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.)"

The adding the review into the title drives me nuts as is telling me how I’m going to feel about the book before I’ve read it, “Girl in a Sandwich Shop: the book you’ll be up all night reading and will harass your friends to read until they start avoiding you and you you’ll end up living alone with only this book for company”, kind of thing.

I quite enjoy a bit of urban fantasy, but it’s a genre inhabited by writers with the patience of a toddler seeing chocolate.

There’s no slow burn or gradual world-building; no tease or gradual reveal, it’s all in the first two pages. She’s a half-fairy, half-ferret with inexplicable powers she can’t control and enormous shoe collection and red locks and the world is full of monsters and she belongs to a shadowy agency devoted to doing something because, “oooh her nethers are drawn inevitably to that sexy half rabbit-shifter who won’t marry her because of his traumatic past and because they met ten seconds ago” and oh goodness she really loves pizza and her 1970s car also saving the world when she stops thinking about he-man’s lips and look at that, she’s the fucking chosen one.” Page 2 and it’s all over. Aaaasgh!

My personal bugbear is chick lit set in Ireland where none of the characters have actual Irish names and all the place names sound more like English villages than Irish ones.

There's lots of this stuff around and it's clearly written with an eye on sales
in the US and the UK as it's assumed readers wouldn't be able to pronounce realistic Irish names.

Oh, and I hate inconsistencies such as the main character has blue eyes in chapter one but by chapter six they are brown. It's sloppy editing.

My personal bugbear is chick lit set in Ireland where none of the characters have actual Irish names and all the place names sound more like English villages than Irish ones.

I started a book recently which was supposed to be set in Outback Australia, but the town’s name was a version of Little Whinging, which not ever how Australian towns are named. There were a lot of those kinds of errors, so I gave up.

Perfectly good plots ruined by the addition of an unnecessary 'love' story.

Male characters described uncritically as having fallen deeply in love with a female character they have seen once and exchanged 3 words with (yes William Boyd, Love is Blind is guilty of this).

Male love interest rolling up his sleeves and protagonist admiring forearms.

Author switching narration perspectives and forgetting when we should/shouldn't be able to hear an inner monologue.

Mismatches between characters' wealth/implied wealth and their lifestyle / spending habits

When authors writing historical fiction use words not fitting the era. I don't want thees, thous, and ye olde English, but please leave out the modern phrases and colloquialisms.
I can't remember the specific example, but I think it was in The Familiars; Stacey Halls (?) used a couple of phrases that just jarred with me and made me shudder.

And all that riding all over Lancashire while pregnant in The Familiars! It also takes a real person and makes up a story about their life, which is another bugbear of mine. The history of Gawthorpe Hall is interesting enough without doing that. It’s like a teenager with a National Trust membership wafting around a stately home making up stories in their head.

Seconding any novel where information is held back from the protagonist for the purposes of the plot/suspense but there's no real reason.

One I recently read: someone gave the main character a diary which would 'explain everything' but he couldn't tell her in person because it was so complex. She was too tired to read it, then she started but hadn't got to the relevant bit, then she lost the diary and couldn't get hold of him because he was away on a business trip. It turned out the big reveal was that he was having an affair

Another bugbear is when two characters meet up and one "doesn't have time to tell you the details now" because they're going somewhere and then they get killed before they've had the chance to talk. Really how long does it take to say, "I think my brother's the murderer" whilst you get in the car?

Also yes to the pp who mentioned jobs not being accurately portrayed. I once read a book where a primary school teacher got 'someone' to cover her class at short notice so she could go shopping for a new outfit for her date.

I should read better books!

Agree about jarring names. In the early 2000s lots of chick-lit type books had protagonists names things like Poppy, Lily or Ella; names that were fashionable for babies at the time. Actual, 20-something women would have been called Sarah, Clare or Jenny.

Characters who seem to have lots of money from interesting but not fabulously paid jobs, like librarians who can afford large flats by Hampstead Heath. Also most architects are not earning enough for sports cars and swanky penthouses (I know, I‘m married to one), and don’t get me started on artists who sell enough work to fund a glamorous lifestyle without doing any teaching or side jobs

@Finkelbraun that sub is both horrifying and hilarious!

Don't get me started on Murakami and his obsession with women who are not beautiful but the main character finds them incredibly attractive because he's so much more interesting and deep than normal people who are repelled by ugly women

Characters who seem to have lots of money from interesting but not fabulously paid jobs

I'll add to this - characters who supposedly work full time but seem to have endless freedom to wander round furthering the plot. In real life you can't just shoot off at the drop of a hat back to your home town where a body's just been dug up that's triggered memories of seeing a murder that you'd blotted out for 20 years because it was too traumatic but now you're going to become a full-time amateur detective and investigate it.

