author had misspelled Barack Obama. I mean, come on! It absolutely broke the spell for me and all I was doing was looking for the next mistake.

American authors writing historical novels set in the UK can be, erm, interesting. Assume it’s as bad the other way round?

I can’t remember the author but I was reading a series where the Victorian or Edwardian upper-class characters all had first names like Hamilton and Scarlett, and there was a “Sir John Smith” who everyone kept calling “Sir Smith”.

Ole Ham Fist

This probably doesn’t count as we all know it’s utter twaddle but I once ploughed though all the 50 shades books. I honestly don’t know why I did it, I think, just to know what everyone was going on about. Anyway, at one point sex was about to happen and oh no the heroine was on her period! This was no problem for the hero as he just pulled her tampon out and threw it in the sink Now, I’m still partially convinced I dreamed that that happened and don’t have the book to check.

Going from actual tampon experience one of 2 things would have happened; either the plop of doom or a dry pull resulting in what feels like friction burns.

Nothing against period sex but someone else yanking your tampon out

The American romance novelist Susan Elizabeth Phillips has some ludicrous plots:

The one where the heroine forms a psychic bond with a tiger
The one where the heroine ends up with the guy she Falsely Accused of sexual assault when he was her high school English teacher a decade earlier
The one where the hero, Falsely Accused by his Troubled Ex of abusing their children, decides, while under investigation, to take a job as a children's entertainer under a false name
The one where the former First Lady of the US runs away and is not recognised by anyone at all, and comes in second in a lookalike contest of herself

When we were moving, I found a box in the loft filled with chick-lit novels I'd devoured in the late 90s/early 2000s. I started flicking through them and they were seriously awful. I couldn't believe I'd kept them all! They were so bad that I just chucked them out, DH took them to the tip!

I can't remember the author, but I read a few of her books until I realised that they were all basically the same story - group of women in their twenties and one gay male friend who always ended up dying up AIDS. The women always ended up with their perfect matches (after the usual trials and tribulations) but the poor gay guy who had been there for them all was always bumped off!

Two that piss me off:

"She drank the scalding coffee." No she didn't, she'd have to go to hospital.

"He moved/smiled imperceptibly". Just think about that one. How does that happen?

Both are common in modern novels.

@Byllis

We Need To Talk About Kevin - mainly the awful husband. We're either supposed to believe the narrator, who is a globetrotting, imaginative, freewheeling type, fell in love with an obnoxious, controlling, homophobic, dull Trump supporter type or the fact of becoming a father turned him into one overnight.

I also found the narrator's reason for having Kevin in the first place not very credible (she doesn't seem to have any interest in kids at all), but I guess that isn't as implausible as the husband.

It's held up as this clever insight into parenthood, but to me the whole novel reads as though someone who can't bear the thought of having children and can't even imagine why anyone would want to be a parent decided to write out their very worst nightmare.

I'm hacking through this for my book club. Agree about the husband. What did my head in was the terrible sentence structure, long and convoluted, thinking it was a device by the author to evoke a pretty unlikable, pretentious protagonist.

Then I read her afterword. It was her.

Then there was the use of the epistolary structure which included entire conversations in great detail. You really can't do that and maintain the letters style with any degree of believability.

@MaryLennoxsScowl

Another common fault in publishing is paying less than the going rate for freelancers, so the good people become very sought-after and protect their rates, but every literature grad thinks they can proofread and the publisher can’t get a decent freelancer because they don’t pay properly so have to use the people with no idea what they’re doing.

Too blooming true. I'm a professional editor and I see so much of this.

The Chalet School... where every character has to be told to bend their knees when they walk up a mountain. Which does rather beg the question, how else were they going to walk?

Also, Mary-Lou and her “sister by marriage”, apparently entirely different from a step-sister.

I love the Chalet School.

The Chalet School... where every character has to be told to bend their knees when they walk up a mountain. Which does rather beg the question, how else were they going to walk?

Definitely going up ? Normally bend the knees is for going down, and definitely helps stability and isn't necessarily obvious.

@Collidascope

I've not reread anything other than BotMFJ and Travelling Hornplayer in years -- I should pull out Juggling from whatever corner it's hiding in.

