Things that really wind you up in novels

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I just finished reading a 'chick-lit' book (not how it was marketed but it most definitely was, IMO) where the heroine starts out as an ambitious, independent professional who seems like she might be an interesting character for once, then as soon as A Man appears she turns to mush and reveals that all this strong exterior is just a facade she's putting up to stop her heart being broken again. Sigh. To make things worse you could tell she was going to fall for him from about page 20 because a) they hated each other and b) his wife was conveniently dead, AND it had one of those 'quirky' The Quaintly-Named Suburban Avenue Ladies' Flower Arranging Society type titles. It was a shame because otherwise it wasn't a badly written book, it was just ruined for me by too many cliches... What things in a novel make you sigh and think 'Oh God, it's one of those books'?

I have two differently coloured eyes. My left is blue, my right is split down the middle, half blue and half brown.

I like it. Nobody has ever found me magnetic or compelling because of it the buggers

Writers who have foreign characters say phrases that are quite specific to their native country. Dan Brown is terrible for this. The French female character in the Da Vinci Code, was always saying things like 'No worries'. (in my head, in a french accent) All that research into DaVinci etc and you can't imagine that any nation speaks in anything except American colloquialisms.

And the trilogy thing annoys me too.

Often it doesn't need to be a trilogy, it's just being dragged out for the sake of it (much the same way as many final books of a trilogy/series are dragged out over two films, whereas all the other books have usually been badly crammed into one).

Or the author bashes out the first two books really quickly and in great detail and then…nothing.

And for this I am looking at you Patrick Rothfuss and your Kingkiller series, which has a list of loose ends as long as my arm and no third book to resolve them in sight.

Books with ambiguous endings. These seriously piss me off. I've read the blurb so clearly I want to know things pan out. After 400+ pages you're left to make up your own bloody ending....Total disappointment. At any point in the previous 38+ chapters I could have decided something different happened and stopped reading. But I didn't because I've bought the damn book because I don't want to daydream, I want a story, which kind of includes an end. Lazybones authors can't commit, that's what I think.

Have had too much wine and its too late to think of any examples!

Joanna Trollope where the entire plot consists of someone feeling annoyed with someone else but never having a conversation with that person. The whole book consists of our heroine having cups of tea, wine or gin with other people, talking around the topic until some older person suggests to her that she have a conversation directly with the person who is the source of the annoyance.

Any female who loses weight rapidly without noticing.

Detectives/FBI agents, heroes of thrillers who never have any time to deal with any personal maintenance at all. We spend 5 days solidly in their company in which time they never buy food, pay a bill, withdraw money from a bank, put petrol in their car, pick up a prescription from the chemist, or phone a friend. I think their absolute freedom from domestic routine or responsibility is in fact part of their appeal for me.

"No worries" is surely an Aussie colloquialism though, not American.

a PP mentioned Jonathon Kellerman's female characters all in knit dresses. I would like to nominate Alex Delaware's whole day to day life. He spends hours each day hanging out with Milo and solving cases. He sees about two clients a week. He leads this incredibly leisured existence and I can't put my finger on it but there is something about his relationship with Robin that is terribly annoying.

Love these. Mine is far more prosaic, but when characters have names that start and end with the same letter, for example Arthur and Alastair I lose who's who and sometimes have to go back several pages to work it out. Exacerbated x a million if the the names aren't anglo-sounding due to translated works - I have tried to read fancy Russian literature but had to give up because I couldn't follow the names .

I used to really like Karen Rose books, but even if the actual crime story is interesting, in every single book the heroine and hero fall in love and get married/move in together/pregnant in like a week.

The old Alex Cross books were great (3 page chapters aside) the new ones are awful. Super dad leaves his children to the care of his ninety something grandmother constantly, still has time to go on romantic trips and rescue the president's children. NO.

I liked that in Karin Slaughter's books she created a realistic marriage between Jeffrey and Sara, and the emotions that follow cheating.

What really gets my goat is inconsistencies. Read a book the other week where the (feisty but vulnerable) heroine finished buttoning her coat, then just two short paragraphs later she pulled her coat around herself and fastened it - ffs, can't stand sloppy editing.

Once read a book where the heroine looked in the mirror and despaired at her unruly dark curls - as well she might, considering that she had smooth blonde hair at the beginning of the book (yes, I went back and checked)

In another one, the main protagonist's sole sibling had morphed from being her brother to her sister, with no mention of a sex change or any transgender issues , which was a shame, as the story would have been potentially much more interesting than the usual insipid heroine making a fool of herself everytime she meets the curmudgeonly farmer next door with the clenched jaw and the twitching muscle in his cheek...

It's am on book W of the ABC murders (Sue Grafton) and i have just read about 3 pages of background story which is irrelevant to the murder.

WHO starts a series on book 23 and needs to be given this information.

I love this thread.

I am now not on the right page to see the name, but an editor pp said that verbing direct speech is frowned on. I know some authors are dreadful for it, as though they're allergic to "said", but sometimes it does add colour. I wonder if "he growled" is always worse than "he said, growling" or "he said, in a low, angry voice" or something. The old show, don't tell.

