• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Pet Peeves in reading?

Lily

Lily

New Member
Anything you really just can't stand when it comes to reading? specific plot devices, etc...

I'm not really asking about genres...we all definitely have our favorites and some people, for example, hate science fiction, etc.
I'm talking more along the lines of stuff that happens with the books and authors you do enjoy and read (or try to read)

My pet peeve? I absolutely HATE it when an author has passed away and some other person comes along, and writes more books under his/her name. I think if you write the flippin' thing, you should put your own name on it... Pen names/pseudonyms.. that's different, as it's still yours.
I'm talking about, for example, Ludlum or V.C. Andrews. I actually refuse to read a book on that merit alone. Stobborn and stupid? probably. It just really makes me THAT mad.

I also get a little crabby when a mystery suddenly throws all the new facts and stuff in at the last few pages. I like my mysteries mysterious, yes, but please don't hide all the clues from the reader until the last paragraph. that's just annoying.


anyone else have things like this that bug them? or am I just a snappish hag today?
 
I refuse to read the sequel to Gone With the Wind since no one could possibly write the story like Margaret Mitchell might have had she lived. My kids read all the extensions to The Wizard of OZ and Boxcar series until they realized they were just crap and moved onto better things. I didn't have to preach, the writing did it for me.
 
I HAVE read the sequel to Gone With The Wind ABC, and you were wise to avoid it. I can't think of any follow-ups to books written by different authors, that have ever captured the original authors style.
 
I can't stand it when authors decide to leave out quotation marks in their books. Not many authors can pull it off - it just gets confusing, and I think that it's unecessary.
 
Quotation marks are a cultural thing. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Irish literature use the dash to separate the dialogue from the prose.

José Saramago is the only writer I know who doesn't use punctuation marks to do it, he just starts a dialogue sentence with a capital letter, and I like him a lot for that. As far as I'm concerned, with the exception of commas and full stops, punctuation marks are ugly to look at and intrusive. Without them, pages look a lot cleaner and are read a lot better.
 
Heteronym said:
Quotation marks are a cultural thing. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Irish literature use the dash to separate the dialogue from the prose.
Click to expand...
Ah, right. Now that I think of it, the only two Irish authors that I have read (Roddy Doyle and Frank McCourt) did leave out the quotation marks. It wasn't so bad, though, as the dash worked reasonably well.

As far as I'm concerned, with the exception of commas and full stops, punctuation marks are ugly to look at and intrusive. Without them, pages look a lot cleaner and are read a lot better.
Click to expand...
I disagree. I find pages a lot easier to read with punctuation marks, and feel that the writing flows better with them. The problem I had with Saramago is that it was extremely difficult to tell the difference between when people were thinking and when they were actually speaking. It was also rather hard to distinguish the end of the dialouge in some cases, and I would passages that I thought were being spoken, only to find out after that they weren't. Too confusing, I find.
 
Lily said:
My pet peeve? I absolutely HATE it when an author has passed away and some other person comes along, and writes more books under his/her name. I think if you write the flippin' thing, you should put your own name on it... Pen names/pseudonyms.. that's different, as it's still yours.
Click to expand...

Boy, you sure did list the most annoying thing to me. I was in the middle of a book once and found out that it was authored by some flunky of an understudy. I stopped reading then and there. :mad:
 
I agree with MonkeyCatcher, second time in a day ;), about the punctuation. And I couldn't disagree with Heteronym more. Punctuation, in my opinion, makes work far more readable, powerful and simple to understand. I dislike when authors use the topics of the day. It's difficult to do without looking like you're trying to cash in. I'm skeptical about anything to do with muslims, terrorism, Afghanistan, etcetera. I could be missing great works just because I feel the authors are trying to be trendy or I could be dodging a dull bullet.
 
SFG75 said:
Boy, you sure did list the most annoying thing to me. I was in the middle of a book once and found out that it was authored by some flunky of an understudy. I stopped reading then and there. :mad:
Click to expand...
Was it a good book, though? I can understand someone not wanting to buy the book because the author is trying to cash in on someone else's talent, but what's so bad about finishing the book?
 
I tell you guys, it's all in the culture :D and perhaps also in the book choices. I tend to be drawn to authors who use page-length sentences and little dialogue, where toughts are mixed with prose, so punctuation marks are beginning to seem odd to me.

So things that annoy me:

Italics: it's freaking annoying! And I don't mean just one or two words every page. Here in Portugal, some writers have the tendency to write huge chunks of their books in italics, for no apparent reason; I guess chapter numbering isn't clear enough, no, they have to write dozens of pages like this, and it seems no has ever told them that it's a bit difficult to read small, printed letters in italics for several pages.

Short paragraphs: I just can't stand them; I see a paragraph as an idea inside another idea (chapter) inside another one (novel), and I can't stand those paragraphs composed by a single sentence. How can one sentence contain a whole, fully-formed, complex idea?! It works well to individualise short sentences between long paragraphs, but a whole chapter composed by one-sentence-long paragraphs makes no sense to me.

Simple sentences: subject + verb + object, and other kindergarten stuff. I guess this comes from my love of commas.

Overusing adverbs and adjectives.
 
Heteronym said:
Short paragraphs: I just can't stand them; I see a paragraph as an idea inside another idea (chapter) inside another one (novel), and I can't stand those paragraphs composed by a single sentence. How can one sentence contain a whole, fully-formed, complex idea?!
Click to expand...

A sentence is by definition an idea or statement. How complex or long it is is irrelevent.
 
