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?

lol again

Crap endings for me too. All the anticlimax, then, it all falls flat on it's face.

Too many similes. Use a metaphor. Or just tell it like it is, ffs. (Gave up on Kathy Reichs for this reason.)

Franca... come and talk to me about Slataper... (I thought I was the only person in the world who liked him!)

I'm totally digging this thread.

I want to add to the list: multiple points of view, dreams, flashbacks, the continuous present ('I'm walking down the road, thinking to myself...etc), novels in the seond person, stories where the blurb involves lots of layers of memories, the past, memories triggering other memories and characters not being able to escape the inexorable pull of the past....

The words 'not unkindly' WHY can they not just put kindly? Do they have a word count that extra 'not' helps with?

Also, when they have the first chapter of their next book in the back, but you don't realise it has and you settle down to read the end, and it is only two pages and you think..."is that it?"

molesworth..the americans publish on loo roll imo..
in my publishing days we soooo looked down on the NY office, production wise we were just far superior..

then supermarkets started to sell books
the slipppery slops slope...

hate
chick lit
bridget jones gave me the dry boak
tv spin offs

haven't read any of these authors mentioned so i guess i am a pretty good judge of a book by its cover!

lazy writing e.g. coincidences taking the place of proper plot

printed on cheap paper

children's books with 'adult' covers - FFS

I can't stand the hype! The Da Vinci Code was talked about so much, about how well it was written, what a good plot it was, how clever it was, etc etc. Then, imo, it turned out to be predictable and boring. Then, just to add to that, they made the film, which was also crap!

Personally I really enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Agree with you calif on the stupid next book chapter at the end.SO bloody annoying when you're tucked up in bed and then realise you've finished the effing book and have to trek downstairs to find something else to read.

Any book about a traumatic childhood,Angela's Ashes was enough for me.

Chick lit of any kind,and this new "isn't it funny to be a mum" kind of book ...vomit!

Too much descriptive flowery prose bores the pants off me.

..and it was all a dream...crikey our teachers made us stand in the corner for that cop out!

realising the plot has been stolen from somewhere else...
we got detention for that one

Califrau oops! should read the whole thread before I add...but so agree with you!

curious incident .. was like a breath of fresh air to read...

just recently finished Midnight in garden of good and evil which i really enjoyed

Agree with rubbish endings (Carole whatshername should have been shot for the end of Mary Swann).
Books where the heroine is having a 'bad' time, but still wears prada and in the end despite being a complete ar8e all her friedns still love her.
Tony Parsons
Kathy Lette (only so many puns a girl can take....)
Spelling mistakes - for god sake don't proof readers exist any more?
Harry Potter
Aga Sagas
Middle life crisis books - husband leaves for younger model blah blah, she ends up shagging the gardener
'My Terrible childhood' - what is this all about? It has become a whole genre and will doubtless have its own section in Waterstones soon....

sebastian faulks is overrated. i am sure he writes with the stirring film track playing in the background. 'she walked into the room wearing a soft cashmere authentic 1940's twinset and admired his thornproof tweeds'.

any irish angsty moustachioed nuns beating young woman.

booker prize winners but i am probably just jealous.

Yes, actually, to go on about ghastly-childhood books, that bit of blurb I quoted below has a lead-in (from Amazon website) which says ...

"There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution or homelessness. XXX survived all these things before she?d even turned twenty. And that?s when things got interesting."

I find that last, titillating, bit quite repulsive.

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'With one leap Jack was free'

You know the sort of shit, the author spends half the book setting up an impossible situation to get out of, realsied that it is impossible to get out of, and has an utterly inplausable way out. John Gresham does this as lot!

The horrid childhood ones.

and OMG, the clan of the cave bear stuff. Muff diving in furs and she invents the needle.......dreadful

"Horrid childhod" ones ARE a genre of their own - according to someone in publishing I was talking to, they are now officially known as "Misery Memoirs"! He didn't think the market could stand many more of them. Anyone read Andrew Collins's books? A delberate backlash to that sort of thing and very funny.

Pruni/Blackduck - are there many novels written in the 2nd person? I only know of two - Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller" (which I quite enjoyed, but then I was 20-ish and into intertextuality and all that pretentious crap at the time) and Iain Banks' "Complicity" (parts of it) - and I think his intention was to keep the perpetrator's gender ambiguous.

Just read 'Saturday' by Ian McEwan and would like to add books written about the events of a single day (yes, I mean you too Virginia Woolf) and anything without a bloody plot!

I've just finished Saturday as well and I quite liked it...

I hate lengthy descriptions of the countryside, bores me to tears.

There's a French novel by Michel Butor called La Modification which is written in the vous form. (Can't say I got very far with it...!) Can't think of any other 2nd-person novels, apart from that and the Calvino (which I really love).

I hate to dismiss a whole genre, but personally I can't stomach fantasy [shudder]. Not even 'good' fantasy. Couldn't get past chapter 1 of The Lord of the Rings. Just about acceptable in children's fiction (Hobbit, Narnia, etc.).

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Really liked "Complicity"! - it was "Song of Stone" I couldn't stand. Was a real eye-opener as up until then I'd sailed through each of his books.
Not read the whisky one! I remember him getting VERY cross in an article I read (or maybe it was an extract?) about English people not pronouncing "Islay" properly and thinking it rhymed with "Outlay"...

Read any of his Iain M stuff, Pruni?

Ellbell - I think the ideal time to read LOTR is aged 12-15 - after that, adult cynicism has set in and you've just seen/read too many parodies and/or cheap imitations!

Hmmmm.... I missed my time slot there by a good 20 years UD!

Can I add to my list... whodunnits where you never find out who did dunnit.