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

Rags99

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I just finished Jurassic Park. Prior to that I'd only ever seen the film. The characters seem to be a tad stupider.

"We've lost power and the electrical fences are down. What's the dark shape that just ran across the road? Must've been a opossum. Carry on."

LOL!! I just saw this post and read Jurassic Park within the last 2 years for the first time.

I enjoyed the book but yes, scenes like that are very funny. Dont forget the scene at the very end of the book as well, when they are going to be saved and the helicopter is on its way and Dr Grant and the other "smarties" decide to go check out the raptor pens.....WHA?? lol
 

Devil Ledbetter

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One character's actions keep showing up in the same para as the other character's dialogue, which is very confusing.

So for example:

Mom said, "I'm going to eat pie later, want to join me?" I shrugged. "The blueberry is pretty decent."

This is breaking a basic dialogue convention (the actions in paragraph with dialogue belong to the speaker) and to no good effect. Of course it's in an enormous bestseller.
 

thedark

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I'm reading a zombie fiction novel right now that was valiantly self-published. The base story is interesting, but... The MC is an adult man with a teenager daughter. I'm halfway through the book, and the only the girl has every done is cry, shriek, whine, or make googly lovely eyes at the first male other than her dad to be nice to her (and not a zombie). No dialogue other than this, and no depth to her. It's challenging as a reader, because I want to scream for more depth, but also because I want to smack the author and ask if that's how he views his own daughter, or women in general (he's specifically said he wrote the novel to capture his own experience as a father). Whiny liabilities in the apocalypse that he protects only out of duty. Cause there's nothing interesting about this girl, because she never gets a chance. She's fodder, for his fatherly-oriented decisions.

And he's making terrible ones. Grin. But that's an intentional part of the story.

Maybe she'll get more screen time coming up.
 

Hoplite

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Reading a novel taking place on a generational starship. Two main characters: the boy is constantly complaining, whining, and rather annoying; the girl I can sympathize with, and she's interesting but has literally been frozen for the first quarter of the book. And right now I have bad feeling she's going to be playing "deer in the headlights" for a significant portion of the novel.
 

Devil Ledbetter

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I'm reading a zombie fiction novel right now that was valiantly self-published. The base story is interesting, but... The MC is an adult man with a teenager daughter. I'm halfway through the book, and the only the girl has every done is cry, shriek, whine, or make googly lovely eyes at the first male other than her dad to be nice to her (and not a zombie). No dialogue other than this, and no depth to her. It's challenging as a reader, because I want to scream for more depth, but also because I want to smack the author and ask if that's how he views his own daughter, or women in general (he's specifically said he wrote the novel to capture his own experience as a father). Whiny liabilities in the apocalypse that he protects only out of duty. Cause there's nothing interesting about this girl, because she never gets a chance. She's fodder, for his fatherly-oriented decisions.

And he's making terrible ones. Grin. But that's an intentional part of the story.

Maybe she'll get more screen time coming up.
Ugh. I hate when male authors write females characters with such blatant sexism. If it's written in the POV of the MC, then the author hasn't done a good job of characterizing him either as a good father will see his daughter as more than a whining bag of emotional distress.
 

Marumae

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Reading a novel taking place on a generational starship. Two main characters: the boy is constantly complaining, whining, and rather annoying; the girl I can sympathize with, and she's interesting but has literally been frozen for the first quarter of the book. And right now I have bad feeling she's going to be playing "deer in the headlights" for a significant portion of the novel.


I think I know the novel you're talking about and my complaints were exactly the same. The boy drove me nuts .
 

Dave Williams

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I'm listening to an audiobook now. It's SF, set about 25 years in the future. The protagonist is female, unemployed, and has no job skills. She's also a karate and tai chi expert. She's attacked by some men in a park, and kills them with super-cyber-mojo from her brain implant. Then she takes off running from the police, using her cyber-mojo to steal and reprogram cash cards.

Later, trying to find a job, someone offers to introduce her to a friend who makes porn movies. She's mortally offended that someone would think her morals are so low, so she goes off and robs a jewelry store, having discovered she can reprogram The Intarwebz with her tai chi mojo and implant. Then she kills a couple more people, and discovered she can do something that probably counts as cyber-rape to total strangers. But at least she hasn't sunk to doing porn...

