Book icks

[butimamonstersaidthemonster]

I love hearing peoples biggest book icks.

I hate when plot holes are explained by characters being so rich that they have access to technology that doesn’t exist.
I hate when a character is paralysed and then it turns out that they were faking it - you can’t fake it for months or in some books years!
I hate when books are described as ‘the next gone girl’ like it isn’t a major spoiler.

I'm sure I have loads more I can’t think of right now.

Detective novel where tge detective is an actual Police officer based in England but the author clearly hasn’t done any research into UK law and has clearly based their knowledge from watching CSI or something. The amount of times tge lead detective will tell one of his staff to go and get an arrest warrant for murder drives me to distraction. In the UK you don’t need to get an arrest warrant you just need reasonable suspicion and you go and arrest them. Recently read one where they couldn’t get a search warrant as they didn’t have ‘probable cause’. No such thing in the UK and the book was based in Cornwall. Also they’d arrested tge suspect so could have just searched under section 18 of PACE. Surely tge British authorities could have found an actual Police Officer ask.

Also totally unconnected but when someone is described as smiling ‘wolfishly’. I know what they’re trying to convey but no one would say that in real life. It’s a very literary phrase and it always makes me think of the wolf in Little Red Riding who doing pantomime like grimacing!

Oh another. The ‘probable cause’ author who kept using the term ‘feedback’ incorrectly.’ It just meant all the conversation really jarred, stilted and unnatural’. For example, The DCI was waiting for feedback from the DI’. When it should have been ‘ The DCI was waiting for the DI to update/brief her’ ‘What’s your feedback’ said the DCI to the DI when again it would be ‘What have you got/any update’. The language just didn’t feel natural. The character would also say ‘Thank-you for that feedback’ when in real life you’d just say ‘Thanks for that’. It was all very stilted and unnatural. I wanted to get get my red pen out and offer some actual ‘feedback.’ 😂😂😂😂

I don't think GE ever gave her own looks to her protagonists -- she was famously considered terribly ugly by her contemporaries (Henry James called her a 'horse-faced bluestocking') to the point where she used to joke about it herself, but was very self-conscious about being drawn or photographed! She's definitely very concerned with women's looks in her fiction, though.

Charlotte Bronte, four foot nine inches, definitely makes all her favourite female characters tiny! If you're tall, striking and curvaceous in her fiction, you're often a wrong'un.

Charlotte Bronte, four foot nine inches, definitely makes all her favourite female characters tiny! If you're tall, striking and curvaceous in her fiction, you're often a wrong'un.

A wrong 'un, or a little on the Belgian side 😂(which comes to the same thing)

@TepidBathwater - but her main characters always are “character is beauty” - I’ve just dug out Middlemarch and as I remembered off we go on page 1 with Dorothea’s charms… for several pages implying that she is I suppose sexier than her more conventionally pretty sister. Ditto Mill on the Floss.

I think it’s what women of a particular class had to do in those days!

Regarding police novels, the use of the term WPC for Women Police Constables. This was phased out from 1999 , so any stories set
from 2000s shouldn’t be using this abbreviation .

I just looked up The Tiffany Problem, it's really interesting.
I hate when authors use "they" for singular characters who are named. I just read The River Has Roots which has one merit, and one merit only - it's very short. It has a character called Ren and you read "Ren walks quickly. They are worried they will miss Esther if she leaves too soon". WHO is worried?
I mean we all know that "they" doesn't work for a single person unless we don't know their sex but it works even LESS when that person has a name and the verb agreement keeps changing.

Don’t ever read Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books. The POV character is a travelling monk (called not Brother or Sister but ‘Sibling’) who ‘doesn’t have a gender’, but who presumably has a sex — but this is never disclosed to the reader, despite this character having sex, urinating, showering, dressing etc leading to sentences like ‘They looked down at themself to check they were tidy’.

Oh good grief. 🙄my eyes couldn't roll any harder.
I'm off to read a nice Jennifer Weiner romance where all characters have a sex, a body and even a religion! How retro!

What a great thread.Thank you OP for starting it. I have a few icks...maybe too many, sorry this is long.

As other posters have said, a character "padded" to (for example) the kitchen, and it's always a female character! Impossible that she could walk, or go, she "pads".

Also women in books who always "slip on" a pair of jeans, or shorts, sometimes a (probably slip!) dress. I don't mean in an untidy clothes on floor plus highly-polished parquet combination of events, as in literally "slipped" on. Nope, that's just how she puts on her clothes. And if she's not slipping, she's tugging, ffs.

Unnecessary sexualisation of female characters really gives me the ick. A friend highly recommended Kathy Reichs' books as easy summer page-turners. There are loads of them, with a main character who's a pathologist / forensics expert (as is Reichs herself). So I gave one a go. Ick! Why the fuck does a highly-educated scientist author writing a murder mystery whose protagonist is another highly-educated scientist need to mention her heroine's "panties", that she slipped on, or off, alone, then (probably - I've tried to forget) "padded" to the refrigerator for wine? Why? Aaargh! Why are her "panties" relevant to the character or the plot? Oh, wait, now I see it. Presumably Reichs and her publisher were concerned the main character was too intelligent or academic or independent to be of interest to male readers, hence the "panties". Bleurgh.

