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Nov
02
What are your literary pet peeves?
2010 at 10am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Over at Bookrageous (which was first a calendar and is now a podcast, a Tumblr, a separate Twitter feed, and my favorite side project), we’re gearing up to talk about our literary pet peeves. You know, the things that happen in books that make us downright stabby. Things like surprise twist endings that aren’t so surprising, or cliffhangers, or inaccuracies in historical novels, or narrators breaking the fourth wall, or name-dropping in memoirs.
Josh is taking the week off, so Michele Filgate (events manager at River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH; you might know her as @readandbreathe) will join Jenn and me for a ranty discussion of what we’re reading now and which literary tricks and techniques drive us crazy.
And we want to hear from you because I just *know* you have something to say about this. I mean, if you read books and think about books enough to be reading and/or writing a book blog, you have opinions about these things. So let it all out. Let’s kick off Festivus early and have the Airing of Grievances now.
Leave your peeves in the comments here, shout out to @bookrageous on Twitter, visit the Bookrageous blog, or best of all, call the Bookrageous voicemail line and leave a screamy message at (347) 855-7323.
And if you’ve been listening to the podcast already, we’d be most grateful for a review on podbean or iTunes so we can get legit.
Let the ranting begin!
Related posts:
I hate books that are longer than they need to be. I don’t mind long books, but the length needs to be because there’s interesting stuff, not because the book just didn’t get edited down well enough. Books that are too long end up taking awhile from the story rather than making it better.
Worse than the twist you see coming are the twists that have absolutely nothing to foreshadow at all. Even if it is little stuff you never would have seen until you knew the end, it needs to be there! If not it is like they are just adding the twist to be different. It just bugs me!
Also, dystopian that info dump for the first 50 to build the world.
Boring!
Caitie F´s last [type] ..The Maze Runner by James Dashner
My biggest pet peeve – the seemingly requisite vomiting scene in 95% of modern lit. Seriously, people don’t throw up every time they’re nervous, scared, sad, depressed, lost, surprised, and angry. I can probably count on one hand the number of modern books I’ve read this year without a vomiting scene. It’s particularly bad in YA and I think it’s lazy writing. Someone has an intense emotional experience – well just show how intense it is by making them throw up. That’ll get the point across. Sigh.
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I am eternally irritated by books with a Message, that only exist to preach at you. I’m thinking specifically of “The Poisonwood Bible.” There are many others, but that is really one of the worst.
Also annoying: characters that only exist to answer questions about the confusing plot.
Books where the author’s writing is wish fulfilment – unattractive journalists who are oddly irresistable to women come to mind….
Non-fiction writers who insist on making their writing all about them instead of about the story they are reporting
Characters who talk about things they MUST already know about, just so the reader is able to share that information (CLUNKARAMA)
Authors who insist on shoehorning every bit of research they did into their book, even if it’s completely beside the point – just so you know how much research they did
Authors who RUIN original books by writing rubbishy follow ups or stealing the characters
And….breathe!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rebecca Schinsky and Kim Ukura, Regator [Technology]. Regator [Technology] said: What are your literary pet peeves? (The Book Lady's Blog) http://bit.ly/9J07gE [...]
My main pet peeve is the use of the present tense in a historical novel. If you’re going to tell me a story that happened a long time ago, don’t try to make me believe that it’s happening as I read it! (This might be more common in French litterature than in English, though…)
Grominou´s last [type] ..Féeries dans lïle
Ok, examples! I’m not opposed to long books. I loved “The Robber Bride” by Margaret Atwood, which is 520 pages long and is written in a way where certain scenes are repeated, but I still loved every piece of it.
A few books that I think were longer than necessary were:
“Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace – I really liked this book, but it did not have to be as long as it was to get the point across.
“Fingersmith” by Sarah Waters – I didn’t like this book, for lots of reasons (and I know I’m in the minority), but one was that it just felt too long. When I start thinking I’d rather have read a summary on Wikipedia than read the book, it’s usually length.
‘Russian Winter” by Daphne Kalotay – Also a book I liked, but that I think had a few too many subplots going on that could have been trimmed without losing anything.
Nonfiction can also easily, easily get too long, but I can’t think of any examples of that off the top of my head.
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I don’t mind when authors break the fourth wall as long as they set it up as a “I’m going to be talking to you” sort of situation at the beginning of the book. But when all of a sudden that wall is broken halfway through the book and the author addresses me, I want to throw the darn thing across the room. I always react with “how DARE you talk to me?” ERGH.