Meanwhile, The Bad Guys discern her existence by analyzing bulk crime data, and send hired guns off to kidnap or kill her... and then the background is full of rogue artificial intelligences, nanotech, flying cars, hovercars, and economic collapse, all mostly within the previous 20 years... it looks like the author just used a list of "SF tropes" and slapped them into the story at random.

I'm still listening, mostly because I hate to quit anything without finishing it, but also to see if it gets any worse.

I think the last-next-worst book was a (very) thinly disguised Star Trek fanfic search-and-replaced to avoid copyright infringement, that somehow made it into print, with the imprint of a publisher who ought to have known better.
 

annapalooza

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One of the main characters I visualized as black, except she was actually white. Upon rereading, I have no idea where that came from. The character wasn't described in a lot of detail in the beginning, but was more frequently near the end. Except I'd already got her face rooted the way I thought, so every time they brought it up again I was like "no! shut up! you're wrong! I know you wrote the book. BUT YOU'RE WRONG."

So it wasn't the the book so much as my own weird metal issues that was bugging me.
 

ArachnePhobia

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Villain decay.

I'm not saying you can't reform your most badass villain into a hero, I'm just saying when I miss the old version more than I like the new one, It Just Bugs Me. But there are probably tons of readers it didn't bug and this is just a personal taste thing.
 

Ladyxkaa

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pretty soon I'm getting to the part where the badguys use canes on a twelve year old's feet, then when she uses magic to make them think she's dead, they dump her into a pile of the dead alongside her seven cats. if that ain't messed up, I dunno what is.
 

Brightdreamer

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Villain decay.

I'm not saying you can't reform your most badass villain into a hero, I'm just saying when I miss the old version more than I like the new one, It Just Bugs Me. But there are probably tons of readers it didn't bug and this is just a personal taste thing.

Hate it when a good character gets watered down, good or bad. (Usually you see this more in television, though, when a series runs too long or someone gets a bright idea to fix what isn't broken... especially when they decide to pander to the wrong fanbase in the mistaken belief that the whole audience will enjoy their fetishes. But that's another rant for another time.)

One of the books I'm reading is irritating me in several small ways, but I'm in too deep to give up now. Usually, when I read a book, it's like I'm being shown through a house one room at a time; I know there's a whole house around me, even if I can't make out the structure yet, and once in a while I can catch glimpses of places I'm going or places I've been, so it all goes together. This one, I keep wondering if the author's just one doorway ahead of me frantically building. Can't nail down precisely why, but it reads like the kind of aimless, still-finding-the-groove spitballing I've been known to do, where developments pop up out of the blue with minimal foreshadowing and there doesn't seem to be a real story arc. (Not that I'd share said spitballing with the world without revisions...) Plus, the author really needed to double-check the spellchecker they used: at least twice, someone has been lying "prostate" on the ground, and a group of soldiers just helped repair "damns" during wet weather.
 

Lyv

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Yesterday, I bailed on a novel for having virtually no indirect dialog. It was so irritating that I deleted it from my ereader and apparently my memory since I can't even remember the name of it.
 

Brightdreamer

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Yesterday, I bailed on a novel for having virtually no indirect dialog. It was so irritating that I deleted it from my ereader and apparently my memory since I can't even remember the name of it.

Wait - there's a delete function for your memory? Where? (This would save me so much aggravation... though I expect I'd download the same danged title and just be aggravated again.)

Oh - and now that same book with the prostate issue is still going when it should've ended long ago. It's a grudge match now, though...
 

johnsolomon

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Only three characters aren't terrible human beings, and even they're kinda flat. The idea behind the story is pretty interesting, but I'm finding it really hard to care because a) so much cool stuff has been ignored and b) I don't want to hang around any of these characters.

I like giving books a chance though so I guess I'll see how it pans out.

UPDATE: Finished the book. It was meh to the very end. This author is serious about their meh.
 
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juniper

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A couple of things really bugged me in the book I finished yesterday.

