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.)"

I can't stand sloppy geography. I read a book that was set locally. One character had a part time job in a bar and would drive to work to cover an hour of someone's shift - a two hour round trip for a minimum wage job!

I also get so irritated by rich villains - people able to commandeer planes, yachts etc to enable them to carry out their dirty work. They use money as a kind of magic - he was able to kidnap her and keep her hidden in a cottage/underground bunker/cabin in the woods because he controls a vast empire and has thugs and minions at his disposal.

Books that use local or historical dialect for things all the way through- puts me off even the title of crawdads.

Popcorn heavy reliance on coincidence to make a story work is exactly what ruined that MN favourite ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ for me.

Geography is bad in films too. When someone turns a corner and jumps to a different Greek island...

Anything that is excellent but then has something the author thinks is edgy thrown in. Or books that have lazy endings-especially those where it is left for the reader to decide.

The Binding made me want to throw it.

@Greenteandchives agree re THIF. Trying to avoid spoilers but u could have forgiven that particular coincidence occurring once (Dublin is a small place...) but not multiple times!

Another note on lack of speech marks... do authors do this to make their books seem cleverer than they really are? I'm thinking of Sally Rooney in particular. I have read much better books on similar themes that get dismissed as chic lit fluff but SR removes speech marks and suddenly they are modern classics??

@drspouse no it was just a passing comment along the lines of 'everything cleaned down for tomorrow work, benches washed and floor autoclaved' ...didn't finish the book as it put me off!

When the book is about a journey (geographical), and the author kindly provides a map , at the end of the book. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an example, I resorted to the atlas while reading it.

@Badnessinthefolds, Murakami creeps me out the way he writes women characters and male characters' interaction with them. If he was living on your street he'd be the peeping Tom with brown trousers and halitosis that has a strange relationship with his mother.

The Binding was god awful.

I’ve just thought of another one, the book I’m reading at the moment has a character who has just separated from her husband of 20 years and her mother is in a coma, however, there just happens to be a man who plays guitar on his canal boat under her new apartment balcony. I’m just not interested in having a shite love story thrown in.

@Magicbabywaves

The Binding was god awful.

I’ve just thought of another one, the book I’m reading at the moment has a character who has just separated from her husband of 20 years and her mother is in a coma, however, there just happens to be a man who plays guitar on his canal boat under her new apartment balcony. I’m just not interested in having a shite love story thrown in.

I thought that, but bear with it.

You’ve read it Saucery? Set in London and the Forest of Dean? I like the bits set in the past...

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 hmm

Oh yes, so much! This is often the case when there are two interlinking stories being told, one in the past (often in the form of letters or a diary being read by the modern day protagonist) and one in the present, and reading the whole of the past story will tell the protagonist something about their current situation - but for some reason they decide to read it incredibly slowly - a bit at a time and then off they go to make their own plot happen for a bit, then come back to read some more. I can cope with this if what they are reading is really long but I just finished one where the priest was reading the incredibly important letter that would tell him everything and wasn’t that long but decided to read it a paragraph at a time and then go off and get attacked, or whatever.

this is often the case when there are two interlinking stories being told, one in the past (often in the form of letters or a diary being read by the modern day protagonist) and one in the present

This has reminded me of another peeve - where there are pages and pages of the letter/diary printed in italics. Italics are OK for a paragraph or so, or in their rightful place for emphasis, but they're really annoying when they go on for a whole chapter.

@Magicbabywaves

You’ve read it Saucery? Set in London and the Forest of Dean? I like the bits set in the past...

Yes, it’s pretty good. Her previous book Black Rabbit Hall is an excellent family mystery too, although I prefer this one. My heart sank at the introduction of Handsome Younger Guitar Boat Man too, at first.

I’ve read Black Rabbit Hall too! Ok, I won’t despair!

Repetitive sentence forms piss me off.

MJ Arlidge's crime novels - every bloody chapter ends with a rubbish cliffhanger like 'Or so she hoped.' or 'It was time' or 'They were completely fucked' as a single sentence paragraph.

I do love Harry Potter but JK Rowling never met an adverb she didn't like

And bad grammar drives me nuts. Fucking comma splicing should be punishable by a swift kick in the knackers.

Overhyped books. Those light summer read type books. Celeb biographies.

Talking of lifestyle; in psychological thrillers particularly, the heroine is always an Oxford/Cambridge eng lit graduate (who was low on self esteem but tutors thought was brilliant) who are in crisis having given up their job in PR or advertising and now looking after her small children. The husband is always extremely handsome and called Jack or Nick, and is a successful highly paid architect (or similar) but works long hours so she doesn't know whether to trust him or not. There's always a scene where she discusses her theories with her old friend, while sharing a bottle (or two) of wine and eating bread and olives from the local fabulous deli just down the road from their Edwardian beautifully decorated south London house or charming rustic cottage they did up after she got married. Lots about how the sex has changed since kids.

@Luckingfovely I’m with you on Elinor Oliphant. Dreadful tosh.

Poorly edited books. Too many novels ruined because the editor did not tell the author it needed to be 100 pages less and less repetitive.

Anything by Ian McEwan post Atonement. Saturday and Solar gave me the serious rage. Lazy writing and terrible endings.

What's with the prologues these days? I don't want to know what happened (or at least partly) let the plot unwind naturally please!
Oh, and the use of the word 'tendril'. Does anyone ever refer to tendrils of hair in real life? No.

yy to Ian McEwan. Loved the early short stories but 'The Children's Act' was truly appalling.

Ian McEwan thinks he is A Great English Writer.