• 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.

What will put you off a book?

i couldn't get past the first page of "beer" b/c of the terrible dialogue. the author clearly failed at trying to sneak his way into teenage fiction.

also extensive description and repetition of words *cough*tale of two cities
 
Oh yeah, when an author writes in a particular dialect. Some are ok, like Frank McCourt's, but other's like Irvine Welsh, I just don't understand a word, and could never finish one of their books.
 
direstraits said:
. . . I'd rather get a hundred thousand papercuts on my face than to read another paragraph. (prize to who can guess where that phrase came from!). . .
Click to expand...

Hmmm - from the same place as "I'd rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass" maybe? That would be the song 'One More Minute' by Weird Al Yankovic

Back to the original topic. What puts me off is whiny characters. I have no interest in how hard their life is, I read for diversion, entertainment or education, not so I can feel better than a fictional person.

I don't particularly like books written in the present tense, or ones that swap POV from first to third person. I probably wouldn't ditch the book, but it would go down in points.

The biggest turn-off is having a character die in the opening pages, and having the rest of the book explain how it came about.
 
I agree with some of the above. As for what will put me off the book... does the ol' photo in the cover count? Scares the wits out of me every time.

That aside, loooonnnng descriptive passages, spanning many pages. Just get to the action, damn you. Unless I'm in a long descriptive mood, in which case, that's fine. Gay sex I'm fine with. Dialects are cool. Preaching, well, surely that's kind of the prerogative of the author? Fave characters killed off, always a ball ache, but hey. It's fiction. Poor grammar and bad spelling - book abandoned.
 
Certain cliché characters. Like weird kids who turn out to have psychic abilities. Sometimes it's okay if it fits into the story but I think often it's unnecessary. Like in the Langoliers.
 
I agree with Wabbit about the preaching, but at the same time that's a double-edged sword: If I agree with, trust and like an author, I don't mind them telling me how the world works (example: Douglas Adams :) )... but if they've figured out how I should live my life and they're here to tell me about it, they can save their breath (example: Paulo Coelho :mad: )

*mrkgnao*
 
not at all charming in a book..

I can put up with quite a bit, really. I'm a flexible reader, but--

1. I do hate bad dialogue--this is the trait that marred my appreciation for The DaVinci Code. It reminded me of Batman. Oh! Another riddle--to the Batcave!
2. And I agree that being preached at isn't pleasant, either. I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, but John Galt's 100-page speech was excessive.
3. Stories that end much more happily than they ever would in Real Life.
4. Pacing is also important to me--I've read a couple novels that started like gangbusters, then slowed way down, then gave a little promise, then ended with a dirge. What a tease!

I actually like description, but only if it's done well. A good metaphor is a fabulous thing.:)
 
I get put off pretty quickly with books that don't use speech marks. This new trend irritates me to no end. Some people can pull it off - such as Frank McCourt, although it did marr my appreciation of Angela's Ashes a bit - but others a terrible at it - namely Jose Saramago. That, among other things, ruined Blindness for me.

I also can't stand the over-description of landscape/surrounding areas. Jean M Auel did this excessively in the later books of her Earth's Children series, and I found myself skimming over pages at a time. I didn't even pick up her last one because of it, actually.
 
MonkeyCatcher said:
I also can't stand the over-description of landscape/surrounding areas. Jean M Auel did this excessively in the later books of her Earth's Children series, and I found myself skimming over pages at a time. I didn't even pick up her last one because of it, actually.
Click to expand...


I had the same experience with James Michner. Only with his lengthy descriptions, they WERE the good parts.
 
abecedarian said:
I had the same experience with James Michner. Only with his lengthy descriptions, they WERE the good parts.
Click to expand...
I agree. OTOH, The Source was the lone Michner I couldn't get thru. :eek:
 
Well, normally I can tell if I should get rid of the book is if I keep looking at the page numbers or keep thinking of doing something else, not really reading just reading the symbols along the page.

