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.)"

Was coming on to say about The Occupation's Relative books and The Starry Sunshine Cafe by The Sandy Sea bollocks. Loathe both these trends.

Also hate when they change a really nice book cover for the poster of the film adaptation. No. Fuck Off.

Dodgy depictions of regional accents. Generally occurs in Dickens or Hardy. Makes me want to just skip huge chunks of the book.

Endless designer name-dropping - 90s chick lit was terrible for this, not sure whether it still goes on as I gave up on chick lit long ago. I don't care if the jacket is Armani and the bag is Gucci and the shoes are Prada. Shut up about the clothes and tell me something interesting.

"Books where old men always have rheumy eyes."

Ewwww, what are you reading?! 🤢

@tankflybos

"Books where old men always have rheumy eyes."

Ewwww, what are you reading?! 🤢

It seems to be a thing in random bookshop/cafe/chocolate shop/sex cafe by the sea type thing. I don't make a habit of reading them but on the odd occasion I've tried them there has been an old man featured somewhere like the person in the flat downstairs who needs help or whatever. Once noticed, never able to be ignored.

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit

Was coming on to say about The Occupation's Relative books and The Starry Sunshine Cafe by The Sandy Sea bollocks. Loathe both these trends.

Also hate when they change a really nice book cover for the poster of the film adaptation. No. Fuck Off.

OMG yes the unavoidable film tie- in covers

Not just books but also a film cliche. Female character has unprotected sex and instead of taking a pregnancy test like a normal person, is convinced she has stomach flu as she's throwing up every morning. It usually takes a friend to ask her if she's pregnant, at which she's astonished at the possibility.

Lazy writing. (Looking at you Noughts and Crosses.)

This trope of one-time-sex-deffo-preggo is the reason as a teenager I was convinced that if you had sex even once, even WITH protection, there was a more than reasonable chance you'd end up pregnant or HIV positive.

Yes to all of these!

I even have a "shelf" on Goodreads where I stick "99p kindle madster psycho best friend" books (every time I promise not to buy another!)

DD has to read 100 years for school and asked me what I thought...I read it in 1997 and told her I was glad I did, but won't be rereading any time soon, and to keep the family tree handy.

Repetitive use of words I don't think even the author realises they are doing- one of the above psycho-bezzie writers (Lucy Clarke iirc) is fecking obsessed with "salt". Or salty. Or brine. Or salt kissed skin. Or..you get the picture. All her psychos are connected to the sea in some way (not a literary way, they just get done in in beach huts or move to the seaside etc but if she says "salt" once, she says it 800 times.

Names that jar. One Day. Dexter. Would NOT have been called Dexter. They graduated the same day that I did. He'd have been called Pete, or Ian or Darren. She was supposedly working class and northern. She would not be Emma. A decade later, yes. But 1988? Nope. Bev. Alison. Karen. Julie. Lisa. Donna.

Unrealistic dialogue- oft to be found in psycho nutter books.

@SingingBabooshkaBadly completely agree re lack of speech marks! This is my current pet hate and happens in so many modern novels. Why? Just why?

Also, ridiculously long paragraphs. I've just started Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey and we've had both these traits in the first two chapters, so not sure I will persist with it.

Garlictwist- yes! Nobody has ever, in the history of the world, not even on Last of the Summer fucking wine, pronounced "up" as "Oop". Book as "buke" I'll give you, because my Derbyshire grandad did, but "oop" doesn't exist unless it's a southerner ignorantly thinking that's how we speak.

Harlan Coben's detective dialogue! He does the "what's an old broad like you doing in a joint like this" clichéd beige raincoat and trilby 1950s thing with his male characters. He thinks he's channelling Raymond Chandler doing Humphrey Bogart.

**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!

Yes this!

Anybody thinking they've reinvented the wheel by writing about "quirky things that happen when you're a mother" should have their typewriter removed. And yes, when DD was born I bought the whole shebang of them.
Fish fingers and me
The day my boob fell out in the Post Office
Myself, the double buggy and the neighbours

I paraphrase, but y'know

I am dreading the Covid memoirs.

Padding. Women (it’s always women) who pad downstairs. Just walk ffs.

And reaching a crescendo. Crescendo means gradually getting louder so you can’t reach one!

And in psychological thrillers and chick lit wine is always ‘ice cold liquid’.

@ScorpioSphinxInACalicoDressI
I agree about names that are completely wrong for the time in which the story is set. Not a difficult piece of research to do!
The first 2 words of a book were the female protagonist's age. Didn't get any further.

Count of Monte Cristo broke me through never specifying if it was the elder or younger Monsieur de Villefort in the scene. Eventually one was dead, one was talking to the count and I had absolutely no idea which was which.

Books where the reader knows some crucial information for ages before the main characters figure it out. You should never be left wanting to grab the lead by the collar and scream at them to stop being so bloody oblivious.

Books where there are 100 pages stuck in the middle that are a diversion and have no bearing on the plot/characters. I blame the publisher/editor. If it doesn't work as a 200 page short novel it certainly won't work with another 100 pages of fill.

Characters aging oddly across a series. I'm re reading a series at present- the adult characters haven't aged. A female character had a breast cancer scare 3 years ago, when her daughter was half way through university. She's now just graduating. The age gap between the two daughters varies. A minor character has come back to life.... The murders etc are good though.

Quotes at the start. No one cares

Stories written verbatim in patois. Can we imagine the way it’s pronounced?

Oh women biting their lips That too

Completely unnecessary quoted poetry cropping up out of nowhere - who bothers to read it?

Random magic realism without any explanation. You’re reading along happily enough then all of a sudden you’re meant to believe after chapters of relative normality that a certain character is a weretiger.

Historical characters holding opinions they are unlikely to have had.

Magic realism has me wanting to punch people. At least if you open a Garcia Marquez you know what you're in for. But randomly cropping up makes me growl.

If you don't want random poetry and quotes do NOT open The Artemis File. I bought it on Kindle because so many people on here < glares at the writer's relatives because nobody else could possibly recommend such utter dross> and not only does every chapter finish with a flourish of Hamlet etc but he drops them in the middle of paragraphs as well.

Another- using a character to explain things another character won't know but in a stilted fashion. I give you Ron Weasley whose sole role in life seems to be to explain the magical world to Harry. Unless it's something really crucial to the whole arc of their magic world of course. In which case Ron won't know and acts really surprised when he finds out. Which would be like a teenager today going "there was a war from 1939-1945, well I never".

@garlictwist

Dodgy depictions of regional accents. Generally occurs in Dickens or Hardy. Makes me want to just skip huge chunks of the book.

I recently reread Dracula and the bits where the old man in Whitby was talking to Lucy and Mina at the Abbey were excruciatingly bad!

Agree with books set in places I know. There was one in my nearest city and the number of times the streets were namechecked was bizarre! And in many cases, totally wrong. I know the local reference library has a ton of stuff about the area in ages gone by and the writer is from round there, so why he got it so consistently wrong was a bigger mystery than the one he was trying to write. It was like those crappy tv programs where they assume you’ve forgotten everything that just happened 3 minutes before the adverts and repeat it all over again.