What's bugging you in the novel you're reading?

Devil Ledbetter

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Are your reading an otherwise good novel and finding something about it keeps bugging you? Something you want to argue against? Something that keeps throwing you out of the story?

I am reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. It's a pretty good book and I've no intention of trashing it here. But a couple of factors are driving me crazy:

1. Major Pettigrew is supposed to be stuffy and formal, but he's too stuffy and formal for a modern 68-year-old. 68 really isn't that old. My father-in-law is 86 and is more hip and comfortable with technology than Pettigrew, who is befuddled by the newfangled cordless phone and still a little in awe of the power windows in his car. Haven't power windows been around since the Eighties? What modern 68-year-old is going to give them a second thought or harken back to roll-down windows? I'm not buying it. He's also much more doddering than any 68-year-old I've ever met.

2. Everyone in the story (so far) with the exception of the LI is shallow, self-centered, tacky, weak and stupid. This doesn't make the Major shine as the last of the courtly gentlemen; it makes him come across as judgmental. The MC would be more likeable/sympathetic if he didn't spend all of his time being teddibly disappointed in everyone else. And the remaining cast would be much more believable if they weren't all caricatures of modern excess.

So what's bugging you in that novel you're reading?
 

CaroGirl

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Believe it or not, the novel I'm reading is incorrectly bound and has the pages OUT OF ORDER!! Now I have one more thing to worry about for my own book, which has yet to arrive (pub date is next Friday).
 

quicklime

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the sheer age....I'm reading Frankenstein, and I love and hate the writing in equal measure....
 

leahzero

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I'm reading Stephen King's DUMA KEY. I'm not a big King fan, but the beginning drew me in with the MC suffering a terrible accident and struggling with damage to the language center of his brain.

What's driving me nuts about the book is that it's contemporary, yet the characters speak like they're from the 50's, 70's, or some other random decade.

Examples:

A college boy in his early 20s says: "The cable's hooked up, the computer's Internet-ready—I got you Wi-Fi, costs a little extra, but it's way cool."

First, this doesn't even make sense from a technical standpoint. "Internet-ready" means something is ready to be hooked up to the internet. It's almost never said of a computer, because all modern computers are internet-ready. That's like saying a computer is keyboard-ready. King is showing his age here. He was clearly trying to make this character come across as tech-savvy, and failed.

And second, "way cool?" No one under 30 says that.

Next example: The MC, a man in his 50s, says goodbye to his 19-year-old daughter at the airport: "Go on, hon, better let 'em wand your bod and check your shoes." Seriously? Does anyone on earth say "bod?"

And here's the one that finally made me stop reading for the night: The middle-aged MC and his college boy assistant are discussing an art gallery where the MC would like to show his paintings.

"It's where the elite meet." He spoke solemnly, but when I burst out laughing, he joined me. That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

"Then that's settled," I said, "because I am definitely elite. Give it up, son."

I raised my hand, and Jack gave it a smack.


I should think what is painfully wrong with this is painfully obvious. Just, no.
 

Devil Ledbetter

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I'm reading Stephen King's DUMA KEY. I'm not a big King fan, but the beginning drew me in with the MC suffering a terrible accident and struggling with damage to the language center of his brain.

What's driving me nuts about the book is that it's contemporary, yet the characters speak like they're from the 50's, 70's, or some other random decade.

Examples:

A college boy in his early 20s says: "The cable's hooked up, the computer's Internet-ready—I got you Wi-Fi, costs a little extra, but it's way cool."

First, this doesn't even make sense from a technical standpoint. "Internet-ready" means something is ready to be hooked up to the internet. It's almost never said of a computer, because all modern computers are internet-ready. That's like saying a computer is keyboard-ready. King is showing his age here. He was clearly trying to make this character come across as tech-savvy, and failed.

And second, "way cool?" No one under 30 says that.

Next example: The MC, a man in his 50s, says goodbye to his 19-year-old daughter at the airport: "Go on, hon, better let 'em wand your bod and check your shoes." Seriously? Does anyone on earth say "bod?"

And here's the one that finally made me stop reading for the night: The middle-aged MC and his college boy assistant are discussing an art gallery where the MC would like to show his paintings.

"It's where the elite meet." He spoke solemnly, but when I burst out laughing, he joined me. That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

"Then that's settled," I said, "because I am definitely elite. Give it up, son."

I raised my hand, and Jack gave it a smack.


I should think what is painfully wrong with this is painfully obvious. Just, no.
I'm pretty sure no one has said bod since Dec. 22, 1978 unless they were remarking on a stranger they were sexually attracted to. Definitely doesn't go with father/daughter conversation.

And they high-fived? Hysterical.
 

Jess Haines

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There were a lot of things that bugged me about the last book I read, but it was an ARC, so I can't be sure if the errors might not be fixed in the final version.

