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.

😂😂😂😂yes I’ve read a LOT of books where it’s heavily implied that the heroines looks are ‘wasted’ in the provincial village she comes from and she’s only really recognised as being beautiful when she gets on a train to London

I thought it was common knowledge that the only cover girl for the provincial editions of Vogue and Cosmo is the local prize heifer.

@SmidgenofaPigeon

😂😂😂😂yes I’ve read a LOT of books where it’s heavily implied that the heroines looks are ‘wasted’ in the provincial village she comes from and she’s only really recognised as being beautiful when she gets on a train to London

Eeeh, well, things will improve for the poor lasses once we get that there electric-tricity and televideo's and the world wide interweb thingy down here int' country!

I used to enjoy a Maeve Binchy as a bit of brainless reading but I stopped when I read one in which a character was raped by her ex-husband but it was written as an act of love.

@LadyFidgetAndHerHandbag

I used to enjoy a Maeve Binchy as a bit of brainless reading but I stopped when I read one in which a character was raped by her ex-husband but it was written as an act of love.

Which book is that in?

@Graciebobcat

Kindle Unlimited recommendations have led me to some of the most terrible books I've ever encountered and I've just stopped my subscription. I'd rather pay £5 a time and read something really good.

Me too. Almost all of it is trash for £8 a month!

The only thing I paid to keep was the Ron Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton, which is incredible if anyone feels like devoting months of their life to one book

@fishonabicycle

The Dilemma. Husband finds out their daughter might be dead, and doesn't tell his wife as it might spoil her 50th birthday party! Which she is massively precious about because she didn't have a a huge white wedding.

That drove me INSANE!

It was so so stupid.

This might be an unpopular opinion, and I feel bad because Richard Osman is a nice man, but The Thursday Murder Club was pants.

The mystery doesn't build. The "detectives" are just a clutch of "old people are people too" stereotypes, and they just go from suspect to suspect eliminating them until they pick the last one.

Some reviews were raving about the "twists and turns"... But there weren't any? They barely named suspects until they were ruled out by a tortuously long bit of dialogue.

@SomewhatBored “ ... a universe where short fat women with cropped hair get all the men”

you mean, the Gloucestershire born and educated JKR, who trained as a French teacher in the early 9ps when shevreturned from her divorce from Portugal who moved to Edinburgh to be near her sister for support with Jessica is Scottish?If school years changed in the mid 90s, JK would have experienced her own schooling under the ‘oldsystem’. I did too and, despite teaching for many years in the ‘new system’ my instinct remained for a long time to think about 1st year etc

This part of the thread has made me laugh. Can't believe that people are debating the classification of a fictional wizarding school year groups!

We aren't. I was complaining about The Casual Vacancy. I let her off re Harry Potter.

@thecatsthecats

This might be an unpopular opinion, and I feel bad because Richard Osman is a nice man, but The Thursday Murder Club was pants.

The mystery doesn't build. The "detectives" are just a clutch of "old people are people too" stereotypes, and they just go from suspect to suspect eliminating them until they pick the last one.

Some reviews were raving about the "twists and turns"... But there weren't any? They barely named suspects until they were ruled out by a tortuously long bit of dialogue.

Oh thank god I thought it was just me! I like richard Osman but I was wildly underwhelmed by it. The whole selling point seems to be “ooooooh old ppl behaving like actual ppl rather than staying in drinking tea”. I mean it’s ok but nothing special. If it wasn’t written by him, I can’t believe it would have sold anything like the amount it has.

@BalloonSlayer sorry!

@iklboo

I gave up reading The Dark Tower series when Stephen King wrote himself in as a huge plot device / hero of the story. That was one WTF too far.

Ah, but if you've ever read any interviews with Stephen King, he genuinely believes his work is up there with Tolkien and can't understand why his great Tower works haven't had the same critical acclaim - quite apart from the fact that he mostly writes in words of one or two syllables and his stories are utterly face value with no real complexity (which is why the translations of his books into French were my go-to reading when living in France as I knew they wouldn't be a challenge!) Great storyteller, awesome imagination, but has an ego too big to notice his works lack any kind of literary background or depth - reminds me of Wilbur Smith writing himself into the "Seven Scrolls" novels - again. fantastic page turners, but he dropped himself in the story and made out he was the best lover in the world with a huge appendage - is this really necessary?!!!.

tbh I am not sure why so many men are so fascinated with the concept of the huge appendage.
Bashing away and hitting the cervix is both hurty and annoying.

