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.

Anything by Sophie Hannah, really. The blurbs on the back of her books always sound so intriguing, but they always turn out to have a ludicrous explanation and are peopled by characters who behave nothing like real humans do. And I always inwardly groaned when those dysfunctional detectives turned up again, with their messy backstory that I couldn't be arsed to keep track of.

Re people "padding" to the bathroom or down the stairs. It's everywhere - once I started noticing it, I couldn't stop, and it annoys me far more than it really ought.

Also, any harried middle-aged female protagonist will usually have a beautiful, coltish teenage daughter called Ellie or a mature-beyond-his-years but loveable tweenage son called Teddy.

I am mightily enjoying this thread, so many LOLs. Thank you OP

Yes!! @WitchWife that reminded me of Diary of a Crush of anyone has ever read it- I used to LOVE it. Heroine was always moaning about being skinny and small and had ‘weird green eyes’ and blonde hair and despairing about her apparent lack of gorgeousness. It was deliciously late nineties and she’d wear things like bubble-gum pink mules and white mini-skirts and halter necks.

Naturally, all the men in the book were all in love with her.

Oh yes yes- fraught middle aged mums ALWAYS have a beautiful but surly and secretive daughter and a son like a golden retriever.

I agree with the Dawn French book mentioned above. I presume it was According to Yes.

I would love to see that on AIBU!

@SmidgenofaPigeon

Yes!! *@WitchWife* that reminded me of Diary of a Crush of anyone has ever read it- I used to LOVE it. Heroine was always moaning about being skinny and small and had ‘weird green eyes’ and blonde hair and despairing about her apparent lack of gorgeousness. It was deliciously late nineties and she’d wear things like bubble-gum pink mules and white mini-skirts and halter necks.

Naturally, all the men in the book were all in love with her.

Haha that’s exactly it. And they’ll always be musing about their friend who is so lucky to have voluminous breasts and womanly hips (who I presume hates the protagonist for being a faux naive skinny cow).

Just finished reading “the island” by Victoria hislop which I found quite painful. I managed to work out after about the first chapter “whodunnit” and it’s just full of completely implausible scenarios. Like
SPOILER ALERT IF YOURE GOING TO READ IT:
The bride, who has literally just got married and spent the whole book going on about how perfect her new husband is, basically doesn’t give toss that’s he’s been murdered on their wedding day. instead she just comforts her sister (who she doesn’t even like) and whom she has just found out was shagging new (now dead) husband!

Also,has anyone read any Judy Astley books? They are strangely comforting but quite bland books but the one I just finished was particularly ridiculous. The main character is surmising on her ex husband who has just turned up in town. She married him when she was 16 and he was twice her age. No one knows about this except her mother, who doesn’t recognise him when he turns up 20-odd years later. It ends with her daughter who is also 16 running off to Thailand or somewhere with the ex-husband, despite the fact he’s about 65 now and she continually describes him as “old and crinkly” - she doesn’t care that he’s her mums ex husband either and all this despite knowing him for about 2 weeks.
Oh, and also the main characters husband who is an airline pilot, has a gay affair with a steward. The steward rings and tells her, the husband confesses and then she basically just goes “oh well, you silly old thing!” And the book ends!

Oh yes, I read that Dawn French book. Is it the one where the heroine shags the grandad and the grandson? - Sorry that's a it of a spoiler if you're reading it.

I've just finished a really contrived and improbable book called The Guest list by Lucy Foley

Why would anyone hold a wedding on an island in the sea off Ireland where the guests have to travel by boat, there are regular storms which knock the electric generator out and nowhere for the majority of the guests to stay. The book focuses on the wedding party but why are none of the other guests panicking that they have nowhere to sleep that night (obviously the storm miraculously stops)

And the coincidence that everyone the groom has wronged, either they or their closest relatives just happen to be at this wedding .....

I won't give any more spoilers but if you are about to start reading it, don't bother .

@shinynewapple2021 I had the misfortune to get a copy of The Hunting Party, also by Lucy Foley. Bunch of horrid late thirties wankers getting off their tits in a remote Scottish lodge and going on and on about when they were at uni. No one cares. Someone was killed but I couldn’t be bothered to find out who. I wanted them to all to drown in the loch, since they spent so much time being twatty braying oafs and and quaffing champagne next to it. DEFINITELY the kind of people who are insufferable to be sat near in a train or restaurant.

