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.

We had identical twins in the family who married identical twins and the women definitely played that trick on the men and pretended to be each other.

I went off Adele Parks after reading Playing Away, which was about a woman who cheats on her lovely husband and when it all goes pear shaped the story paints her as the victim

Oh, yes ... her cheating was totally understandable because she found her job unfulfilling.

I got fed up of hearing about what was going on inside the heroine's pants every time she set eyes on the bloke she was shagging. Yes, we get that she finds him irresistibly sexy - you don't need to repeat it 20 times.

Those characters reappeared in several later books - I think the cuckolded husband was the guy whose sperm was stolen, as mentioned upthread.

@MaelyssQ

All the female writers I used to enjoy seem to have gone off piste lately. Sheila O'Flanaghan, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, Theresa Driscoll have all stopped writing gripping readable books and started writing utter twaddle.

Maeve Binchy died in 2012!!

Don't read anything by Juliet Ashton unless your disbelief can be suspended from a tightrope.

@itssquidstella

When I was about 16 I read a book I got free with my copy of Cosmopolitan (so sophisticated!), which was called Waiting for Addison, I think.

I’ve just googled it and it doesn't seem to exist, so maybe I'm wrong about the title. Anyway, it was utter drivel but the heroine ended up with a guy (possibly American) called Addison.

It might have been a You've Got Mail type premise where Addison was simultaneously the creepy nerd in the basement flat and her online penpal /lover. Those sorts of plots were rife in the early noughties when the Internet was still a bit mysterious and glamorous.

I was so appalled by it that I’ve never forgotten the experience of reading it, even though the details are murky now.

Lol, read this post and thought "that's by Jenny Colgan". Wish I could remember actual useful stuff. Do they even still give books away with magazines for your summer beach holiday?!

@mdh2020

We had identical twins in the family who married identical twins and the women definitely played that trick on the men and pretended to be each other.

Spoiler: the men did too.

Oh boy....Sweet Valley High, anyone?

For me, as a doctor, the hardest part is suspending my disbelief around medical procedures in order to actually finish the book. Everyone gets placed in a "medically induced coma" (not comma)- a procedure that it actually rarely used (what they mean is sedation which is used more frequently). I recently read a crime novel where the protagonist, a man with hemophilia in his 20s, was killing in revenge for getting HIV from his clotting factor. Clotting factor hasn't transmitted HIV since the mid-80s (way before he was born) and almost all clotting factor used nowadays is recombinant with no blood product involved at all. Just a little research would be welcome.

musty balls.... hahaha that's clearly a real life memory from the author!

Honestly - i havent found a good read in a long time. Everything is the same old drivel.

I dunno fact is certainly stranger than fiction. I know a woman who had a 3 some with 2 of her son's friends they were barely 20.....and she was married.

@itssquidstella

When I was about 16 I read a book I got free with my copy of Cosmopolitan (so sophisticated!), which was called Waiting for Addison, I think.

I’ve just googled it and it doesn't seem to exist, so maybe I'm wrong about the title. Anyway, it was utter drivel but the heroine ended up with a guy (possibly American) called Addison.

It might have been a You've Got Mail type premise where Addison was simultaneously the creepy nerd in the basement flat and her online penpal /lover. Those sorts of plots were rife in the early noughties when the Internet was still a bit mysterious and glamorous.

I was so appalled by it that I’ve never forgotten the experience of reading it, even though the details are murky now.

It was Talking to Addison, and it was indeed by Jenny Colgan. I got that freebie too, and felt similarly about it.

I'm glad so many other people remember Talking to Addison - I didn't imagine it!

Ah, Sunset Beach.
When I stayed in a Backpackers in Australia we all used to watch it late on a Tuesday night.
There was some storyline that acid or something had been put into moisturiser and they showed this by putting what appeared to be a patch of melted cheese on the actresses arm.
We were all proper hooting with laughter, and that was one of the more realistic storyline.

@PenCreed

Really bad geography gets me every time - where the author has just made stuff up without even thinking about whether it makes any sense. I don't mean fictional places, but where they've set a story in a place they clearly know next to nothing about.

I read a book about a couple who meet in St Pancras when their trains are delayed. He's getting a train to Scotland - those don't go from St Pancras. He's later worried about it being dark when he gets to his aunt's house, in the Hebrides, in summer. The author also has a different character who is a teacher in Scotland, who decides to tour with his musician friends in the summer holidays. Except that it's August in the story, and Scottish schools go back in early August. The rest of the book was utter fluffy trash as well, but the fact the author didn't appear to ever have been to Scotland, where a major part of it was set, was particularly irritating. (It's called "The Day We Meet Again", don't read it).

Yes, Never Greener by Ruth Jones did this, I was so annoyed by the inaccuracies involving the Scottish school system (plus the main character was supremely irritating) that I didn't get past chapter 3

I gave up reading chick lit years ago, love true crime, and autobiographical books. The murders at Whitehouse Farm by Carole Ann Lee is brilliant and thought provoking if you fancy a change.

@speedtalker

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!

