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.

@biddybird

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?

It's not supposed to be entirely believable, a lot of Davies isn't.

The story is about putting on an opera version of the King Arthur story. The husband in question is himself called Arthur, and is head of a business empire who wants to do good in the arts. The whole situation with the other guy is meant to reference the Arthurian stories - in this case, particularly the part where Uther, King Arthur's father, magically impersonated another man to get in the sack with Arthur's mum.

The psychological side in the Davie's is that the wife kind of knew it wasn't really him. The whole idea of people following poetic patterns in an unconscious way is pretty prominent in the novel, and in a lot of Davie's writing generally.

I read a book, I thought it was by Chris Manby but I could be wrong, where a bloke proposes to his girlfriend. She says 'Maybe'. More accurately she says 'I might marry you if you pass a test and score enough points'. Then there was a complicated system where every Sunday night she'd write his points tally on a piece of paper. And he wasn't to be told what would get him (or lose him) points.

As ridiculous as all this sounds, the ending was utterly bizarre. She ends up ripping up the paper and giving a speech about love not being about points. But the whole thing was her idea!!

There were some other stupid bits in it too where one of the men would act like he'd discovered fire or invented the wheel or something and go on to reveal an extremely basic psychological fact. As though it were an epiphany.

I can't stand books where you know the ending before you finish the first chapter! You know those, 'girl has bad break-up with long term boyfriend who cheated on her so goes to the West Country to recover and on the first day meets a handsome but rude and arrogant man who she thinks is horrible but then discovers he cares for his elderly grandmother and spends his weekends helping out in a local soup kitchen'.
Straight into the charity shop bag! (or the bin if its too awful to even give away :) )

I read a book years ago - either Chris Manby or Jill Mansell I think - where the heroine had a flat mate 'but this isn't going to be one of those books where the heroine gets together with her flatmate ... [three pages explaining why flatmate was totally unsuitable]. Ending - heroine got together with flatmate.

Yes!! To Outlander @FenellaVelour and @DrCoconut. I'm currently listening to the Audiobooks (Why??!!), Drivel doesn't cover it, even allowing for the time travel.
I nearly abandoned it at the start when she keeps going on about all the lovely plentiful food, immediately after the war, when there was still rationing

@notafanoftheman

I did read a sex scene once where he nuzzled her neck while she gave him a BJ. Nice trick if you can manage it.

Was she a giraffe?

Great thread!

Can I just throw in nikki (nicci?) French

@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.

She leaves to run away because of Mr Rochester’s mad wife in the attic.

But yeah, pretty unlikely to faint at her relatives door 😂

Stovetopespresso

I read one (forget who by) where protagonist is somehow punished for having a high flying career. mid breakdown she gets off the train randomly, lands a job at a bakers due to mistaken identity and realises kneading dough is what she wanted all along. then a hunky man comes and asks to sample her baps. happily ever after!!

Was it "The UnDomestic Goddess" by Sophie Kinsella?

I didn't mind that one too much as I loved the characters of the couple she worked for and the downfall of their niece.
Also found "Diary of a Shopaholic" okay - could recognise some of my own thought processes, but she got more and more irritating and dim in the couple of follow-ups that I read.

"She boobed boobily down the stairs whilst thinking about how beautiful she wasn’t."

I'm SO going to think this every time I go down the stairs, probably with a vacant expression and a swish of my hair.

I've been disappointed with a few books that were 'new' by authors I'd enjoyed. Books were disappointing and not up to the standard I expected. Then noticed that they were not recently published, I'm talking several years before. I think some authors get a successful book and then the publishing house trots out their stuff that can't have been good enough originally! I check the publication date now if I'm not absolutely certain that it's their latest.

@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).

I don't get this? 5B seems a perfectly normal name for a High School class - what is the problem with it.

It may be worth mentioning that I am Scottish - as is JKR......

Or rather, it got published but wasn't very good and didn't sell, and now they've written something decent it gets re-released as new!