1 -
a 15-yr-old boy has been kidnapped. His parents have just decided to separate. Mom acts too normal and even starts up an affair with someone from work within a few days.

I can't believe that a woman whose son is missing, and who also needs special medication to stay alive, is going to be getting sexy with a guy she's been eyeing from work. I can't believe her whole being wouldn't be focused on finding the boy.​

2 -
also, during one of the sexual liaisons in her apartment, bad guy gets in and slaughters the sexy guy. She manages to slip out of the bathroom and run to the front door - which is locked with a keyed deadbolt from the inside, so she can't get out.

Who has a deadbolt lock that must have a key from the inside? I've seen those, but they're not meant for apartments or houses. Fire trap for one thing. Plus, of course, a way to stretch out this particular scene, as she has to get to the kitchen to find the key to unlock the door.
A couple of other things bugged me too - not sure if I'd pick up another one by this writing team. (Husband/wife write together under one pseudonym.)
 
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Ladyxkaa

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in the book I'm reading lately, the noble girls are considered PROPERTY in the country she's in and there's this tradition from olden times where they can kidnap a girl, tie her up in some place far from wouldbe rescuers and they can be beaten until they give up and sign a marriage contract(which takes away any legal rights she has) and they can only be freed from it if their liege lord so declares it. the empress in that place had it happen twice, but the kidnappers went light on her, cuz no one wanted to really harm a woman who was going to rule the country, so she shows disdain cuz she thinks ANY woman who can't escape DESERVES to be forced into the marriage.
 

Dave Williams

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Who has a deadbolt lock that must have a key from the inside?

All of ours are that way. For that matter, most of the ones I've seen in other homes are that way.

If the door has a window, or a window is close enough for someone to knock out the glass and reach through, a deadbolt with one of those little turn-knobs on it isn't worth much.
 

Jess Haines

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Not the one I'm reading now, but one I read just before it, really felt the need to repeat Important Facts Related to the Plot.

I think the author thought that maybe it might pass over your head if they didn't remind you of certain Very Important Things constantly.

Still, they found it very vital to tell you the same thing over and over again.

It wasn't like you could have forgotten. I mean, they just told you that same plot tidbit half a chapter ago.

In case you didn't get it the first few times, they kept repeating themselves.

:tongue
 

Brightdreamer

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I'm picking at a YA title on my Kindle, debating whether I'm going to keep going to see if a story ever shows up or give it up as a lost cause. So far, I have a snot-nosed punk of an MC who has no real goals or aspirations except to be obnoxious and badmouth anyone who might be a friend or supporter, including his own great aunt. And there's some stuff about the statues in Central Park talking to him, because he's supposedly a descendant of the guy who designed the place... though they're talking to him about things that happened to the kid in school, so how they'd know that stuff is beyond me, unless it really is going to all be a hallucination in the end. So, basically, it's an Americanized and heavily watered-down version of Charlie Fletcher's Stoneheart trilogy, only with a far less likeable protagonist, plus I'm over a third of the way in and the statues have barely started doing anything (Fletcher started his story in the first paragraph of the first page.) I was promised some interesting stuff about the history of Central Park, though...
 

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Currently picking through The Uninvited by Liz Jensen, and though it's keeping me hooked on a whole, I feel there are far too many missed opportunities to fully explore the material and the ideas presented early on in the story.

Also, the protagonist is the epitome of dull and has zero likability.
 

S. Eli

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The love interest died abruptly and I realized I cared so little about any of the characters that I didn't even know most of their last names. They weren't annoying or anything or even bland, I guess? It was mostly like I could read the authors character chart over his shoulder.
 

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I'm reading "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn. I enjoy it, yet I can't figure out why the two lead characters ever married. They are polar opposites. I think that Amy staged her disappearance. I could be wrong, though.
 

Albedo

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So a godlike alien entity, faced with the choice of saving only one of, a) a whole artificial ecosystem and the advanced aliens that built it, or b), two ships full of monkeys who were trying to nuke each other for the entire novel, giving the ones it chooses and only them the chance to repopulate the Galaxy, chooses b. Obviously.

I suspect the author was a primate.