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 most ridiculous thing I have ever read in a novel was in Robertson Davies' "The Lyre of Orpheus". This is a very highly-respected author of Canadian literature. The events ensued as follows:

1. Man is staying overnight at the home of a couple/friends of his.

Being rich they all have separate bedrooms.

1. After all the lights are out, man (somehow finds and) puts on the husband's dressing gown and goes into wife's room.
2. Wife (on account of the dressing gown) assumes man is her husband. Mind-blowing sex ensues! Like she's never had it before! But she thinks she's shagging her husband.
3. WIfe gets pregnant and tells husband the good news as they are TTC.
4. But—husband has had mumps and hasn't told her yet he's infertile!

It carries on from there. But (3) is particularly unbelievable, isn't it?

Did Cecilia Aherne write that one about a girl called Rosie or something that has a teen pregnancy instead of going to uni but it doesn’t matter because she manages to become amazing at working in hotels and then she gets back with her best friend when they are both 85, or something, after writing mindless drivel to each other over the intervening 58 years.

Also, characters who think like their writers. "He watched the young woman at work, and thought about how her unlined faced contrasted with her already-wrinkled hands, and how cruel fate had been while still blessing her with youth" NO ONE THINKS LIKE THIS

Literary writers are the worst for that, confusing word count for quality.

@BalloonSlayer

Laughing at the Michael Caine voice!

I fume at writers/screenwriters trying to be all realistic about state secondary schools and then a character says "I'm really tired, had an awful lesson with 5B."

The new system of school year numbering has been in place for nearly 30 years!!!

The writers of Outnumbered are guilty of this, as is JK Rowling (I will let her off re HP as obviously Hogwarts doesn't come under Ofsted, but she does it in The Casual Vacancy as well).

JK Rowling is from Edinburgh, so maybe she had the Scottish school system in mind?

Someone posted a Kindle series before Christmas that was free at the time. Billed as laugh out loud. The first book was called 'Mollie McQueen is not getting divorced'.

Laugh out loud it is not.

What followed were many chapters of a cock lodging, abusive man child, none of which even raised a smile. As I read it all I could think was 'christ, if she had posted this on MN they would have issues the fastest LTB in the world'.

In the end I googled to find out if she did LTB, on discovering she didn't I swiftly deleted it, and all it's sequels from my Kindle.

@MaelyssQ

Actually checking my bookcase it wasn't Maeve Binchy at all (apologies Maeve, wherever you may be now) it was Cecilia Aherne. She used to write really interesting and readable books and now they are just drivel.

Oh, that's good to hear, actually. A friend recommended Aherne to me, and when I glanced at the one book of hers that was in the library, it looked like absolute twaddle, and I thought my friend had lost her mind. I'm not looking for anything too upmarket, just something that'll hold my interest for a while. I'll have a look at her earlier stuff. Some writers do branch out away from their original MO, and while you wouldn't want to read the same book 20 times under 20 different titles, sometimes you don't get into the later work in the same way.

I read the After books by Anna Todd before giving them to 14 year old DD. They are teen books based on One Direction fan fiction - like twighlight with more graphic sex descriptions. But main character is English yet drove from 16, goes to liquor store and cvs in London, won’t marry her but thinks she (American) can live in England etc etc - surely they could have found 1 English person to proof read.

Read Sophie Kinsella’s latest one. It’s basically exactly the same as all the others; idiots ditzy girl, closed of gorgeous man, cold mother in law. Except the protagonist is awful. I hated her the entire way through, she was a total arsehole.

criticalwoman not read but watched May contain nuts on tv and enjoyed it Shirley Henderson played the mum. I tried to find it again when DD was sitting 11 plus - thought she would find it funny but couldn’t.

Really dodgy romance one author escapes me where mystery man who has slept with female character turns out to have same dad as her husband. Yet they are repeatedly called step brothers? Not half brothers.

@PickleC

My absolute favourite was a Tom Clancy Jack Ryan book that in the end I just read for the laughs. Two highlights - Jack Ryan's wife working for NHS and they stop an operation halfway through for all the surgeons to head to the pub for lunch leaving the patient on the table. Couple of pints, head back, finish the op. Because its 'socialised medicine' so that happens!!!

