Reading peeves

[DopamineHits]

1 - I hate it when several characters in a novel have the same name. I know books like Wolf Hall can't help it as they were real people, but I'm halfway through One Hundred Years of Solitude and please, not another Jose Arcadio... There are twenty two Aureliano's! I know only five of them are main characters, but I'm getting confused!

2 - I don't like irregular page edges, like the ones on the Puffin Chalk editions and the Little Women Penguin Classics Deluxe edition. Not a good feature. I don't know the name for them but why make it harder for readers to turn the page?

3 - Trends that really outstay their welcome. For instance;

"The stamp collector of Auschwitz."

"The stamp collector's ex wife's niece, and other women who are only described in the title in relation to a man and his profession, for some reason..."

"Romeo, and Juliet the stamp collector: a Shakespeare retelling (because we exhausted all the fairytales by now we think but we're checking again, don't worry.)"

Books where the main character steadfastly refuses to just have a conversation with somebody that would clear up all the misunderstandings/plot .

Books that start with a really cool premise, paint themselves into a corner and just fizzle out, or just make up something that makes no sense as a twist ending.

The Stamp Collector of Auschwitz
The Stamp collector's ExWife's niece
OMG Yes!

For me it's books about coffee shops by the sea. (Don't read them, but the virtually identical pastel coloured covers with curly font titles really irritate me)

Also any thriller which claims to have the most amazing twist you'll never see coming, the best thriller I'll ever read. If the publisher tries to tell me that on the cover, it's a no from me. I feel like someone in the marketing dept of a publisher is trying to tell me what to read. They can do one.
Any psychological thriller with a three word title such as "He Saw me" or "You Came back". Dark cover, yellow (Or sometimes bright green) title font. Literally hundreds and hundreds of books like these on the market.

Overhyped books. These aren't necessarily bad, but the over-hyping irritates me. Eleanor Oliphant was OK, but didn't deserve anywhere near the attention it got. Likewise the Tatooist of Auschwitz.
I am steering clear of Crawdads for a while because of this.

I didn't finish One Hundred Years of Solitude because of the ludicrous amount of characters called the same name. Makes books unnecessarily complex.

I'll add to my rant- authors who think they are clever and/or quirky by not using punctuation. I'm looking at you Sally Rooney.

For me it's books about coffee shops by the sea. (Don't read them, but the virtually identical pastel coloured covers with curly font titles really irritate me

Yes!

This and books where the woman is setting up a business, usually a twee shop of some sort and she meets a man who is great at diy and helps her to do up the shop. Hello authors, it's 2020 🙄

Books where the main character steadfastly refuses to just have a conversation with somebody that would clear up all the misunderstandings/plot.

A sub-category of this is in mystery novels, where the detective rings someone who has a clue. “No”, says clue haver, “I can’t tell you now, meet me at midnight in the forest”, thus signing their death warrant.

You’re on the phone, you idiot. Just say the thing. The minute this trope appears, you know they’re dead.

I also have an aversion to constant references to hair; nobody in real life tosses their unruly locks or notices their russet curls.

Thrillers were the female protagonist is so dumb the mysterious new boyfriend/boss/roommate could practically stand there with a knife dripping blood wearing a name tag that reads “Hello I am a Serial Killer” and they’d still not consider the possibility they’re connected to all the strange killings in the area.

On the other hand I’m currently reading a thriller where a woman is nursing an elderly man with amnesia, on about page 5 she discovers a manuscript in his office (he’s a novelist), reads the opening paragraph which goes something like, “I looked down at the body of the woman I’d just killed, the only woman I’d ever loved” and gasps in shock because she immediately concludes that the man she’s caring for is a murderer and that he wrote his murder confession in the form of a novel which he then published.

Books where old men always have rheumy eyes.

Novels where significant portions of the text are in eye-boggling italics (Ruth Hogan’s twee Keeper of Lost Things), novels where the characters all met at Oxford but the author hasn’t done even the most basic research (Helen Foley’s The Hunting Party), novels which hinge on ‘And then I woke up and I was all a dream!’ (some Anita Shreve novel whose name escapes me where one of the two POV characters turns out to be a figment of the other’s imagination).