Totally bonkers character names. Not in Harry Potter and similar, but in "serious" literature. One of my favourite authors, highly acclaimed, highly readable, can't seem to give anyone a name approaching ordinary. They're all named things like Ash Buccleugh, or Montmorency Caulk. Tbh though, I find it quite endearing now, so rather than an ick, each ludicrous name makes me smile, but with this particular author only. Cormoran Strike, as a bonkers character name: ick, because the books aren't as well-written, sorry.

Every single thing written by Sally Rooney gives me the ick, especially the one set in France with two student girls.on hols in a villa, one of whom is shagging the professor/lecturer. Maybe she's a Marmite author. I just don't think she's very good. By contrast, as a contemporary Irish author writing in English, Claire Keegan, for me, is sublime.

I recently read a very annoying book set on a fictional Scottish island. So much about it felt inauthentic. The "incomer" being completely accepted after just a few months. Unrealistic romance scenes. People talking about getting the bus, as if they are regular and easy to come across on remote islands (rural bus services in Scotland are sparse). The names of the characters.

And a completely unbelievable plot twist that made it all so much worse.

Oh another one, which I started but didn't finish and whose title I have mercifully forgotten. It was some kind of detective story, set in the present day.

The main character (male) worked hard and went home expecting his female partner to have cooked, cleaned and ironed for him. I think she also brought him cups of tea while he relaxed.

Thought at first it was meant to be ironic, then I kept expecting her to tell him to do his own stuff but nope! She submissively served him.

Ick ick ick!

Yes. I mean, the books are otherwise sort of cosy fantasy, quite likeabley so — robots suddenly became conscious a hundred years or so before the time line of this book, and decided to leave human civilisation altogether and become sort of botanists on the 50% of the planet that’s set aside for them by the newly environmentally aware humans. But Sibling Dex is a deeply annoying creation, if only for sentences like ‘the tube of anti-itch cream they were going to slather themself with’ or ‘Dex found themself whisked off to a cookhouse’.

In the SR novel (Conversations With Friends) the lover is not a lecturer, he’s a washed-up actor. He’s a good-looking, weak gym bunny, so I suppose the appeal for her is obvious, but why he’s got a thing for sour, emotionally-constipated, self-harming performance poet Frances is another matter…

This is why I began to dislike Peter James ‘Grace’ series. The missing wife was interesting, but the explanation (eventually) was boring. They gave him a new girlfriend (Cleo) who was like Mary Poppins ‘practically perfect in every way’ and so bloody dull.

That makes me want to burn the book. Not because I think it would be a politically dangerous text, but because it is an offense to the English language.

I’m reading a book like this now as the main character is non binary. Enjoying it but it does get confusing!

People “tossing together” a salad when they have an unexpected guest. I read something recently and we were treated to the whole “simple meal” they “threw together” - bread, cheese, a “good” bottle of wine…

Maybe I’m the one out of step, but if I had a random guest I’d be fishing in the freezer or offering them baked beans. If I hadn’t just come via Waitrose the chance of being able to produce a palatable salad would be nil.

Particularly when the character has a full on job - detective or pathologist or some such occupation where they spend all of their waking hours working, but they never call in at the supermarket or have to wait in for a delivery. They also seem to be the type who are ultra fit and go for random 15 mile runs ‘to relax’ without putting any training in.

I doubt I could even offer that much to an unexpected guest! In my universe, no-one would 'drop in' expecting a full meal. Tea/coffee and biscuits I could do, toast, maybe, but not a meal. In the highly unlikely event I was called on to feed someone unexpectedly, I'd probably order a takeaway.

See, I’m always fascinated (on here, rather than in fiction) that so many people habitually have biscuits in the house to offer an expected caller. I literally never do. If I bought biscuits because I liked them, I would eat them, probably fairly quickly. I’d be far more able to give someone salad, wine, bread (via freezer) and cheese, though, depending on the time of year/week, the salad might be a tin of chickpeas with whatever is on hand chopped/grated/roasted and chucked in, rather than some extravaganza of leaves.

I sometimes have biscuits in, but if I didn't, I could nip to the shop and get some, given 10 min warning. Or I can usually offer a cheese sandwich.

I do have food in the freezer, but if I had a visitor wanting a cooked meal, we'd probably go out to eat.

If someone called unexlectedly I could offer lunchbox snacks.

I do have a shop within a few minutes walk.

I too hate the unnecessary over-sexulisation of women (often in fantasy) or very boring, dated gender stereotypes (looking at you, romance). I guess it is somewhat required for the genre, but the language often becomes patronising and cringe. I remember reading the Shopaholic books as a 20-year old but now the themes give me an ick. It was very of a time.