Cori´s last [type] ..And now a break from your regularly scheduled book reviews…
Thanks, Kim! THE HISTORIAN and THE SWAN THIEVES (oh, poor Elizabeth Kostova) are on my list of too-long books. It’s definitely a peeve when I’m wondering where the editor was and why she didn’t put the red pen to more use!
Dangling storylines or the appearance of the gun in the first “act” that don’t get all tied up at the end.
There are wonderful books that do it but — stories with so many characters with similar names that it gets confusing and I have to keep flipping back and forth to remember them all.
Frontmatter! I hate frontmatter. I do not want a Yale professor telling me everything about an author’s life, his repressed homosexuality and the *important themes* of the book even before I begin reading it! (Notice the use of the exclamation point, I am very upset by this). I do like reading this material after the book but never before. Which means I have to flip past the 40+ pages of the stuff before I can get to the actual book.
I cannot stand it when a character looks in a mirror and starts listing off their features to let the reader in on the character’s appearance. Half the time I don’t care if the character has a crooked nose or blue eyes. And if it is important, there are better ways of informing the reader. One of my professors mentioned this once and now I cringe every time I read these parts!
The most irritating thing that ever happened to me reading was when I was reading a mystery and it turned out that the narrator did it!!
It was YEARS before I ever read ANY book written in the 1st person after that!
I have two. The first is the split narrative, like in House of Leaves or the Blind Assassin. Both drove me up the wall, and I ended up reading only the story I was interested in and wishing the other would go away. Just tell the story! (Oddly, though, a similar technique in The Nobodies Album did not bother me. Perhaps it was done better there?)
The second is trilogies that don’t really need to be trilogies. What’s wrong with writing just two books? Too often the middle book is just a stretched out set up with a crazy-making cliffhanger. Or the third book will completely trail off and lose steam because the story has run its course. Conversely! There are often books that feel as though have been crammed into three when four would have worked better. It’s as though three is the magic number, regardless of story arc or character development.
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Just a few from me…
Memoirists who don’t grasp that the best stories are those where you write about your own foibles and how much of an idiot you’ve been, rather than laying into other people; thrillers that turn out to be not thrilling in the slightest; when an author has a favourite word they use so much you start to think “shut up with the perspicacious already!” (or whatever), and adverbs. I’m with Elmore Leonard that they’re unnecessary. They’re for when people don’t know the right verb to use in the first place. (You don’t need to say “he said angrily” when you can use “he shouted”.)
And if we’re naming names on the non-twisty twists, my copy of Salem Falls even had a reader’s guide in the back with Jodi Picoult talking about the “surprise” ending, which I’d guessed by the half-way point. I also hate non-thrilling thrillers (Laura Lippman’s Life Sentences was recommended by two women writers I admire, but I thought it completely fizzled to nothing.)
Finally, does every woman in contemporary women’s fiction have to hate the way she looks and be on a diet? When I get to the mandatory self-image issues section I start inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) groaning…
Er yeah. That was just a few, right?
This may be an odd one, but – a few months ago I was reading a novel that involved a woman discovering a rare book. After the discovery, the text shifted back and forth between the “rare book” and the actual novel. While this wasn’t that annoying, the big problem was that I found the rare book had better writing and more interesting characters than the real novel. I actually got annoyed when the author had the woman put her discovery down and go back to her own life. What makes this a pet peeve is that I *know* I’ve read at least one other novel like this before. Sometimes the book within the book…should just be the book. (I said it was an odd one.)
Re: long books and editing. I get annoyed with re-issues of books in their “original, uncut, unedited editions!!” as though that’s something to get excited about. Something closer to the mediocrity-with-potential of a first draft? Count me out.
Related is the publishing of manuscripts that an author left when they died. I’m sure some can be touched up, but it feels wrong to have something edited without input…
My biggest pet peeve is when characters find them selves in a strange or different situation but don’t accept reality and keep acting like all the rules of their pervious life can’t change. This often happens in science fiction and it drives me crazy!! The most egregious example was the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant that came out years ago, but i just read another story where the main character took half of the book to realize that he was not in Kansas anymore.
The situation annoys me because it is, IMHO, not at all realistic, and, the damage done by the character refusing to accept the new reality ends up being a large part of the story. It leaves you wondering what could have happened if the character had just a little common sense.
In short story collections, I’ve noticed authors confuse having a central theme/idea binding the collection together with having a collection of the same story told ten times. It’s understandable that it’s a difficult line to walk but it should stand out when one story repeats itself for 200 pages.