(1)I do not like charaters that do the exact opposite of what they would have done by earlier descriptions of the charater in a certain situation. Unless there was a reason, like somebody with mental powers making the person do something opposite, or the person was indeed acting like he or she would but was an act to fool somebdy.
(2)I do not like authors that repeat themselves; like Arthur C. Clarke saying in every book "even though there is no gravity, there is still mass and inertia."
(3)I do not like authors babying the reader; the said example above or keep saying that there is no sound in space, et cetera.
(4)I hate excessive cussing, it just seems, I don't know, very childish, or dirty or just trying to look "cool." Michael Crichton's Prey is a good example of that, the book would have been very good if it did not have excessive cussing and bad charaters.
(5)I hate stupid charaters; like Eugenia of Nemesis by Asimov, she was supposed to be smart, but she was stupid and always argued over the same thing over and over again, it was repetitive; just like Joanna Stavenger of Moonrise by Ben Bova, that was very repetitive in the arguements and her blaming the moon and the like for Paul's death is just crap.
(6)Bad dialogue, pretty much the result of the 4 and 5; George Alec Effringer's 25 crunch split right on two is a very good example of this, he had an excellent idea of what happened to the guy and the woman and how it turned out, but I could not stand the football parts and the way the charaters spoke: "I don't want no --" "That ain't no --" "I ain't said nothing." "I ain't did no nothing."
(7)Pages of descriptions; very boring if not done right and gets very repetitive, The Once and Future King by T. H. White is a good example, or C. S. Lewis's space trilogy.
(8)Bad metaphors and other ways of describing scenery; I just hate it when they make up stupid things to describe things, Ray Bradbury did it a lot in Fahrenheit 451: "Bang, bang, bang, bang went the lightning" and the like, I hated his descriptions but I really liked the idea of the story.

Various things like that.
 
I don't like when the dialogue comes without any quotation marks. It's annoying and makes the author look pompous (this can be found in books like Angela's Ashes and Cold Mountain.

Sex scenes are fine, but not when the author is trying to shock the reader or "add spice" to the book.

I can also do without 100% perfect, all-knowing characters who never make a mistake. I think this is found quite a bit in the fantasy genre (Richard Rahl from the Sword of Truth novels and Anita Blake are great examples). While I think a hero shouldn't make mistakes all the time, the suspense factor is considerably lowered if he/she is right every second of the day.
 
I HATE writers that go back and forth on a topic. It confuses the heck out of me and just makes me want to put the book down and stop reading.

Oh and I hate it when you grab a book and it has so many grammatical errors that you wonder if the author has an editor, then if they do you wonder how in the world the editor got the job in the first place.
 
direstraits said:
I was unfortunate enough to read a gay sex scene once. Let's just say I'd rather get a hundred thousand papercuts on my face than to read another paragraph.
Click to expand...

Was it well-written, though?
 
On the subject of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors:

If I'm enjoying the book and the writer's style overall is pretty good, then I can forgive a random typo, run-on sentence, etc. When the whole book's obviously in need of an editor... well, either the editor needs to be fired or the author should look for a new job.
 
Drop this book...

two words:

Dan

Brown


I love a good trashy thriller. But a trashy trashy thriller is just sew disposable...
 
So many reasons to discard. Lack of quotation marks in dialogue is, perhaps, immature, but the only time I've been able to overcome my dislike of that style is with Roddy Doyle's books. There are other reasons - bad writing (oh, you stylized sons of Hemingway, may God forgive you your prose), over-endowed characters (she detects, she shoots, she rides a Harley, she knits, she talks to her cat, she counsels small children, she could kick Buffy's ass and every guy in town *wants her bad*) and those unhappy attempts at literary language that leaves every reader begging for the story to return to the Hollywood ripoff that is it's soul. But my #1 reason to return a book to the shelf is if there's a casual insult of New Jersey. Now, that's just lazy writing.
 
GreenKnight said:
two words:

Dan

Brown


I love a good trashy thriller. But a trashy trashy thriller is just sew disposable...
Click to expand...


Baaahhhhh!, too easy. Why?? Was it the inaccuracies? The fact that Brownamania has swept the globe?
 
homosexual loving scene

the only loving scene between homosexuals i have ever read was in proust's Sodom and Gomorrah. and once i realized what it was about, i really loved the way he described it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top