What are your book pet peeves?

[AlpacaTheBags]

What tropes or clichés annoy you in books?

I have so many but one is when the main character is at risk so they move far away to make a new life where no one will be able to connect them to their past. Good plan but they always go to some tiny coastal or rural village(Population 150) and buy or rent the most well known and distinctive building in the place(Usually a potter's or lobster fisherman's cottage.)

And then when the villain inevitably catches up with them, they always run towards the cliffs to have their final encounter. I don't know why because you can guarantee that at least one of them is going over the cliff.

As a total aside to the thread (sorry), I've often wondered how my 80s comprehensive school with circa 1200 pupils managed to create functioning timetables without the benefit of computers.

I think novels are going the same way as films now - all the good ones have been done 🥲

We had doubles, too - six periods in a day, and not impossible to have, say, double PE, double tech, and double science and use up an entire day that way. Non-practical subjects were never double periods, though, so we had PE, art, music, science, performing arts, and tech as doubles but nothing else until the sixth form.

Once you hit the sixth form, pretty much all of your lessons were doubles, so I had a lot of double German. Fortunately, I loved German

Great thread!

I've started a separate thread in 'Chat' about pre-computer era school timetabling if anyone else is interested.

The school I attended for sixth form had 8 35minute lessons... all sixth form ones were doubles. Lower school was a mix of single and doubles.

police detective tries to catch criminal.
Same Criminal ends up hunting police detective (&/or their family, loved ones).

Stupid stupid stupid.

DC have double and even triple lessons (in last 10 yrs)

Agree with all the pregnancy comments. Woman / teenage girl has unprotected sex, few weeks later sore boobs and vomiting. Gosh what could it be? Always the same bloody thing!
Also chauvinism and sexism. Peter James books in which everyone fancies Roy Grace, in one Cleo is talking about how she can't wait to have sex with him as soon as she's delivered their baby (does the man have no idea how babies come out?) and there's a PC who would look gorgeous but she doesn't spend time beautifying herself for work and she lives with and cares for her mum, what a shame she isn't prioritising her appearance.
I found Elizabeth George also quite irritating with her descriptions of women and their appearance, regarding whether they make an effort or not.

Books where the central character has a delightful pet, usually a dog or cat, which is only there because it dies in some horrible way about half way through the book. This often occurs in a remote and rather sinister rural location.

I've got quite into Anne Cleves' Vera books, but am also getting a bit irritated by the constant references to how fat she is - her thighs spreading across a desk she sits on; her being unable to do any physical exertion etc etc.

I first read Helen Forrester's autobiographical books when I was about 12 and was very affected by them. Reading them again when I was older I did wonder how much was an exaggeration. I also wondered how much they were stretched to 4 volumes after initial success. Maybe not at all I'm not sure. I also found the mother characterisation interesting. Mental health issues as seen by a child not really understanding what was going on. I think the descriptions of Liverpool in the depression and in war time are very evocative; have such strong images in my head.

To go with descriptions of hardened nipples there's also plenty of descriptions of erections that are queasy making. Imagery of torpedoes etc.

Anyway, things I can't stand are books were you become really involved for the first 100 pages and it goes pfft after that. Or the other way around 100 pages of slog and then it's brilliant 🤔

Yes, yes, yes! How many times does that happen in real life?

We were all obsessed with The Valley of Horses in secondary school because it was the first book any of us had encountered with proper sex scenes

When I was at secondary school we had single lessons in the first and second years (as it was called then) and double lessons after that. This was 85 to 91.
I got a teaching job after an informal interview at the end of the school year to start in the September.

The danger font on the cover. Big slab serif, unenlightening title like 'strange feelings', usually written by some dour young woman with a fringe.

Definitely when the most stunning character as described is touted as the misfit -boy it girl

or when the character is introduced as reading a book in a park or walking their dog or some other begin task that serves to show how unusual and quirky they are 🙄🙄🙄

*boy or girl

Am I the only one who gets stressed about people’s pets? Mainly single female detectives and their cats. The detective is out all night on an investigation and I worry about who is feeding the cat.

When a character’s race is mentioned only when they’re not white. Has turned me right off books I have otherwise enjoyed!

I seem to read alot of books where a main character knows someone who is an IT expert/dark web expert. Or has got a friend who owes a favour, in government security or such like.

Right. And in three tries, they have accessed the computer's password and all of the bad guy's encrypted files.

I think it was only the first one or two of the Helen Forrester Mersey books that were autobiographical, she openly admitted that she went from fact as seen by a child, to a bit embellished, to loosely based on real events to almost 100% fictional.

The woman who is the main character in the book is extremely smart, capable e.t c and all the male characters are pretty useless.

I've noticed this is especially the case with female authors.

I also don't like its set at one period if time then it jumps to a different period of time, then goes back again.

In middlebrow literary fiction it's very common to get a lot of unnecessary background material woven nailed onto the story, either to shore up some lame plot device, to set up a creaking extended metaphor, or just to show off What A Lot of Research I've Done. Even if it's beautiful prose, it's infuriating to be subjected to a load of extraneous facts about woolly Mammoth excavation, or the gargoyles of Notre Dame or whatever else it is the author read up on for this book and now has nowhere to put it in.

Closely related is The Story is Quite Dull But I've Set it Somewhere Lovely. Or even worse, a tired plot is lent gravitas by tragic historic events.

Anachronistic things like heroines having long hot baths in wartime are annoying too. Or women telling each other to spoil themselves or have some pampering.

Not a cliché but the book I’m reading at the moment has had the same spelling mistake in it as the previous book by the same author. Spec rather than speck.