Books about missing children, usually girls, often involving a body of water.

Books which got so much attention that I was suckered into reading them, and then couldn't stop until I'd reached the end to find out if they were really as bad as I thought they were.

I'm looking at you, Goldfinch, and Elinor bloody Oliphant.

Never again will I be fooled by the popular press!

Overhyped books where the author (usually a youngish woman) gets a huge advance. The books end up being edited to appeal to the greatest number of people, to justify the hype. Recent examples are "The Confessions of Frannie Langdon" and "Tangerine". Both just awful.

Books set in real places with completely made up geography. I once read some terrible chick lit or other that was set in West Hampstead, while I lived there. It was very specific about names of roads and routes, but they made no sense in real life.

Long descriptions of dreams, especially those which have no relevance to the story.

Idiotic, lazy descriptions of characters. Men with cool blue eyes who 'grin' and women with unruly hair and slightly upturned button noses who have no idea how beautiful they are. Ugh!

Anything described as "hilarious" on the cover usually isn't.

And crawdads is vastly over-rated imho

P.s. did anyone else think this was going to be a thread about a poltergeist that didn't make it from the page to the screen?

Books that have short sentences. My attention span wants more. I hate them. All pithy and abrupt. Stop it.

We can hold whole sentences with complex phrases in our heads and follow the flow, stretching our imagination and flying with the author - let them expand, let our minds build a glorious picture... please...

Not keen on photos of the author, particularly of females with flowing locks of hair. I don't care what the author looks like;I care about what they have written.

Misuse of the unreliable narrator device.

Acceptable use of unreliable narrator: exploring conditions such as depression, mental illness and so forth.

Unacceptable use of unreliable narrator: Part 1 - My goodness, however is all this totally weird, intriguing and frankly impossible stuff happening? Part 2 - None of it happened.

Can we include words which are annoying? "Thrummed". A thrumming heartbeat usually. Tells me the author probably started off writing fanfic (said as a reader and writer of fanfic).

women with unruly hair and slightly upturned button noses who have no idea how beautiful they are. Ugh!

Yes, this too x a million! These heroines always inhabit an alternative universe where they're too slender and willowy, and their neck is too swan-like and their eyes are too big and such a weird emerald green colour and of course, that damn untameable Titian hair! Of course no man ever looks at them 'cos they only like girls with big boobies and perma-tans ! Feck orf ...

I am not a massive fan of the present tense, which is annoying, as it is everywhere. I can get over it if the writing is good, but it takes an effort. I do feel like some authors just feel like the present tense is cooler, or easier to write, rather than considering whether it fits their story.

Also, it isn't so much the books but the surrounding publicity -but I have read so many interviews with writers about their books where they say "I wanted to tell a story about what being a mother is really like, all the bad bits that nobody ever tells you about, because that never happens" - it does! There are loads and loads and loads of books about the shit bits of being a parent, and there have been for ages!

OP, I was just talking yesterday about 100 Years of Solitude. I had read and loved Loved in the Time of Cholera so was eager to read 100 Years. I think I started and gave up on it four or five times because I was so confused by everyone having the same names! Well done to you making it half way through.

I’m also annoyed by lack of punctuation, with a particular hatred of authors using dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate speech or, worse still, using nothing at all. Why? Why?

Literary authors who think the beauty of their writing is enough to sustain an entire novel without any form of plot at all. It sometimes is, but very rarely. Actually, it’s really the editors rather than the authors I should be taking issue with on that point.

Overuse of brackets. Yes Anita Shrieve, I am talking about you.

@pastapestoparmesan

Books set in real places with completely made up geography. I once read some terrible chick lit or other that was set in West Hampstead, while I lived there. It was very specific about names of roads and routes, but they made no sense in real life.

Yep, this. One short story in was set in our town and the point where I lost all willing suspension of disbelief was not the demon-horses or inter-dimensional portals. It was when the author got the train line from London wrong.