I’m also tired of the prevalence of drug problems. It seems as if everyone has a drug problem in contemporary lit and it’s continually used as the excuse for crazy events, crazy actions and/or crazy friends. Maybe a character/story would be more interesting if they weren’t on crack 24/7/365 or if they had a reason for their drug problem beyond literary convenience.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the name-dropping in Historical Fiction/Romance. A ridiculous number of romantical historical novels published in the last 10 years happen to take place in or around 1810, and most of those characters manage to run into Jane Austen in some way or another. It’s just tacky!
I hate:
1) When characters in historical fiction use really modern words, or worse, speak in modern-day slang.
2) (related but a little different) Bad translation that changes a book’s tone and/or adds in words/phrases/slang that it doesn’t belong — i.e. characters saying “hey, man” in The Brothers Karamazov.
Anne´s last [type] ..Kidlit Con 2010
I get lost when I feel like an author is using point of view incorrectly, especially if it’s first person. I sometimes have a hard time articulating why it doesn’t work for me, but, in general, if a character is narrating details that I don’t believe he or she, in character, would notice, I get distracted. I also frequently think books that are in first person should be in third (“Hunger Games” and the Sookie Stackhouse books, for example) and that books in third person should be in first (“The Magicians” by Lev Grossman comes to mind).
And the very worst thing I’ve encountered is a book that switches from third to first halfway through, and yet the narrator addresses the audience as though assuming that we know all the information that was told in the first half. No reason for this!
A CHANGE in POV halfway through with no warning/acknowledgment/reason? That is straight-up crazy and would drive me nuts, too.
*shudder* at the thought of Dostoevsky being butchered that way.
Bestselling writers as protagonists
Scott Nicholson
i agree with what Lyndsey said about wish-fulfillment. i mean, i can tell that the author likes cooking indian food, practices some obscure martial art, and rides vintage motorcycles from the unnecessary amount of time spent describing these things in the book, so when i look at the author’s bio and see, “when she’s not writing, she’s cooking indian food, practicing nine-diagram pole-fighting, or working on her collection of pre-WWII motorcycles” i roll my eyes so hard they hurt. no. duh.
also, house of leaves rules.
I hate when women giggle. I know it’s a small thing, but when authors refer to the smart, strong, wily female protagonist as “giggling” they lose my respect (the authors and the protagonist).
NovelWhore´s last [type] ..The Abduction Genre
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post then, Lydia.
Okay, I tweeted, but now I have more room to gripe! Kim Edwards is notorious for repeated phrases in one book-how many times can she say the boys ear lobes were like sea shells? Seriously? She used “like quicksilver” three times in one novel. I hate that. I also hate a paragraph that is introduced with “that said”. Or when a writer builds up a character, fleshes them out to be something visual and real, then leaves them in the dust.
OH! And I hate it when a writer talks to the reader like they are an idiot-explaining certain topics like a boring middleschool teacher that we already know (do I really need an author to explain sound waves in an exposition in a novel? NO!). Then there’s the 200 page build up that wraps up neatly in a bow in three pages-the cheater!
And why is it that subtlety is disappearing? I hate authors who tell tell tell about a character and how we should feel towards them rather than let us figure it out from the text? Whew!
amy´s last [type] ..In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik
I also hate novels that just end. I second Amy above in wrapping everything up in a nice little three-page bow, but I also read the entire Jodi Picoult book HOUSE RULES just to have it end and make me think my copy was a misprint. Ok that’s an exaggeration but still.
NovelWhore´s last [type] ..The Abduction Genre
over use, which in most cases is any use, of the word ‘suddenly’
i could go the remainder of my life never seeing that word again.
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First person present tense.
I am writing a comment in a blog right now. I am not riding on a horse or running through a dark alley or attending a dance. Do I do these things with a typewriter strapped to my torso? No! It defies logic.
Really? I love it when first-person present tense is done well, especially in memoirs. Gives it a sense of immediacy.
Literary name dropping! I love well-written, clever fairy tale retellings, but I HATE it when the authors just throws in all these random characters that serve no purpose other than to show off just how brilliant and well-read the author is. Argh! The Sisters Grimm books are chock full of literary name-dropping and it makes me want to stab myself in the eye.
Also: hate lots and lots of telling instead of showing, especially when the telling is redundant. (Yes, I’m looking at YOU, Twilight. If I have to read ONE MORE TIME that Bella is clumsy, I’m going to jump off a bridge.)
Just read Jane Doe’s comment re messages, and I totally second that! I read a lot of children’s lit, and I hatehatehate it when books sacrifice the quality of the book for the sake of the message. These books have such a patronizing tone to them, too! Argh.
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I loathe precocious child characters who have nothing in common with any child anywhere on the planet, including *actual,* *real* precocious children.
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