I hate it when books do this

[petronella23]

• start by flinging you into the middle of a conversation or action scene where you don't know who anyone is

• keep swapping between past and present

What are your pet hates?

Present tense
Historical novels in which the names are all wrong for the period
Historical novels in which the tone/attitudes/beliefs are very 21st century
Americanised language from British characters
Foreign characters who say odd things in their language which are actually quite easy to translate, rather than the tricky words they might not know.
Lack of punctuation.
Poor grammar apart from in dialogue/some first person
Multiple first person POVs when author is not skilled enough to make them sound like different voices
Books written by men in which the hero gets lots of women interested in or sleeping with him
Characters moving country with no mention of visas or other legalities

I actually don't mind characters with the same name, it is much more realistic.

Doesn't Earnshaw go off to Liverpool and return the same day having done his business and carrying a child? It's something like 150 mile round trip.

It's a long time since I read it.

I read recently that in the ?18thC and beyond people weren't racist but more classist - So the poor were lesser mortals undeserving and worthless - the rich were God fearing, self righteous, Church going. This was probably also still the case in the 1st world war when the poor commoners were sent to the front to be slaughtered whereas the rich generals gave the orders as if they had a God given right.

Badly written sex scenes. I don’t like sex scenes shoehorned into the plot anyway but for goodness sake make it plausible. Most women do not orgasm at the same time as men. Most women do not orgasm through piv sex. Most men don’t have good sex when they are blind drunk.

Conversation in a book I read this morning (paraphrased)

1: what time is the flight?
2: 9.35
1: shall we meet for breakfast at 7am?
2: ok

And it then describes them checking in a couple of hours later after driving to the airport.

Worst sex scenes I've ever read are in James Herbert's books.

Apparently one reason they were popular was because they had loads of sex in them (least the early ones). But they are truly awful. Don't think I'll ever be able to forget the description in The Fog about running fingers through a forest of hair and finding her other even more moist cave.

There’s a tik tok account where she reads out examples of terrible sex in books. Some of the descriptions are really excruciating.

Many of the descriptions suggest that the authors must have very limited experience and understanding of human anatomy.

Books where you go through the whole thing without finding out the main character's name. I guess you could argue it works for the Handmaid's Tale but it really doesn't bring anything to most other books.

Children's books which take stories from TV shows ie the Paw Patrol Treasury book...awful writing and terribly hard to read out loud.

Here we go. Some awful food-based examples. 🤮 vm.tiktok.com/ZMYxTh8bE/

Just as an aside - while there definitely was an attitude in the past that the poor were almost a different breed, the officer class in the First World War had about a 6 week life expectancy at the Front - worse than the average working class soldier. Loads of young upper class men (and boys) were slaughtered in WWI. Read Regeneration by Pat Barker, a truly brilliant novel, for some insight into this.

Interesting, thanks,

I think I was influenced by All Quiet on the Western Front (I know that was Germans)

I do think WW1 was the first crack in the major dismantling of the traditional British class system that happened in the 20th century. Before then it was very much ‘rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate’, then by the 1930s you were looking at Raymond Briggs’ East End barrow boy-turned-milkman dad buying a house in Wimbledon.

Gimmicky prose - for example, no punctuation, or no capital letters. Just write normally, please. Put it this way, if your entire novel is one long sentence, then the chore of reading it is going to feel like a long sentence.

Books that pull the rug after you've read the first page/chapter and you realise you're reading a completely different type of book to what you thought.

• Books with dramatis personae. If you need a dramatis personae you have too many characters. I'm not interested in the main character's brother's aunt's cleaning lady.

• Books that don't resolve clearly. Say like there's a question as to whether someone was evil or just misunderstood or whether they did or didn't murder someone. And the ending is all wooly and drifts off. And then you google for an interview with the author who is asked the question 'did they or didn't they' and give a waffly answer about how its for the reader to make up their mind. I don't want to have to guess and I want to know what YOU the author wrote this story about. I can't think immediately of the titles any like this but have read several - I read a terrible book recently about a woman who had a bf who was possibly a bit of a stalker/violent or possibly just a normal guy who she provoked. that was one of these books.

• Books that read as if there were two plots of not great interest and the agent or editor said, I know let's throw them up in the air and reassemble them in a random chop and change order to make it more interesting. It's really not. So like you have a scene of a murder, then a scene when that person is alive, then a scene just after the murder, then a scene before the murder, interwoven with another sub plot in the same random order. It does not make a plot more interesting and is just annoying. This is such a modern phenomenon I long for a normal chronological book with everything in the right order.

@SirTarquin - gosh, I disagree so much!

The Wolf Hall trilogy needed dramatis personae because roughly half of the (historically significant) characters were called Henry or Thomas.

All the Iliad stories (Silence of The Girls, Women Of Troy, Song Of Achilles, A Thousand Ships, The Penelopiad etc) needed to make sure their readers knew which person was aligned with which side.

I also like books like Life Of Pi that present a dichotomy and ask us to choose. I am happy to own that my instinct to to chose the beautiful lie over the terrible truth.

Chopped timeline books like Build Your House Around My Body let complex stories reveal themselves through nuance, overlapping narrative and pacing. To have told the story sequentially would have been to have diminished the narrative arc.

Also on dialogue, I hate it when authors try to indicate a regional accent by writing it phonetically, full of apostrophes to represent dropped aitches and gs, and so on. Just say 'He had a strong Glaswegian accent' or whatever and drop in a few - and only a few - regional words and turns of phrase

JkR is terrible for this. It worked in the Potter books because a) it was humorous b) they are fantasy and c) they're written for children; but she also does it in her subsequent books where is reductive and jarring.

@GandhiDeclaredWarOnYou

The Wolf Hall trilogy needed dramatis personae because roughly half of the (historically significant) characters were called Henry or Thomas.

This are real people though. They aren't 'made up characters'. I'm talking about fiction like Jilly Cooper. If you have a dramatis personae = too many peripheral characters.

I’ve not read Jilly Cooper, so I take your word for it. The only books I can think of in recent years with a list of characters was A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes and the Wolf Hall books - both of which needed them.

A cracking writer, Haynes, if you’ve not come across her.

I think Jilly Cooper built up a huge ensemble of characters over the course of the Rutshire Chronicles, because she generally kept main characters from previous books on the periphery of all subsequent books, when she should probably have let them go.

Love Natalie Haynes. She does brilliant podcasts too - Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics.

She is, I love her. Stone Blind is great too.

Thanks, I’ve not heard of that one.

I'm with you on the past/present thing. I've just finished John Boyne's All The Broken Places and the constant changes in time andplace throughout the novel was.ultimately irritating.

When they don't write out the action! I just read a novel where there was an entire chapter of the heroine's ruminations anticipating the big event, then end of book 1. Then in book 2, it was years later looking back at the consequences of the big event. She skipped the event itself! So rubbish.

And when historical fiction writers do the same. You know there's a big historical event coming up, the author is foreshadowing it in the narrative, then it's skipped over, or the characters miss it - not because they're off somewhere else doing something important like saving the Queen's life, but because it feels like the author couldn't be bothered, or wasn't up to writing it.