But the highlight was Jack Ryan and wife having to escape down a cliff I think it was with Prince Charles and Diana. Jack and Prince Charles start using machine guns against the baddies and Diana and Jack's wife have a touching moment hiding behind a rock where Diana reveals she is pregnant. I still think I must have imagined parts of this because nothing else I have read matches the insanity - and it was all written utterly straight-faced.

And do you remember Mrs Ryan worrying about BSE in British beef, but concluding that it will be fine if she just cooks it through thoroughly?

Tom Clancy is a perfect example of an author's success riding roughshod over editorial standards.

I read this the other night and thought the same about the balls comment !! Still love AP though

I hate things that are out of period. I recently read a book supposedly set in 1976, in the UK, where characters used the phrase 'chill out'.

A quick Google will tell you the phrase wasn't heard of until 1979 and even that was in the USA, in an era where it took things much longer to cross the Atlantic.

The author's approach to evoking 1976 seemed to be making all textiles orange, and little else.

Some writers do branch out away from their original MO, and while you wouldn't want to read the same book 20 times under 20 different titles, sometimes you don't get into the later work in the same way.

Jody Picoult is surely the worst culprit of this. Ooh, yet another gripping moral dilemma.

Lol at boobed boobily! I hate books where the male gaze is imposed on the female lead. Boobed boobily is exactly the right way to describe it!

I don't even remember what the book was, but this was the point I stopped reading it...

Medically induced comma. My eyes!

It's not just modern books that have absolutely ridiculous scenes.

I really do love Jayne Eyre. But what are the chances that having left the Rochester household to visit her dying aunt she has some kind of health breakdown on a moor in the middle of nowhere..... and just happens to be rescued by members of her previously completely unknown other family.

@MaelyssQ

Actually checking my bookcase it wasn't Maeve Binchy at all (apologies Maeve, wherever you may be now) it was Cecilia Aherne. She used to write really interesting and readable books and now they are just drivel.

Cecilia Aherne had never been a good writer. They must be utter waste of paper now.

Utter drivel. She would never have been published if she wasn't an Aherne.

@singsingbluesilver

It's not just modern books that have absolutely ridiculous scenes.

I really do love Jayne Eyre. But what are the chances that having left the Rochester household to visit her dying aunt she has some kind of health breakdown on a moor in the middle of nowhere..... and just happens to be rescued by members of her previously completely unknown other family.

And much is made of the sweltering midsummer evening before their aborted marriage. Then she runs off and nearly dies of exposure on the freezing cold moors.

I agree that editing has gone to pot. In another Santa Montefiore book a character is referred to as round. "everything about her was round". On the very next page "the tips of her fingers were square, like her body".

I hate it when you enjoy a book - the story is good, etc and then the ‘twist’ at the end is as thought the author thought ‘oh shit, I need to finish the book in the next chapter. Let’s pick a random villain without giving any nods to them earlier in the book’.

@SmidgenofaPigeon

I remembered something wise that was ridiculous in an Adele Parks book

Firstly most of the characters in this story live in Holland Park, which is stupid because they are not millionaires and fanny about in jobs that involve taking wanky black and white photos or making cabinets.

SPOILERS

The really awful bit is a female character that has a daughter with her husband but later the husband finds out he was infertile all along and it couldn’t be his. Instead of having a chat about this revelation he just turns overnight into an alcoholic and pisses the bed and breaks an antique lamp and ends up in prison. At the end it’s revealed that the wife, desperate to get pregnant, STOLE HER BEST FRIEND’S HUSBAND’S sperm out of a condom when she heard them having sex in a bathroom at a party. She then pounced on the condone and voila, a much longed-for baby. At the end the husband gets over it and doesn’t drink anymore and they go on with their lives.

I think Boris Becker must have read this book! Didn't he claim that the woman he got pregnant in a cupboard at Nobu 'stole his sperm'? Just off to Google.....

I stopped reading Outlander (Diane Gabaldon) when the bloody Loch Ness Monster made an appearance. It was already winding me right up with the appallingly written Scottish accents and the glamorised sex abuse, so it wasn’t too tough to stop. Do people just not bother to research?

In the history of time had a woman ever regretted dumping a bloke because she missed the smell of his balls?!

How that made it past rounds of editing I do not know.