Chapters that are longer than 20 pages or chapters that don't have a lot of breaks for one to be able to switch to something else. I developed this habit when I was in university, the result of reading of articles that were sometimes 30+ pages, even when the pages were put together on one side of a sheet. I like writers to be susincte and to the point.

Also if an author is unable to catch your imagination half-way through the book; don't want the book to become a chore in the end.
 
I'm sure someone will be able to cite some classic passage that I would have to make an exception on, but some literature or writing teacher of mine pointed out that direct characterization (directly telling the reader what someone or something is supposed to be like) is really a rather crude way of getting the job done, and more skillful authors make much more use of indirect characterization, i.e. showing the reader what a character is like instead of telling them.

I think this is fairly obvious and true, yet many a mass-market yarn (and I'm talking best-sellers here) has been ruined for me by this device - the author doing clumsy exposition work like (making something up here, but I feel the real thing is generally just as bad):

He got up and walked across the bar to the blonde at the bar. He generally preferred blondes, and he wasn't above making a pretty brazen pass at one if he saw her sitting alone.

I mean, isn't the action going to tell us all this in about two ticks?
 
ions said:
A sentence is by definition an idea or statement. How complex or long it is is irrelevent.
Click to expand...

A sentence is a statement, true, but some writers are better than others at making interesting long statements. The telegram type of writing doesn't appeal to me; too many sentences die before they have the room to blossom.


Gary, I'm sure all the greatest writers, at one point or another, have used direct characterisation. Movies, belonging to a visual medium, should show the information, but there's no reason why novels should be written like screenplays, although there are benefits in doing that if you're Dan Brown.

Dostoyevsky is always telling the character's state of mind: happy, distressed, resigned, paranoid, in terror (this being Dostoyevsky, his characers are seldom happy and always in terror), and he's considered one of the greatest writers of all times. Imre Kertész starts a novel telling us that the hero always sits down at 10 a.m. to think, every day. How can he show that more succintly? Starting several chapters with the hero sitting down at 10 a.m. to think until a rythm is established? How many chapters would that take? What if the writer doesn't want to spent too much time on this detail?
 
It drives me nuts when writers get long winded. FOr example, the book Wicked could have been 100 pages shorter and it would have been so much better. He just got lost on an idea and rambed for 40 pages.

Also when authors get unnecessarily wordy just to say something. In one of the books I was reading earlier the author wrote that the character depressed the plunger on the telephone. Just say hung up. :rolleyes:
 
Nobody ever relates to my pet peeves. I am a technical writer by day, and a novelist by night. The technical writer in me CANNOT ABIDE poorly constructed sentences, or rambling. Poor construction, lack of clarity and rambling are the diseases of many non-technical writer authors, just as nit-pickiness is the disease of technical writers.

Most of my postings are "edited" because I am an obsessive compulsive proofreader. I will go back to move a comma. It's that bad.

I once went on a rant (it may have even been here) because 1984 (which I had thought in my pre-technical writing youth was one of the Best Ever novels) was so poorly written from a technical standpoint. I pointed out a paragraph on page 37 (I think) where he used the word "which" 10 times, and used it correctly only twice. His entire book went, "He picked up the book which was red, went to the window which was open, looked on the street which was below him..." In nearly every instance, he SHOULD have used the word "that" in place of "which," or reconstructed the sentence to eliminate it altogether, by saying, "He picked up the red book, went to the open window, and looked down on the street below him."

That book contains some really lazy, bad writing. Good story, though.

The novelist in me hates bad dialogue. I have been known to literally fling a book against a wall on account of that.

Would-be writers, please take heed: Read your dialogue OUT LOUD before you commit to it.

Rant rant rant. Overuse of incomplete sentences. Comma splices. I could go on and on and on. Someone please shoot me.
 
Heteronym said:
Short paragraphs: I just can't stand them; I see a paragraph as an idea inside another idea (chapter) inside another one (novel), and I can't stand those paragraphs composed by a single sentence. How can one sentence contain a whole, fully-formed, complex idea?! It works well to individualise short sentences between long paragraphs, but a whole chapter composed by one-sentence-long paragraphs makes no sense to me.

Simple sentences: subject + verb + object, and other kindergarten stuff. I guess this comes from my love of commas.
Click to expand...

Both of these, IF USED SPARINGLY are highly-effective literary devices. A one-sentence paragraph gives enormous power to that one sentence. The author, for whatever reason, wants you to feel the power of an idea to either stop you short, shake you up, turn you around, or startle you. Just go with it. If the author is skillful, you'll be too busy feeling its impact to notice the length of the paragraph.

You're right though. One short paragraph after another is bad. The writer either doesn't know what s/he is doing, or is trying some sort of experimental writing style, which may or may not work.

Short sentences do the same thing. Sometimes writers use them together to convey a feeling of abruptness or urgency, or to move the action along more quickly. It's an issue of impact; writers paint with words and sentences, and short ones have their uses, just as magenta has its uses. Short sentences also create or break up the rhythm between longer sentences to make prose more interesting.

There are lots of little tricks and devices good writers use that you probably don't even notice. They teach you to spot them in English literature classes...yes, that's what those classes are for, all you students out there. In theory, it's supposed to help you appreciate good literature, and know when you're reading bad.

As a side note: Portuguese literature, from what you described, sounds a little weird to me. I'd wonder about the italics myself.
 
namedujour said:
Nobody ever relates to my pet peeves.
Click to expand...

I believe some non-fiction falls in the category of technical writing, and the criteria I apply to fiction are the same to non-fiction. This is why I can't stand The Da Vinci: a lot of the content of that book - Goddess myths, conspiracy theories, mathematical formulae, theology, Art history - can be easily found in better-written non-fiction :rolleyes:

I think I can relate.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top