List love: 10 more bookish pet peeves

Thursday’s meme only gave me an opportunity to list 10 of my bookish pet peeves, but I have many more, so I decided to make a list of an additional 10 that irk me just as much as the first 10. Here it is, in no particular order:

Introductions or prefaces to novels that give away important plot points or endings. Especially prevalent in modern editions of classic novels.
Mary Sues and Gary Stus, i.e. characters so perfect that the sun apparently rises out of their exquisite arses. Perfect characters give no leeway for character development and because they are perfect, problems aren't really problems for them, so there can be no real conflict in the story.
Reading a book and only discovering at the end that it’s the first in a trilogy or series and the story will not end for several more books. I have no problem with series books if each book is a self-contained story that can be read out of order of publication.
Writers who give their books happy or perfect endings when it is clear that an ambiguous ending would have been both braver and more suitable to the story. The opposite is just as annoying - an unhappy or ambiguous ending when a happy ending would be better.
Interchangeable characters. Annoying when they are supporting characters, intolerable when they are lead characters. Seems to happen a lot in fantasy.
Deus ex machina endings or plot point resolutions. This is a lazy, cheap and nasty way of resolving things.
Characters who are Too Stupid To Live, i.e. rush headlong into danger again and again and then have to be rescued and never learn from their mistakes.
Historical characters as protagonists, behaving out of character or doing things that history tells us didn’t happen. I don’t mind so much in genuine alternative reality fantasy/sci-fi, but in real-world settings I detest it, especially when I know the characters well. All in all, I just think it’s lazy to grab a historical character instead of making one up. I do love seeing them as supporting cast, except I think that George, Prince of Wales and Prince Regent of the UK from 1811-1820 has been overused in Regency set romance novels, as has Beau Brummel.
Authors who don’t respect my intelligence. Comes out in any number of ways, including telling me the same thing over and over and over again, explaining things that are self-explanatory and talking down to me.
Authors who change history to suit their purpose. This is something I totally enjoy in speculative fiction but not in novels that are presented as based on historical fact. This is why I only got a couple of chapters into The Other Boleyn Girl before I gave up in disgust, but was able to enjoy Temeraire.

This was just a sample. I have enough for at least two more lists, but I have a couple of reviews I want to post first. Maybe next week.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

Reading in Reykjavík

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