So many of my pet hates have been mentioned, including anachronism and linguistic or cultural translation errors.

I also can't bear food descriptions - it would often be more plausible for the characters to be having beans on toast or corn flakes, but they always have cordon bleu steak/shellfish/poussin or handknitted granola bar things regardless of poverty/timing/skill. You can just say "after lunch".

I manage to read books set in America, written by American authors, absolutely fine without localisation into British English.

Why are UK books altered for the American market? Is it to trap future fanfiction authors so that other people can laugh at their description of Draco Malfoy eating Twinkies?

Or am I actually being arrogant? Are American books routinely anglified, and I just take it for granted?

I just read the entire American version of Prisoner of Azkaban to ds and the only changes I noticed were bangs for fringe and flashlight for torch QueenTilly (I'm not a native English speaker though, some things might have gone right past me). I don't think these changes are necessary, I'm sure American kids could figure it out but it's not a big change in this case.
I realized (while reading Goblet of Fire) another hint that Hogwarts is set in Scotland: the summer holidays start at the end of June.

I remember JK Rowling saying in an interview once that one of the only things that had been changed in the Americanised version of the first book was 'jumper' to 'sweater', otherwise it would have sounded to American readers as though Mrs Weasley was giving Harry and Ron lumpy initialled pinafores for Christmas Which I thought was fair enough!

MrsHathaway I think it's the frequency of the verbing that makes the difference, and possibly also whether adverbs are used. It's when it gets to the level of

"That handsome village doctor thinks he can get away with being a grumpy shit to me just because he happens to be gorgeous - well, I won't let him!" she feistily expostulated [pursing her too-full lips and tossing back her mane of waist-length blonde curls that had plagued her since childhood with their unruliness].

"Oh Arabella darling, you know I can't bear to see you unhappy," her gay best friend distressedly sighed [springing to his Jimmy Choo-clad feet]. "I know," he breathlessly enthused. "Andrew and I will give you a makeover, it'll be exactly what you need to take your mind off him."

that it becomes a problem

(PLOT TWIST: the doctor's secretly been in love with her all along! After the makeover he reveals all by grabbing her and kissing her unexpectedly, and luckily for him she reciprocates rather than pressing assault charges. After two days they move in together, only to drown in a tragic domestic accident involving gallons of chablis and a bubble bath surrounded by Diptyque scented candles.)

(I may have let my imagination run away with me a bit there... )

urbinos yes - it's inconsistency which does it for me. The amount of times I've flickedback thinking "no, you definitely said you were a vegetarian so why are you having a bacon butty"

Some of Adele Parks' novels have the characters doing normal jobs but oddly I don't like them as much as the glam ones - must be escapism.

Agree with pp regarding Karen Rose. Good at the crime stuff but she must be contractually obliged to include sex scenes and they're always awful.

Oh yes, inconsistency. I love Charlaine Harris, but her 'Grave' series doesn't seem to have been edited at all: the baby sisters swap ages between books and she can't seem to decide (or maybe remember) whether the heroine spent her horrible childhood in a tract house or a trailer.

Yes, frequency does sound plausible.

On the subject of HP and Americanisation... The first script for the HP movies transplanted the lot to an American high school. Unsurprisingly, that didn't get made. It would have been unrecognisable and the fans would have hated it.

I hate it when a book is set somewhere real that I know, but they move things around to suit. I don't mind fictionalising (Peter May did this really well in the Lewis trilogy - apart from adding a Uist to Harris ferry 40 years before it existed) but I do mind when it says, e.g. on west coast, but then says close to something I know is on east coast (for example). Iain Banks was great at fictionalising without screwing up. You could place where things were. More like that please. This doesn't just apply to places I know really, 'cos sometimes I look up the places if it's somewhere else, and I love accuracy. I can't tell you people who're rubbish at it, 'cos I don't generally finish the book then...

Loads of people are just terrible at geography though. I used to know a woman in her early 40s who was convinced that Liverpool was on the east coast... so maybe they assume they know where something is and don't feel the need to look it up? It annoys me too, though.

Oh some of these things would drive me potty and throw the book out of the window. Especially the inconsistencies they sound so sloppy. I normal don't read any chick lic(?)
After DSIL gave me a couple of books from the Times columnist (still is?) slummy mummy. Many years ago I found the columns funny. So the books were bought for me. The first might have been call slummy mummy. I enjoyed the first part of the book but then it was just so far fetched self absorbed crap. I don't read anything that looks like it might be written in a Bridget Jones/self absorbed style anymore, and by the sounds of it I'm not missing much.

I do have a secret guilty pleasure for reading the sort of teeny books by Sarah J Maas I have yet to read the little novels before Throne of Glass tho

I am infuriated by dates that are changed in later editions of a book. The worst culprit that I remember was some of the earlier Stephen King novels. He creates the atmosphere of the sixties really well so to slap a 1980 date is a right poke in the eye to the reader.

Some of the pony books that I read as a child did this too. Rereading as an adult shillings are turned into pounds and infrequent references to dates are modern. Yet the book is obviously set in the 1950's or thereabouts.

Why do they do this?