To the people who are complaining about shit books -- try Barbara Trapido's Brother of the More Famous Jack. It's about an suburban eighteen year old falling in love with her philosophy professor's bohemian, chaotic family, and it's clever, funny, and brilliantly-characterised.

I recently reread Sex and Stravinsky, and then Temples of Delight. I was in absolute fits of laughter over the descriptions of Caroline's hypochondriac mother and sister (in S and S) and then Alice's friend Flora's miserly parents and the foul-mouthed, drunk grandmother who wore green flares and managed to disgrace herself quite spectacularly in a fancy restaurant.

I love Caroline's mother and sister. I assume that book is meaningful to its author and it does feel a bit like a very well-told revenge anecdote that didn't quite happen. But it's so well done I don't care.

What I do find a bit revolting in that book is Caroline making delicious deserts out of the leftovers from the dons' champagne flutes. That is just grim, isn't it?

(Besides which, snaffling a couple of bottles would surely not have been beneath her abilities.)

It's so nice catching up on this thread. It's going to put me in a good mood for today (I hope).

There's a Joanna Trollope (I forget which) that is, in its entirety, product placement for Emma Bridgewater. It never says so explicitly, but it is. They have a family pottery business (as you do), and no character can pick up a mug without being told it is garlanded with pansies from the classics range that sold so well and is still very popular, or they eat cake from a plate with the blue and white daisies design that she came up with when the children were strolling through a meadow, or whatever.

I enjoyed it in the way it's nice to flick through Country Living and look at the tat to buy, but I was really curious what financial dealings (if any) Emma and Joanna had.

Sorry not to reference the posters who said it but I have noticed in the past that real people mentioned in novels often have their names mis-spelled. It used to really aggravate me but after a while I realised it must be to avoid being sued.

Re the step-sister vs sister-by-marriage, the meaning of the "step" annotation has changed over the years. You used not to be a step father, for instance, unless you had fathered a child with your new wife to go with the ones she already had. In David Copperfield, Mr Murdstone is always referred to as his "Father in Law" not his stepfather.

I can't remember the author or the title but some dystopian future thing. A British soldier is in Calais and another character meets him and drives him to Brittany, so far so good.

In Brittany they have dinner with character no 3, and then the two drive back to Calais that night.

Interesting that the longer word count is said to be bollocks, although submissions to novel competitions have had minimum word counts of about that eg, from the Comedy Women in Print Award "Completed unpublished novels are required by Harper Collins to be 85,000 words or more", and a librarian once talked about an author (I want to say Denise Mina, but that could be completely wrong) complaining at an author event that she had been told to increase her word count as they liked books a certain thickness on the shelves.
Successful authors I guess are a completely different matter, and can totally imagine ego and power getting in the way. The length of the Harry Potters and GoTs as you go on are ridiculous!

This thread is brilliant 😆

I used to really enjoy the Elizabeth george inspector Lynley series until careless in red and beyond where I can only assume she handed the books over to a student creative writing class to carry on

DC nkata who is black starts to be referred to frequently as “the black” I mean wtaf? Her ideas about working class british ppl do/eat/behave are mond bogglingly awful & tje writing is so bad it’s genuinely hard to believe it’s the same person writing the last books as it was the first few

This whole thread is escapism in itself, thank you!

YES to the “I have to talk to you really urgently, meet me in 12 hours in a dark, isolated place and I will tell you the life-threatening news I have. But not till then.” And then the speaker gets bumped off before the meeting. Just yell the news down the phone, for heaven’s sake!

I read many of the books mentioned when I was in my 20s, and loved them. Now I am mortified at my younger self’s literary lack of taste

I've never read any James Bond books...are they as enjoyably daft as the films?

I read (almost) all the Sookie Stackhouse books, mainly because she would always clean her house. Every few days or weekend, she’s have to do all the cleaning, or if she had guests around, there was always a big cleaning session.

My sister and I used to bond over this with relief, as in most other books cleaning is never mentioned and we felt like failures not being able to just rustle up everything for a baby shower/engagement party without some heavy duty shopping, cooking and house cleaning!