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.)"

For a more recent dodgy regional accent example I give you Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell - I really like his books and enjoyed this one but how do you accurately portray a Gravesend born character? You get them to say ‘yer’ all the time to indicate their working class roots. Really?! Flipping annoying!

I agree @ScorpioSphinxInACalicoDress, magical realism can on the whole do one. Not something I pick up out of choice on the whole. And will give the ‘Artemis’ book a swerve.

Hagrid is another one who actually, thanks to Robbie Coltrane, didn't sound as much like a Wurzel on his combined 'arvester (for those old enough to remember) in the film as he did in the book.
I love JK for many reasons, not all of them HP based ;-) but as a fellow linguist her writing of regional accent is atrocious.

Books that have gratuitous and lengthy descriptions of murdered women. James Patterson......
Yuk. And I like psychological/crime/whodunnits.
Floaty fonts on a pastel book cover, accompanied by a handbag and a cupcake....
Agree with 'old men and rheumy eyes'
Rushed endings when the rest of the book has been v e r y s l o o o w...

Oh yes to everything that's been said so far.

Gross errors of language and concepts such as an alleged Georgian character referring to ego, or saying "lmindblowing" or "sexy".

To be honest I've read so much now (I'm very old) that I feel irritation at every extraneous word, usually adjectives. "Light blue sky", "glowing iridescence", "trembling and shaking" etc: just use one or the other. Too much description generally and oh my god the over-use of similes is horrendous. I could not get passed page 3 of Hamnet with all the "like a" nonsense.

Any sex scene is horrific. Absolutely unreadable.

I can't read Dorothy Koomson's books for her unrealistic dialogue. Or her unrealistic storylines i.e The Icecream Girls.

I'm that age where I don't want sex myself so I certainly don't want to read anybody else's at it. With their "sheets heavy with the perfume of their love" the morning after , when we all know that means "feck this is minging get them on a 60 wash with extra Lenor"

Main characters in chick lit who are always a bit quirky and have swishy lemon scented hair. (Freya North looking at you)

I use a HP paragraph when I do my story writing module with my teens as a kind of what to do but please don't do it like this example- Again JK, for every verb there is an -LY adverb, for every noun two simple adjectives.
Harry runs quickly. Or slowly. Or happily.
The cold crisp weather
The hot steaming sex. Or jam Roly poly.
Etc.

I am enjoying this thread immensely!

How I wish I had swishy, lemon-scented hair.

I must respond re Emma and One Day- I grew up in the 70s in a Northern, almost entirely WC town, and I had several friends named Emma at school, all born early 70s. I didn't know a single Beverley or Donna though. Many, many Karens (which is why I find the "Karen" meme jarring, as they're not "I'd like to speak to the manager" types at all).

Books about tortured young women who have complicated relationships with food/sex. I've read faaar to many of them recently and often end up wanting to slap the protagonists... Ordinary people was the worst for this. I'm not even interested in my own relationships in the detail that went into.

Agree with all of the above peeves, but my biggest one is when an author messes up their dates, or weird ageing as a pp called it. E.g. In 1970 James is 20 and his brother is 22, but in 1983 James is 36 and his brother is 40, and the daughter he had at 25 is now 12. I won't stop reading the book because of it, but it completely throws me.

Phil- that's it you see. I was born in 1965 and so graduated on the exact day Dexter and Emma did...and remember the first Emma I ever knew, who was about 5 years younger than me (we called her Baby Emma ) and my grandmother was "ooh fancy bringing back an old fashioned name like that"
Lord knows what she'd make of the Mabels and Elsies now!

The gardener (it's always the bloody gardener!) having floppy blonde hair - get a fucking hair cut!

A good book with a weak ending is infuriating

Poorly researched jobs where the job is significant to the plot.
EG The follow up to Me Before You, the love interest is a London paramedic. At one point he gets in trouble for going on a personal errand in an Ambulance because another crew saw his ambulance outside the protagonist's house and called control to enquire.

1. There are 500ish ambulances on duty at any one time pan London. No crew would bat an eyelid at another Ambulance being parked outside an address. They would also not know who is in which Ambulance as they are allocated on the day.

1. Control know where all the Ambulances are at all times.

1. You actually are allowed to run errand within reason as long as you're not on a call.

He also gets shot which is ridiculous. Its London, not Johannesburg. If any paramedic got shot or would be national news.

This is obviously specific to my own job, but I imagine it applies to many others!

I mentioned in a previous thread about overrated books that I don't like books which seem to get extra intellectual brownie points because they've been translated or written by a non-Anglophone author. It was pointed out to me that translated books aren't a phenomenon, so let me be clear I'm not talking about translated books. Just authors and books who get treated as though their low or medium-brow work is serious literary fiction when it just isn't. The Bastard of Istanbul is a great example (not translated, but a Turkish author). Serious theme, but stuffed with cliches and really quite lightweight overall.

