Overused words distracting me from otherwise enjoyable book

[treaclesoda]

I'm halfway through the most recent Shardlake book. I love the series, like the mystery, the characters, the atmosphere.

But if I read the word 'sardonic' , or a variation of it, once more I think I'll scream. It just keeps leaping out at me.

Is this not something that an editor should be pointing out somewhere along the line before it gets published? It's not hard to notice.

There are some words I forever associate with a phase of reading Alistair Maclean in my teenage years: "impassive" and "inevitable".

Don't read Memory Keeper's Daughter under any circumstances. There were so many uses of the words shimmering, glimmering, and glittering that I ended up counting them (yes, it was a very boring book). They added to over 40.

I'm also about halfway through the new Shardlake - and I can't say I've noticed 'sardonic' being over-used! I'm loving it though, I've had to make a big decision to keep it only in my bedroom or nothing else will ever get done apart from mnetting of course

I do agree some authors get carried away with particular words. When in need of fluff years ago, I got through several Jilly Coopers. Why on earth does she use 'evidently' so often? And usually incorrectly too! Were her books doing so well that she could do no wrong in her editor's/publisher's eyes? I've often thought that's why JK Rowling's later Harry Potter books got so unwieldy (and frankly unreadable).

One just out Sheila Hancocks book away after a page and a half because of this. Too many adjectives and trying hard.

I've read the Memory Keepers Daughter! Yes, it was quite boring, as well as ridiculously implausible.

A friend and I have a running joke as she's been ploughing through Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch about how many times the word "atop" appears. A lot, it turns out. And once you start noticing it, it's really annoying. You want to scream, "Just say 'on top of,' Miss Literary Novelist!"

Oh, and btw, I used to work in book publishing, and even back in my day, the death knell had already sounded for the talented literary editor. They're just too overworked and too busy trying to work out how to market the book to pay attention to clumsy writing, which is a shame. In re Jilly Cooper that's why I'd have to throw a book like that at the wall. In a writing class I took in my teens, for pete's sake, we were told to avoid "ly" words in general, unless they are necessary (was going to say "absolutely necessary," but there you go, see?). They just clutter up the story.

I wAs wondering the other day if anyone else noticed this sometimes. One author (possibly Sansom) uses the word protuberant at least every other chapter and it does my head in.

I didn't notice it in the Shardlake (am a huge Shardlake fan) but have just read, 'Longbourn' and her characters kept having internal dialogues in which they thought blah, blah, blah and then thought, 'and yet, and yet', and then more blah, blah and it make me want to throw the book across the room. Not so bad if it was only one character, but she did it from several points of view - lazy and annoying imvho.

Even DH Lawrence did it- he seemed to have "word of the day", and use it several times over a few pages, then not again. The two I remember from a level study of The Rainbow are "fecundity" and "mechanicalism". Used to drive me mad!

This is an example of an author not giving the manuscript to enough beta readers before it goes to the agent. And why absolutely nobody should self-publish before it has been read by at last 6 different readers with red biros and edited/rewritten accordingly.