Well the Casual Vacancy is supposed to be in England.

And outnumbered is definitely in England.

American authors often slip up with details when writing about Britain or Ireland. Anachronistic language or Americanisms I can get past if the writing's good enough but factual inaccuracies really piss me off.

I read a series a few years ago set around the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the main family had a castle on the "Perthshire Coast" with a tunnel to a hidden cove where they boarded a boat to France! Even pre-Google a glance at a half decent atlas would tell you Perthshire is landlocked and must be a good 50 miles from the sea!

@HeadNorth

Secondary school classes in the UK are numbered six to eleven

Secondary school classes in England are numbered 7 to 11 (or 13)
In Scotland that are S1..Sx

The Outlander books are terrible. There isn't enough space to go into detail about what utter garbage they are.

I read a book recently about an au pair who gets the job on false pretences by pretending to be someone else then flies out to Norway (or somewhere) and no one bothers to ask her for any ID. Then the guy diverts an entire river in front of a house he's building by hand, in about 6 hours. Then when the au pair is found out, she's sent home but a family friend tries to kill her so the family accept her back into the fold, even though she's been proven to be a liar and totally untrustworthy and they all live happily ever after.

Another bugbear is the new strain of vampire that's appearing, where they're not sexy and dark and dangerous, but sparkle in the sunlight and only kill animals instead of people or they do yoga and make smoothies (like in A Discovery of Witches). I mean WTF?! Invent your own fucking monster instead of putting a twist on a well established one, especially when the twist is shite.

@TodgerStrunk

I'm still smarting from reading 48 Beast Quest books out loud to DS and at no point do they go to the toilet or clean their teeth. Seriously unhealthy.

They never used to in the "Swallows And Amazons" books either.

Yeah I read that book quite recently @SmidgeonofaPigeon by Adele Parks at the begining of the book the drunken husband was just someone who drank a bit to much sometimes and all of a sudden he was getting out rageously drunk everywhere ,what really annoyed me though when he was sent to prison ,he said he was left to detox from alcohol cold turkey ,but would have been given librium if he hadn't been in prison ,I used to be a mental health nurse and worked in addiction for a while ,I can't imagine any prison just allowing someone who was seriously alcohol dependent to just go cold turkey ,is it could be very dangerous and potentially kill them

This one about a bloke running about doing all sort of outlandish things in the middle-east. The local evil overlords string him up for days on end until he cops it, then they chuck his corpse in a cave and block the entrance with a giant boulder. Some goths/grave robbers go to interfere with his remains a while later, only to find that the boulder has been moved and the corpse is gone!!!

Think it might be the precursor to 'The Goonies'.

This is an excerpt from ‘Just My Luck’ and it would be an hilarious AIBU, she would be ripped to SHREDS

‘I was planning on serving drinks on the patio. I’d themed the night. Mexican. I’d made margaritas, strong ones. And I’d bought corona and sol. This sort of attention to detail is my way of showing I care. I’d even got Emily to download some Mexican tunes’

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. And sometimes you feel like you are reading the same book 20 times.

*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.*

I also offer you Oliver Twist, which has a completely unbelievable twist where the kindly people who take in Oliver turn out to be his actual relatives.

Reading this thread is like standing in the paperbacks aisle in Sainsburys and being confronted with a sea of pastels and pinks, cupcakes and coastal village scenes, and the authors names in swirly gold or pastel writing.

I'm reading The End of the Affair by Graeme Greene (which is Literature of course on account of being written by a white male).
A man mopes around wondering why his married lover completely ghosted him after he nearly died in a bomb explosion. Turns out she was convinced he was dead, prays to and makes a bargain with a god she doesn't believe in, so when he miraculously turns out to be alive, she has to give him up without explanation because that was the promise she had made to her non-existent God. Then she dies after being stalked by the lover whose threats to tell the husband mean she runs out of her house while suffering from a severe cold.