Another Gillian Flynn novel, basically a mum and her kids are found horrifically murdered and the surviving son is believed to have done it but evidence suggests he may be innocent.

Intriguing....

Until you find out (SPOILER ALERT) the mum hired someone to murder her. Yes hired someone to bludgeon her to death because she was poor. So rather than take her own life in as quick a way as possible, she hired a complete stranger to break into her house at night and murder her.

Flynn is an excellent writer but some of her plotting...yeeesh!

Until you find out (SPOILER ALERT) the mum hired someone to murder her. Yes hired someone to bludgeon her to death because she was poor

Wouldn't that be for insurance purposes as they don't tend pay out for suicide? Although I agree there would be easier ways of doing it.

I've just finished a really contrived and improbable book called The Guest list by Lucy Foley

This is the book I meant upthread - not The Island! Utter crap.

It was an 'ordinary person solves the mystery' book.
We were told how much milk this man likes on his cereal, and the exact browning of his toast.
He took a shower and put two soapy fingers into his anus, up to the second knuckle.
I think this was to show how persnickety and meticulous he was.
I stopped reading.

@Coopz

Your two sentences made more sense that the plotting in the book did.

Imagine going to sleep KNOWING that someone is going to come into your house and club you to death. Would you do a normal bedtime routine so as not to alarm anyone? Do your skincare? You’d have to I suppose because it would look odd if you weren’t murdered in your pjs in the dead of the night.

Sophie Kinsella has always written utter drivel.

I used to devour books by Marian Keyes and later, Lisa Jewell. Both have way jumped the shark lately. Marian’s last book was utterly unreadable and I gave up as there were just way too many characters to follow and I couldn’t give a fuck about any of them. LJ has gone from writing intelligent chick lit into dark thrillers lately. All of which have been shite. I give up.

I don’t usually read chick lit but fancied something lightweight and Christmassy on audible to listen to whilst wrapping presents in December.

I flicked past 10 or so variations on the Christmas Cupcake Cafe Bookclub theme before downloading Christmas Every Day which said it was going to be about a woman renovating a cottage in a forest.

I made it as far as the bookclub meeting where the big burly ex marine type guy declares his lifetime dream of baking cupcakes for the local cafe before deleting it in a fit of rage.

@SmidgenofaPigeon

It gets even more insane. To explain the whole family getting murdered this is what happened:

The hired guy was only meant to kill the mum, but one of her kids saw him creep in, so he killed the child too. The surviving son's girlfriend discovered the bodies and rather than call the police decided to set about murdering the rest of the family for fun. The surviving son went along with it cos he was a wet blanket.

😂 what?!!! Under what universe could you see a mum and a kid brutally murdered on the floor and then think ‘that looks so much fun! I’ll do a few murders and then we can go to Taco Bell’

I can’t remember the last time I read a novel that didn’t contain typos. I like Lisa Jewell but there are always errors like saying eldest instead of youngest child and swiped right instead of swiped left...

I want to know about the book where clothes kill people. It sounds intriguing. What’s the name of the book please?

@CounsellorTroi

I read a book called the French Gardener by Santa Montefiore. This French guy turns up in an English village where he used to work in the gardens of the local big house 25 years ago. Nobody recognised him.

Oh I read one of hers about this Anglo Irish aristocratic family of the past and a modern day cousin who was identical one of them bla bla. Utter tosh but I loved it! Thank you for reminding me to look up some more of hers😁

Years ago I read a thriller/horror book where the author kept writing the ‘scary’ bits in capitals. It was hilarious. I have no idea how it got punished like that.

‘The door creaked open and Glenda peered in. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out in the gloom that KEITH WAS STANDING THERE WITH AN AXE IN HIS HAND’

She always has the perfect home and spends the first chapter describing how perfectly middle class it is with a smattering of modern cultural references. And never eats anything other than salad. 2 pages in I’m desperate for the murderer to show up and force feed her donuts.