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.)"

Historical fiction where all the characters you're supposed to like have 21st century liberal attitudes to everything while the baddies are classist and sexist. The further back in history the book is set, the more jarring this is.

Americans who have clearly never set foot in a British school writing about them. The latest offender was a traditional boys' public school which had, among other implausible things, one lone girl attending the school for handwavy reasons so that she could become the teenage protagonist's girlfriend. Just set the book in a mixed boarding school!

'Chosen one' narratives, especially when they join an organisation of some kind and are immediately catapulted to the top of it despite knowing nothing. The character who objects because they've been training and hoping for promotion for years only to be overlooked because of the super special newbie is portrayed as jealous and/or bullying.

@IwishIwasyoda

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.

Game of Throne and A Suitable Boy are great example of this.

Think they coud easily have been have 1,000 fewer pages, A Suitable Boy possibly even fewer No need for minute detail over everything.

I seem to recall in A Suitable Boy there must have been 50 pages on a party, 20 where the preparations, 10 on one single song and 20 on what people thought about the song and party.*

Game Of Thrones had ever outfit described in such detail costume designers would be able to reproduce them exactly. Also have them completed by the time the average person takes to read the passage.**

• numbers might be an estimate ** might be exaggerating

I hate it when you star at the end, for example with the death of the main character. Then you scroll back in time to find out all the events leading up to it. You've lost me. I no longer care. I'm not invested in the character because I know they're going to die. Wish they'd stop doing this.

Also putting recipes in just as page filler. Lazy. As if I'm going to read the damn recipe.

JK could have done with someone reminding her how perfect the Chamber of Secrets was lengthwise when she plonked the building brick that is Order of the Phoenix on the editor's desk. Ootp is my favourite HP but sometimes, less is more. I think she had become so important by then nobody dared do any editing.

I would read the half fairy/half ferret book...

JK could have done with someone reminding her how perfect the Chamber of Secrets was lengthwise when she plonked the building brick that is Order of the Phoenix on the editor's desk.
That's slightly unfair. DD was the perfect age for HP: she was Harry's age and 'grew up' with him as the books were published each year. The first book was an easy Year 7 read but as he (and she) got older they got longer and darker.

Somebody who really needs editing is Hilary Mantel. I found all those irrelevant wanders off piste so annoying that I gave up the will to live and have never finished the book. If it was fiction I might have stayed the course but it's history: I know what's going to happen so stop delaying the inevitable!

I know that's why JK did it- that the early books were meant to be shorter and more accessible to younger readers, but I still hold (and I see it with Cormoran Strike) she is untouchable by editors.
It's kind of like JRR Tolkien and his (feels like ) extra 300 pages of elvish poetry. Or Twilight and the bloody werewolf legends.

Wolf Hall is one of few books I never finished which annoys me intensely because I wanted to. Yet A Place of Greater Safety is one of my all time favourites.

I know that's why JK did it
OK. It's just that we did the whole "queuing through the night for the release copies" thing. It was a competition to see who could finish it first so when JK slammed the anchors on I thought, "good for you. Slow them down. Made them actually read it and savour the experience."

I got WH from a charity shop and it was put on the To Be Read bookshelf. A friend spotted it and gave me APoGS as a present. To be polite, I tackled GS first and couldn't finish it. I subsequently gave WH back to the charity shop, unread.

I liked WH a lot and found it a really moving book. The Mirror and the Light though (which I’ve read this summer) - Jesus! It’s incredibly well researched but another book that really needed a heavy edit. Any book you have to force yourself through is hard work - others have said how sad they felt when Cromwell gets executed, from about page 500 onwards i was looking forward to his execution!

@kshaw just for you, The X Files <a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D087QGg2Ggxs&ved=2ahUKEwj7oojQhKTrAhWVQhUIHRP8CP8QwqsBMAB6BAgJEAM&usg=AOvVaw0jUKjSSIcKpfbrZWXhX-5R" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Southern Blot.

Remember reading a Prue Leith book the heroine was a single mother so took her baby to work and popped her under the desk and merrily did a days work 🙄. I was a SAHM to a baby of the same age and couldn’t get past this. Ridiculous!

@countfosco - that made my teeth itch!! 😂

Finally got round to reading The Muse and so many gripes mentioned above in there: rheumy eyes, pages of italics, trying to write how accents are spoken, obvious ending...

A lot of these I agree with but I have not read all so will add my own list

• similar names
• Using first name some times then just surname so I think 2 characters but the same person
• spending 20 pages on describing hair colour, the weather, type of car just any random thing
• some flashbacks work and some don't
• books with no proper chapters
• a character sees their partner hugging someone, giving someone money, doing something that may be dodgy but not asking the person concerned just assuming the worst automatically
• prequels written after a series starts, start with the beginning then continue if you are doing a series

I will have loads more

Interestingly, with the Cormoran Strike books, Strike doesn’t really have an accent. This is probably because he’s lived all over the place, including Cornwall and London, and it was mentioned at one point that he and his sister could alter their accents to fit in. In the Audible version, he’s given rather a West Country accent, but doesn’t really have one in the TV version. Also, Robin is from Yorkshire, but her accent isn’t written as such. She does have a definite accent in the TV version though.

I absolutely loved The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah. Set in WW2 France, it's mostly very well-researched. The thing that spoiled it for me though, was the (fairly frequent) references to rural French homes as having "mismatched chairs" at the dining table. You can almost smell the Annie Sloan...

I would read the half fairy/half ferret book...

Dulcie the fairy is having a bad day. Her auburn locks are refusing to cascade properly and in a fit of mustelid fury she’s chewed her favourite Manolos to pieces.

Added to her angst, the sexy-as-hell barista in her favourite coffee shop has just asked her out, and she can’t decide between saying yes and running up his trouser leg.

Even her favourite chicken and caramel latte can save her day from disaster. And that’s before her nemesis, the tall, dark and fluffy rabbit shifter tries to hire her to investigate some missing chickens.

DanceLikeEmmaGoldman ;)

“she can’t decide between saying yes and running up his trouser leg”

Chicken and caramel latte - sounds fowl. Bit confused though if the rabbit shifter has a hirsute problem? Suspect the barista might be behind the dastardly poultry napping - can you let on @DancelikeEmmaGoldman??

War and Peace.

Head wreaking for names. Each character has three names and can be referred to as a combination of the three or each one individually or a diminutive of some sort.

There's enough characters without each one having 18 possible names.

(Had a smiley face at the end of that. It's gone!.)

Where the author has a favourite turn of phrase that they use over and over and over.

I forget which book it was but the author seemed to describe everything "like so many..." . It got really bloody grating.

It might have been Little Fires Everywhere but I'm not sure.

I came on to say book titles like
The Photographer's Wife
The Paramedic's Daughter
The Beekeeper's Daughter
The Builder's Great Uncle
Blah blah

I really hate books that don't end properly and leave you guessing. If I wanted to use my imagination or decide myself what happened I'd write my own book

Yes to the names
Similar names eg Ellie, Elaine and Emma. Who is who?!

Multigenerational stories where the granny, the mum and the daughter are called Laura, Sarah and Kate or similar. Again, who is who?! The granny should be called Betty, the mother maybe Kate or Laura and the daughter be Tiffany or Chloe.

And the mystery constantly alluded to just irritates me. I read Tiger Eye by Judy Blume when I was about 13. Even then I was unimpressed. The heroine constantly thought about "the night that changed everything" and "the bag at the back of her wardrobe". A whole book later we discover her dad was killed when his store was robbed and she still has his blood stained clothes in her wardrobe or similar