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.

Loving this thread

@notafanoftheman That's all right. I'll try to phrase myself more sensibly in the future!

@woodhill

Penmaric

The rich are different

Cashemara -

Are the other ones.

Wheel of Fortune blew me away as you mentioned

She writes from different perspectives which is great

The Starbridge novels were all so excellent too, but easy to read at the same time (I know you have read them)

Thank you, as soon as bookshops are open again I’ll go looking!

The Starbridge novels are some of my favourites, I read them totally in the wrong order, in fact I started with the last one! The way she presents the same events from different viewpoints as you read on really draws you in.

And despite being so easily readable they sparked an interest in their subject (being vague obviously) that’s lead to much other reading.

I love being introduced to new interests this way

Second (or third) The Wheel of Fortune. Read it many times as it's a fantastic book.

@SomethingNastyInTheBallPool

Ooh, I love a bit of Susan Howatch but I hadn’t heard of The Wheel of Fortune - definitely adding it to my Big List.

Hope you love it - family saga based around a beautiful house in South Wales, loosely inspired by history. Told from different viewpoints which together add up to the truth.

Sorry, that makes it sound really trite. I’d make a terrible blurb writer

There was a cold case crime novel I read, I think a Val McDermid, in which the cops got info from a recent census from a county record office.

CROs don't have access to any original census records.

I've read all this and I'm still having olfactory hallucinations about musty balls!!!!!!

@OnceUponAMidnightBeery

I liked the spookiness of Glamorous powers and the details about each character's background in each novel and John Darrow was fascinating.

You can reread them and I love the way they tie up with the modern novels and 2nd generation

@Ellmau

There was a cold case crime novel I read, I think a Val McDermid, in which the cops got info from a recent census from a county record office.

CROs don't have access to any original census records.

Plus the census is closed for 100 years!

Although if you want really terrible archives stuff in a novel - Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee has his main character go to the PRO/national archives for parish registers (not held by the PRO). Character doesn't like microfilm versions so wants to use originals (if surrogate exists he would be firmly told to us that so as not to damage the originals). So he goes and HELPS HIMSELF to the originals on an open shelf - irreplaceable archival material is not kept on open shelves where people can help themselves to it, let alone in the national archives.

That book was tedious shite, quite apart from the nonsensical archives research bit.

nonsensical archives research....

Oh yes, many authors guilty of that. Or conversely, the character spends most of the novel unable to solve the mystery when a quick Google search would have provided the answer - and yes, the internet was available when the novel was published.

I read one in which the great revelation was that someone called Daisy and someone called Margaret were one and the same person.

@JimmyJabs

While we're gunning for the popular, am I really the only one who loathed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? So much twee, so many eccentric locals opening their hearts to the plucky outsider, so much appropriation of Nazi atrocities to add 'grit' to the story. I don't understand how anyone managed to read it without immediately getting diabetes.

I’m from Guernsey. Good for tourism but what a load of rubbish! Went to a screening of the film, there was lots of laughter when the camera panned over a majestic landscape of somewhere that was...not here.

@SomethingNastyInTheBallPool

The thing that drives me insane about the Shopaholic series is that she NEVER FUCKING LEARNS. And has to be rescued by her husband again.

Yes this is why I stopped reading them. She describes guilt / panic so well, that horrible squirmy feeling when you know you’ve fucked up and you’re trying to fix it but you can only read that so many times before thinking for God’s sake, how have you ended up in this situation yet again?

The lady’s maid book is about Nancy Astor, if I’m thinking of the same book. My mother read it years ago and was bitterly disappointed that in her opinion it was just a dull litany of clothes worn on various occasions and other domestic issues rather than an insight into a great political figure.

No you fucking didn’t, South Ken is not on the central line and even then, you would ‘emerge to the splendid grandeur’ of Bens Cookies

I've been meaning to ask if anyone with knowledge of publishing can say if authors of popular brands of books as you could have said the James Bond books were ever farm out the actual writing? I ask that because I used to enjoy Barbara Vine's books but then in the 90s/early 2000s I noticed how formulaic they had become so I stopped. And last year sometime I think I heard an American writer saying he came up with the ideas but had a group of writers producing the books. Can't remember the name but someone very productive.

This os the best thread -thanks OP!!!!!

Agree about irritating mismatches in timelines.
Not chicklit and a late review but in the Illiad the best Greek fighter in the Trojan War is Achilles - so much so that they were losing because he was sulking in his tent after his boss stole his gal / but age -wise it doesn’t add up, because the whole war started (ten years before) as a result of events at the wedding of Achilles parents Peleus and Thetis. So he should have been less than ten years old at this point. (Yes , I know ‘ten years’ was Homeric fir ‘ a long time’ but still bugs me!)

say if authors of popular brands of books as you could have said the James Bond books were ever farm out the actual writing

Yes they do. You’re thinking of James Patterson. There are unsubstantiated rumors Enid Blyton did, and Alexandre Dumas certainly did. The Nancy Drew books were written by a syndicate under the collective name Carolyn Keene, marketed as Caroline Quine in France. Foucault’s author function innit.

Germany. Supposed to perfectly blend in. She said three words in German and made four mistakes

@notafanoftheman Why did they need to change Carolyn Keene for France? Were they hoping to make Nancy Drew appear effortlessly French?

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/if-women-wrote-men-the-way-men-write-women

For those who get annoyed by the “boobed boobily” female characters written by males this is very apt.

This is one example from the link:

Hugin was chosen, among all the boys of the village, to compete in the Races. He had grown up, the child of a simple, lovely baker, and his wife, the wolf-hunter. Hugin wore his hair in simple golden waves and had the longest legs anyone had ever seen, coated in fine, silky down. When the yearly selection began, other boys watched Hugin. They knew he would be the one, and they pouted.

I agree about Kate Atkinson's Big Sky. I can't remember a single thing about it, yet I have read and re-read all the other Jackson Brodie ones (hence me leaping to the defence about them on here). She had another one out recently; I forget the title but it was about a female spy - it felt like it had been dashed off in a rush in about a week.

Agree. God in Ruins and Life after Life were moving epics that stayed with me that spy one was very thin. She’s very variable quality

@SomethingNastyInTheBallPool Agree with you on Kinsella and Shopaholic. I have sympathy for Becky and I do quite enjoy the books. And the surrounding cast of characters, who are comforting and real. But it's the same book every time with some implausible scrape and if I were Luke I'd think she was a plant by someone out to sabotage my business.

[quote StrawberrySquash]@SomethingNastyInTheBallPool Agree with you on Kinsella and Shopaholic. I have sympathy for Becky and I do quite enjoy the books. And the surrounding cast of characters, who are comforting and real. But it's the same book every time with some implausible scrape and if I were Luke I'd think she was a plant by someone out to sabotage my business.[/quote]
I enjoyed the first couple of Shopaholic books, before the continuing implausible scrapes got too repetitive. She did start out as quite a sympathetic character.

But with the more recent ones I find it impossible to understand why, why, why is Luke still married to her? She’s less and less likeable with every book, and she’s continually dragging him to the brink of financial ruin before pulling it back in some implausible way!

Is there some secret blackmailing going on here? Because the number of spouses who’d put up with someone like Becky when divorce is an option must be minuscule.