The reality would be your boss saying 'I can let you have next Wednesday off but otherwise there's nothing free until October'.

I read a Charles de Lint novel. Well, I started it. Two people are amazingly transported to an unknown land. After a bit of chat, he lies down for a nap and she wanders off and encounters an inhabitant. More chat and she goes back to original bloke. Some wandering about and they’re doing yet more chatting and she suddenly says, “Oh, I forgot to tell you! While you were napping I met this bloke. Seeing as he’s the only other person we’ve seen in this mysterious world, of course it completely slipped my mind.” Or words to that effect.

I was so enraged I put the book down and never picked it up again. That was years ago and I still remember how angry I was at such a stupid plot device.

Oh yes @Pelleas and people who fit in picking the kids up, cooking a delicious tea, going to choir, watching a film with their partner and a spot of detecting between 5.30 and bedtime, when the rest of us have no time travel abilities.

I read one recently where the main character was torn because if she didn’t do Strictly on the advise of her agent she would lose the family farmhouse (not the main family home, just the farmhouse). She was a populist historian who had been on the telly, you see. I don’t mind a bit of ‘how the other half lives’ but that seemed.....,excessive.

Any novel involving the heroine going off to an island (usually a Greek island) to 'find herself'. Cue lots of dreary descriptions of sunsets and sand beneath the feet, simple food covered in olive oil, quirky locals and invariably some rugged fisherman type who at first appears to have a local girlfriend but is actually unattached and the owner of a lucrative business, who falls head over heels with the 40-something heroine in preference to all the lithe local 20 year olds throwing themselves at his feet morning, noon and night, because of course that happens.

@DancelikeEmmaGoldman Yes! What with the shoe obsession in those books?

I have to ask where you're finding all these rotten books... as I have never read anything like that described by @DancelikeEmmaGoldman last night. But maybe I want to!

Perhaps not really, but it was a v entertaining read.

I do recognise the "tea shop by the sea" trope though, I've seen plenty of those around.

I think I'll stick to re-reading Swallows and Amazons, The Moomins, etc for a bit longer. Most of my reading these days is stuff my children are reading- how I wish Philip Reeve, Cressida Cowell, Lemony Snicket et al. had been born 30 years earlier!

As a scientist when the science is wrong!! Annoys me. Like a 'dna test' is ran in 5 mins...takes about an hour to set up and roughly 3 hours to run. Once read that they'd autoclaved the lab floor. An autoclave is a high pressure and steam system that completely sterilises lab equipment. They'd clearly just googled 'how to clean things in a lab' not actually researched what the process was. Sloppy

I love this thread! Intensely dislike the 'oh my sister is so straightlaced and boring and does everything my parents expect of her, and I'm so wild and free and unconventional' that pops up frequently in historical fiction. Such a lazy way of character building and showing the norms of whatever time they're inhabiting. Always wanted to write a book exploring the inner life of the conventional sister as authors don't seem to consider her worthy of having one.

I get fed up with repeated descriptions of how wonderful the protagonist's children are (Jodie Piccoult is particularly bad for this ) I don't want to read about 'delicious baby smell' or teenagers who 'smell of apples' and endless drivel about how quirky and intelligent the little darlings are. Yes, the protagonist has children, it can be assumed she loves her own children, so can we please stop reiterating this and move on with the plot.

@kshaw did they chop up the floor to put it in the autoclave?

Pet peeve about childrens books... Is when neglect is just accepted and ignored. Harry Potter for example... Why did none of his Primary Teachers express concern?

I haven't read any recent children's books lately, but do any modern characters use the lavatory? Enid Blyton children never did.

Agree about jarring names. In the early 2000s lots of chick-lit type books had protagonists names things like Poppy, Lily or Ella; names that were fashionable for babies at the time. Actual, 20-something women would have been called Sarah, Clare or Jenny.

Absolutely.

Agree with so many on here. I can’t stand those Christmas themed books you see in Sainsbury’s- I’ve attached a photo- or that endless rubbish about poverty stricken girls/women having to looks after a baby etc. There’s 100s of them. I used to enjoy the candlestick maker’s daughter kind of novel until they blurred into one another.
I met the author of a series of books about vintage tea cups, she seemed a bit bashful when admitting what she wrote-even she knew it was pap!

I just read Miss Benson’s Golden Beetle. There was too much ‘she took a bite’ ‘as she swallowed’ ‘chewing, she nodded.’

@EthelMayFergus

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.

Yes I absolutely hate that.

I think it was in Victoria Hislop's novel about the Spanish civil war, the main characters age didn't quite tie up in the present time