But, one of my favourite books spoke of a character's small appendage and commented 'It was like waving an arm in a barn' which has never left me as a description!

Oh thank god I thought it was just me! I like richard Osman but I was wildly underwhelmed by it. The whole selling point seems to be “ooooooh old ppl behaving like actual ppl rather than staying in drinking tea”. I mean it’s ok but nothing special. If it wasn’t written by him, I can’t believe it would have sold anything like the amount it has.

I think Spielberg has bought the rights purely on the grounds that the concept is solid and you can chuck a few Maggie Smiths etc into the film and chuck out a sequel or two.

I think that once people are famous they get a free pass on editing, because the publishers are going to sell anyway. He is a smart man, so I think if he'd been told "you need to play out the mystery more and stop talking as if old people are anything special for having a personality" it could have been really good.

[quote boxingdayclearout]@BalloonSlayer sorry! [/quote]
Fair cop re. me: my 7 and 10 year old are obsessed by HP and are, as I type, watching the backstories on YouTube. As far as we’re concerned at Wooster Mansions, it’s all perfectly real and I may have temporarily lost the run of myself!

I've just read on Antony Horowitz -that I really really thought I would love and it was rubbish. The Setence is Death -the name of it. 5 star reviews on Amazon -thousands of them. And he writes about himself writing about a detective etc.

It read as if it was written for a TV series -not a novel and I hated it. Very let down.

@iklboo

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.

Just popping on to say I've had to stop reading his crime thrillers (set in NI I think). I love a good crime thriller but my god, his were progressing more and more into torture porn and were making me feel ill (roasting nuns anyone?).

There was one Adele Parks book (or possibly Jane Green), set in a ski resort, where the whole plot revolved around a character thinking the male protagonist was in love with her because they'd once had bumsex.

It was about then that gave up on chicklit.

YES! I HATED that book. I loved her earlier stuff - most of the Walsh family stuff was very funny - but this was just a sad and toxic relationship.

I'm not defending The Break, but didn't it come out later in the book that the wife had actually been having an affair the year before the husband decided to go to Thailand to shag other women find himself?

I can't really remember it very well (and there's no excuse for either of their behaviour).

I suppose the tell tale thing about MK's books is that I haven't wanted to reread any of her later books, but I can still go back and read some of the early ones, like Rachel's Holiday (but definitely not Watermelon). She's getting back to her previous standards but she's not quite there yet.

And she'd better not break Rachel and Luke up just so she can shoehorn in whatever her pet 'issue' of the moment is.

But, one of my favourite books spoke of a character's small appendage and commented 'It was like waving an arm in a barn' which has never left me as a description!

That's brilliant! See also 'like stuffing a handful of dough into a purse'

The sperm stealing has reminded me of Sunset Beach and the turkey baster. I can't recall where she was stealing it from.

coughs, preps lecture notes

Single mother Virginia was in love with lifeguard Michael because they were both from The Hood (despite both speaking and acting like they'd gone to Harvard) but Michael was in love with posh journalist Vanessa. Virginia stole a sample of sperm from Doctor Tyus, who just randomly kept his own sperm samples at work for some reason, drugged Vanessa and impregnated her with the turkey baster so that infertile Michael would think she'd cheated on him.

Vanessa's mother had some kind of terrible terminal illness that presented with skin lesions, so Virginia bought a potion from the voodoo witch doctor Mrs Moreau to sneak into Vanessa's moisturiser to give her skin lesions to make her believe she'd inherited her mother's terminal illness. Why this took a voodoo potion when she could have just used a $1.99 bottle of Domestos I don't know.

I realise this a book thread but there is literally nothing I don't know about Sunset Beach. When I am 90 and have forgotten my family I will still remember Terror Island and the evil twin saga (fun fact: the evil twin was originally named Bill, making them Bill and Ben, until the British actor complained).