Officially I think it is bollocks. But I’ve read a lot of unpublished books submitted to publishing houses, and it probably is more a very good guide. The major failing in books I rejected was that they’d done something weird (not in a good way). The quality of submissions that I read was not dreadful. Generally if someone has written an entire book then they’re not going to be completely inept. The book being too short (or too long) was a common indicator of a problem. Unless you’re awesome, then if it’s less than 80,000 words you’re unlikely to have well-developed characters with a clear arc, plus a satisfying plot which has had time to develop and resolve properly. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s a good way of weeding out a very common flaw.

I gave up reading chick lit years ago, love true crime, and autobiographical books. The murders at Whitehouse Farm by Carole Ann Lee is brilliant and thought provoking if you fancy a change

Now I still read chick lit (and have enjoyed some Jenny Colgan ones) but I also read horror, sci fi, crime, romance and historical books. Depends on my mood. To be fair some of them - in all genres - have been ridiculous though.

Thecatsthecats

"I'm not calling these spoilers, because you can't spoil a turd. "- Please may I use that?

Stovetopespresso - " it might be possible if while standing on your head you cut the end off with the other hand? I just hope the couple weren't still in the room, especially if she didn't have scissors and had to bite it off instead" Well thought out - have you tried this?

@SmidgenofaPigeon

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 😂

While absolutely LOVING this thread, you have reminded me of a truly irritating book. I can't remember the author, but I think it was a man and meant to be Serious Literature, but he was American, and his lead character went to either Oxford or Cambridge. He had clearly done bog all research and the whole thing was so unrealistic it ruined the whole novel. King's College has courts - it's at Cambridge. Oxford colleges have quads. (As if it matters, but it does in a book which is inviting you to believe in a world!)

Louise Bagshawe's heroines all used to get ripples in their lower stomach when they came. How has that stuck in my mind for twenty-odd years?

One of the writers getting panned on here has just written a book about my (horrible) boss as my boss' wife is their PA. I haven't read any of theirs before but clearly have to read this one, so you lot are making me dread the task ahead.

My personal bugbear is poor editing around facts too, particularly when, say, one chapter starts with 'on Friday morning', and the following one is set the next day and the kids are off to school etc. It's endemic, and interesting to read on here about editing.

I also really dislike the drift towards using dead kids as a cheap plot device. I can't read books like that. Sometimes that's all that's on offer at airport/station outlets, other than cupcake bollocks.

Ironically Marian Keyes follows me on Twitter because I once tweeted about wanting to read books that weren't about cupcakes, and she got involved in the ensuing discussion. I still rate her stuff but I do miss the sharp edges of the Walshes, so I hope her new one brings that back.

I had the misfortune to read the first Shopaholic book. Never have I wanted to slap the heroine so badly. And it was just so unfair that she got the great job, the guy etc. She was just so vacuous and self-absorbed. Utter garbage.

And I did once shred a M&B book and return it to them it was that bad. Heroine was raped by husband on their (arranged) wedding night. But she apologised for being inexperienced and fell in love with him.

Judy Blume was all the rage at school in the late 80s/very early 90s but its safe to say I was very naive. Got told two characters 'did it' on a motorbike but could not work out how. Had only seen people lying down on telly and couldn't work out how they would manage to lie one on top of the other and balance on the seat. Like a seesaw.

I love this thread, as someone who worked in publishing. Some of the suggestions about publishing are way off - the reason the quality of a brand-name author drops off is because they are busy touring and doing events and developing their brand, so they don't have as much time to write and their editors are terrified of pissing them off and losing them to another publisher, not because there are eager-beaver writers toiling away anonymously behind the scenes. And there generally isn't a word count that publishers insist on, but a thin book disappears on bookshelves in shops and annoys Kindle readers who are expecting a full book and get a few pages.

What I don't understand is that I've never ever read anyone saying they love Lucy Foley's books - quite the opposite - but they have sold squillions. Why are you all buying all these shit books? Is it the covers?

I feel your pain. One of my DS's went through a phase of loving beast quest books. Never had such formulaic twaddle read to me! Kids books were much better in my day!

Can't remember the book, but a woman, who owns bars / casinos / strip joints in Soho, stitches razor blades into her suit lapels, and when a man grabs her to give her a beating, his fingers get cut off.
Yes, razor blades are sharp, but think how hard it is to cut through a small chicken bone, let alone cut all your fingers off with a razor blade.
It was just full of gratuitous violence too, which wasn't necessary for the plot, and got really silly.
But again very predictable in the outcome - falling in love and marrying the much hated business rival.
Possibly Martina Cole, but not certain.

Actually Lee Child isn’t Lee Child anymore. Lee Child’s brother is now Lee Child. So the Reacher books aren’t likely to get any better.

Possibly Martina Cole, but not certain.

Sounds like it. I’ve only ever read one Martina Cole and I thought it was abhorrent. The main character (if I remember rightly) was in love with a gangster type who was basically a misogynistic rapey bastard and then when he suspected she had cheated on him (she hadn’t) had her beaten up by his heavies whereby she ended up seriously hurt and in hospital. I think she’d had a child with him too!
Cue then passages about how he can’t get over the “love of his life” as he’s completely “infatuated with her” (it’s not his fault he’s so in love with her that he’s gone crazy with jealous lust) and after a brief apology she takes him back.
It’s all written like some warped east-end, crime worshipping love story, like we’re supposed to think the male love interest is a great guy cos he’s just a tough loveable rogue with heart innit? I couldn’t believe a woman had written it tbh.