Similarly, any non-UK/US/etc. novel clearly written for an international audience. Characteristics of these are plentiful references to food handily explained ('she savoured a mouthful of chicken yassa, the delicious rich and spicy stew popular in Senegal') and tourist hotspots (main character passes the Colosseum and Trevi Fountain on their way from home to the office). Don't make me feel like I'm reading a brochure produced by the tourist board.

I don't get annoyed by the Chess Player of Belgrade / Lutemaker of Zagreb / Basket Weaver of Minsk-type novels as the twee titles alone mean I've never read one!

Ahhhhh I’ve loved this thread. Agree about endlessly mentioning hair. V annoying.

Byllis- many years ago I was really slated for saying I though the Kite Runner/whatever the other one is were badly written and it seemed like the writer had googled 10 things you must include in a novel about the horrors of Afghanistan.
I stand by it- a serious subject does not automatically make a book great, or even good, literature.
I am just totally confused by all the basketweaver of Minsk books that seem so prolific these days!

One of mine is where there's an event that's happened (or in a time-hop) book one that's going to happen) and you done get given all the information but the event is referred to frequently.

Such as the narrator is all sad and not able to have a great life because the "the accident". Or in the book I've just read (The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley) someone is dead in the future but you don't know who or how. It worse when it's supposed to be a 'twist'.

Another thing is where the writer uses a word that's not an everyday word and uses it repeatedly. Much word when it's a unusual word! This occurred to some extent in The Hunting Party too with 'also-ran'. Other one I recall was The Walking Dead "supine" was used appropriately 5,986 times.

Mary Shelly does it in Frankinstien too but I can't for the LIFE of me recall the word at the moment.

I too dislike the currentl gone on too long trend of titles being "The Occupatuon's Female Relation".

Oh, oh wait!! Just recalled another. Ridiculous syntax (anyone read Half-formed Girl ).

The Hunting Party (again - it annoyed me!). Breaking a sentence in two with another doesn't fit to well sentence with a em dash either side.

Also the Hunting Party didn't create a sence of place too well. At the start it referred to "this part of the journey" but had at no point set up anything about the journey. No mention of it.

Hate it when something is mentioned in a familiar way and you think you must have missed it being brought into the story, so go back (many times) to discover it just hadn't been mentioned before.

Over-reliance on coincidence is another of mine. For example in one book by an author (whose other novels I actually really like) the protagonist was on holiday in a tiny town in Lake Como with her new boyfriend, which she had booked as a surprise for him. Turns out not only that new bf's ex happens to be working at a hotel in the same town but also protagonist just happened to have treated her for a miscarriage at a London hospital sometime before 🙄 ok then. In another, again by an author who I really like, the heroine is involved in a car crash which it turns out also kills the adoptive parents of the daughter she gave up some years before. I just find it lazy - if you can't find a way to bring the strands of a plot together without relying on a ridiculously improbable coincidence then you probably need a new plot.

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Novels in the second person.
Anything which has the full Kindle title "The Feelgood Novel Of The Summer The Cafe By The Sea".
I think they've given up on "Miss Smith You Are So Beautiful Without Your Glasses" but "heroine is so busy she forgets to eat and loses loads of weight and "Oh Emma You Are So Beautiful Now You've Lost Weight".

I just can't understand people who want to read the same book over and over again. Lots of them have been referenced in this thread. A recent trend has been all the titles similar to Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train - all with matching covers and all cynically marketed to a certain audience.

I picked up a Joanna Trollope "aga saga" to read in a holiday let not too long ago. It felt as light as a puff of smoke and as if anyone with the formula could have trotted it out in a matter of days. Just trash.

Any novel at all where the main female character is very beautiful and her appearance is described in detail in the first chapter (usually by her looking in a mirror).

These books are uniformly shit.

@Finkelbraun

Any novel at all where the main female character is very beautiful and her appearance is described in detail in the first chapter (usually by her looking in a mirror).

These books are uniformly shit.

Oh yes. Another issue I had with The Hunting Party. (I wasn't a fan, it might not be obvious.) Except it was one female character describing another as well as each character describing themselves.

The amount of focus on breast size was enough to raise an eyebrow.

The amount of focus on breast size was enough to raise an eyebrow.

Ah, yes - the "she breasted boobily down the stairs" technique!

www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/740ypq/she_breasted_boobily/

^^ this! Love this thread - all so true!
I also hate books where what people are wearing is described in great detail all the time, when it's really not relevant. Or when a physical feature is endlessly referenced. In fact, a book which met almost every single criteria given on this thread for being totally peevish was Ben Elton's Time and Time again, which literally had me shouting at the book. I read at night and I had to stop because it got me so wound up that I couldn't get to sleep. It has the accents (kill me now - the Scot); it has the boob bouncy women crap; it has the terrible plot twist which makes the whole book an utter nonsense; it must mention the size of a female professor's bum about twenty times in as many pages; I could go on but I'll be up half the night again in a rage...