What's your pet hate in books?

[deweydell]

Mine is when the writer foreshadows the action to come like when they say 'she crossed the road carrying her little dog who will get run over by a car in two years time'.

Anyone?

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yes chick lit here too - those covers are an immediate turn off

although i did enjoy bridget jones but it stopped there

Books where you don't like anyone at all

I know what you mean deweydell

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books that have been made into a film and republished with photo from film on cover

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american paperbacks - always look shoddy

paulo coehlo

poor indexing

lack of proofreading

Tiny text.

going ott on the detail..... i mean a bit of detail is necessary but i'm talking about 'she walked into the kitchen' followed by 2 pages describing the kitchen in minute detail.

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long chapters.

sequels where they try and fill in what happened in previous books by adding it in to the characters' conversations which usually ends up sounding really wooden.

sequels of classics written by someone else.

shit endings

where you get to the end and think "oh is that it?"

• London geography used as shorthand for description.

• London place-names/ stree-names thrown in all over the place as if we give a shit.

• Feeble sci-fi/fantasy trope/mcguffin used to move along an otherwise moribund plot - viz Jenny Colgan and The TT's Wife.

• Interchangeable glossy flirty twentysomething characters all called Kate and Fiona and Polly.

• Books which start with two smug middle-class characters having a meaningful conversation in their kitchen.

• Books where middle-class affluence is taken as a given - we are told they are "short of money" but they have a holiday home in France and little Tilly/Alfie has private school and violin lessons.

• Names of clothes and cosmetics thrown in willy-nilly.

• Male characters whose sole purpose is to wave their dick about.

• Female characters whose sole purpose is to exist as fantasy-objects for male narrator.

• Endless, tedious recitation of what people are wearing, drinking, eating etc.

• Books where you get to page 75 and nothing has happened yet.

• When you are only told on page 103 what someone looks like, by which time you have built up your own picture anyway.

agree with aDad about endings too.

yes adad, very yes.
....and there are too many like that around at the moment, leaves you feeling so deflated.

excellent list UQD

MORE:

• novels which tell you how the protagonist is feeling all the time.

• Books where we are invited to sympathise with the main character despite the fact that they are quite clearly up their own rectum - here's an example

• Jumping from one character's point of view to another within the same scene.

• badly-edited books - e.g. where stuff like rogue commas and bad grammar and spelling has slipped through.

• anything written by anyone under 25.

• Travelogue in place of narrative (first 200-odd pages of "The Beach").

• books peppered with popular culture references with the shelf-life of yoghurt.

LOL
'Virge was never a great follower of fashion, rather she would take up a character or a period, anything from Audrey Hepburn to Lara in Dr Zhivago, the fifties in Paris or the thirties in Berlin, and then reinterpret it for her own use'.

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Bad grammer. The one that really get's to me is the lack of speech marks, speech and thoughts get all muddled. Drives me mad.