I hope so, because the number of small but significant mistakes annoyed the living daylights out of me, yet the story itself was amazing.
 

JoyceH

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In the book I just finished, a paperback Regency from the 80s, the heroine was escaping her home in man's clothing, and she had her little dog hidden in a basket. And the dog 'whelped' in the basket - so help me, that's what it said. I know the writer MEANT 'yelped', but the mental image, was just so... I guess shoddy editing is not a new phenomenon. (Come to think of it, newborn puppies would have livened up that stupid story.)
 

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I am currently reading The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King book two of the dark tower series. I am a big King fan but this book is killing me the past 30 pages or so it is going back and forth in POV between the gunslinger and the guy he is trying to contact in our world. So, every event is talked about twice making the book seem to take forever to get anywhere.
 

quicklime

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Reading Red Leaves, forgot the author......

Like the movie Unfaithful, you can feel things headed for an explosion, and you don't know what the exact nature is, but the sure and growing knowledge things are going from bad to worse is slowly sucking the air from the room.

On the flip side, what is bugging me is the guy can write, but he seems to be trying to build this up in a pretty heavy-handed way....if writing is seduction, this may not be running across the street to slap a partner across the face with a 2-foot rubber dildo, but it isn't exactly a few barely-too-long glances from across the room or a just-maybe-he-meant-more double entendre, either...


EDIT: on finishing the book, the unsubtlety was due to an unreliable narrator, not a ham-fisted approach. And I enjoyed the book very much.
 
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Marya

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I'm reading Leon Edel's biography of Henry James, written between the late 1950s and early 1970s. James has these 'mysterious illnesses' as a youngish man and Edel is equally reticent, has trouble just coming out and saying that at certain times while travelling James was constipated and in misery because of it.

And Edel the biographer in the early 1960s is more reticent about James' attraction to men than James himself.
 

mayqueen

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The main character is fairly one-dimensional. I hate when a first-person character is really just a generic placeholder for telling the story.
 

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I'm reading the Terra Incognita trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson and sometime when it comes down to it, I sit there and wonder how some people can just be so stupid! For example near the end of the second novel, the sailors on board the Dyscovera come across the long lost ancestors of the Saedran people. They are pretty strong and could help them win the war that is raging back home in a second, and instead the ships crew mutinies against the captain and tries to forcibly convert the king to their religion to 'save his soul' and make them an enemy for it.

I mean come on! Even if you consider them unholy, you think they would at least think to let them win them the war before you turn them into an enemy? :e2hammer:
 

heyjude

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In the otherwise fantastic book I just read, the author confused schizophrenia with DID. :(
 

Tepelus

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There are a lot of things that bother me with Vlad: The Last Confession, and I'll probably post about it some time in a new thread, but the thing that's bothering me the most right now is the author can't make up his mind on how to spell the fortress of Giurgiu. He spells it several different ways, even in the same paragraph. Really? And you've done tons of research as you've stated at the back of your book, and you can't spell Giurgiu correctly? He spells it a couple of times the right way, and he also spells it Guirgui, Giurgui, and Guirgiu. Also, I know, Vlad Dracula has green eyes. Stop mentioning it! And also. Sentence. Fragments. Abound.

If I've learned anything from this book so far, and I'm 2/3 finished, it's how not to write, and edit, edit, edit. And edit some more until that thing is shiny.
 

LJD

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There are too many main characters. (I am getting sick of how women's fiction novels always seem to have at least three main characters.)

Not much happening. An awful lot of backstory. Started slow.

I also find it a bit preachy. Too big on life lessons.

edit: oh yeah, forgot about the head hopping.
 
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strawberryblondie

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There's instalove. The supernatural aspect is accepted without any skepticism by every single character. One of the supporting characters is in love with the MC, but MC doesn't realize it, even though everyone else has known forever.
 

Chasing the Horizon

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Descriptions of irrelevant scenery that go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and . . . you get the idea.

14yos acting like 10yos. The author is old and clearly had no idea what it was like to grow up in the late '90s.

And the secondary MC needs to stop whining before I start skipping his chapters. If saving the world is such a horrible burden, I'll gladly do it for you, just so I don't have to listen to the whining anymore!

Anyway, I need to go delete half the scenery description in my MS now, I think, lol.
 

Tex_Maam

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Patrick Rothfuss has gotten big props for The Name of the Wind, and not without reason: he clearly did a whole heck of a lot of research and world-building for this book, and he puts lots of fun little songs and nursery-rhymes here and there (the bigger surprise is that they are genuinely well-crafted; I've seen many fantasy authors fall on their face attempting it.)

But oh man, his protagonist is just the Black Hole of Awesome from which no hint of specialness can escape. He is better than everyone at everything. He's a fifteen-year-old with fifteen different master-class talents. He has a tragic backstory, and color-changing eyes, and friends who are friends with him for no discernible reason, and if anybody doesn't like him? It's because they're legit evil.

And I guess what really gets me about it is that the book is 660 pages long, and somehow that's not room enough to give any other character any substantial independent life. Come on, now - we all know that Harry Potter is Mr. MC with the Big Destiny and the Special Power, but Neville Longbottom's still got his own concerns, doesn't he?

I don't know. I always did like X-Men stories better than Superman, and this book here is reminding me why.
 

Devil Ledbetter

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I finished Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. At a minimum the word "small" appears at least once every three pages, and sometimes up to 3 times per page. A small smile, a small laugh, a small console table (I suppose to differentiate it from all those enormous console tables) a small boy, a small cake, a small hush. This author is mad crazy in love with the word small.

She also constantly describes things as pale or low. And it's a crazymaker how frequently she includes color. Example:
The Ali family's house was one of the more prosperous. It retained half a garden with a gravel area on which stood a small two-seated sports car. The elegant effect of the car and the new white-painted windows was overshadowed by the neighboring house, which bore leaping dolphins on the gateposts and purple shutters around dark wood window frames. The Major was just allowing himself a small sniff of disapproval at such obviously foreign excess when a white woman with streaky hair and a pink fur jacket over green jeans tripped out of the front door in her black patent boots and drove away in a small green car with an "Ibiza Lover" bumper sticker.
Worse, here is what the above painstakingly described house, woman, car and bumper sticker have to do with the story: not one thing. I guess this paragraph exists just so she can use "small" three more times.

Another thing that bugged me was her constant use of "horrified" as a reaction. This is a subtle love story about old people. There is very little going on, period, let alone anything horrifying.
 
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crunchyblanket

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Just finished Kathe Koja's Under The Poppy, which started strong and ended strong but suffered from a saggy, somewhat indulgent middle. Luckily, I was rather enamoured with her prose, so I stuck with it.
 

Elias Graves

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I'm currently reading The Help. It started out pretty good, but it wasn't long before I realized that it's not about the help at all. It's about the author's struggle to become an author disguised a self indulgent Skeeter Caulfield.
I get this self congradulatory "look how enlightened I am" vibe, when it all comes down to her desire to get published.
 

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I'm reading The Discovery of Witches, and several things are bothering me bad enough that I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to give it up (even though I'm 80% of the way through and I have never, ever given up on a book after I've invested that much time in it). In ascending order of importance:

(1) At least half of this novel should have been left on the cutting room floor. I can handle this because the awful crap I have to read for work (e.g. FASB statements) has cultivated a certain patience in me, but srsly, I keep "reading" as much as two pages and realizing that I have absorbed not a word. How many times can people have tea and sleep and talk about food? Did an editor even touch this?

(2) The two main characters are the most self-indulgent Mary Sues I think I've ever read in a work of fiction that was actually published. The male romantic lead is particularly godawful. And creepy. The main character starts out alright and has an interesting backstory and occupation, but she gets more and more Mary-Sueified the longer I read. She is simultaneously *spoiler highlight* the most powerful witch ever, and yet spends most of the novel crying, fainting, shaking uncontrollably, and otherwise falling apart. Oh, and the male lead is simultaneously teh ultimate predator and then we learn later *spoiler highlight* I am not even joking, he is secretly a knight. Like an actual knight. Who runs a secret order. Charged with protecting innocents. There is no irony here. I kept looking for it, and it's not there.

(3) This is the most turgid, melodramatic, insufferably boring romance I think I've ever encountered in a work of fiction. It starts out cliche while not seeming to take itself too seriously, and that I can handle. It becomes egregiously offensive, with the male romantic lead telling the main character when to eat and sleep. And I just read a scene that made me throw this book at the wall; I can't even talk about it, it's just so horrifying, but let's just say we run into a Buffy versus Bella problem here.

Why did I put up with it for five hundred some-odd pages? Well, there's about a hundred pages of really interesting stuff here. The secondary characters are great. The worldbuilding is fascinating. What little actual "plot" there is -- awesome. If the main characters were kicked out of this book, it could be fantastic.

Lots of potential, very little follow-through, and now I need to cleanse my palate with Alice Hoffman and a Buffy marathon.
 
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WordCount

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I'm adding to the Stephen King fire.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love King. To me, he's a literary god. I love his stuff. However, in recent novels (Under the Dome, 11/22/63), his constant forcing of the Democratic party is killing me. Now I know that it only bothers me because I'm GOP, but the Republican hate is beyond irritating, and brings me out of two of the best stories he's told since the 70s. (From what I remember, there were no political party references in The Shining, The Stand, or 'Salem's Lot. Or It, now that I think about it.)
 

Once!

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I've not read Stephen King for years. But I vaguely remember being annoyed that just about every book had an I-guy and his grandpa.

The I-guy was invariably a thinly-veiled version of Stephen King and his Grandpa was the wise old coot filled with ancient stories and woodland lore.