Ten More Book Turn-Offs

Somehow I managed to miss this Top Ten Tuesdays prompt - the first to interest me in a long while:
"You know..you are reading and then SOMETHING happens to completely turn you off -- cheating, absent parents, multiple POVS etc.)"

So I decided to do one of my list love lists instead. My bookish annoyances have already been chronicled in detail (click on the "list love" label to find them), but I have more, and here are the ones that first came to mind when I saw the prompt:

In no particular order:

Happy-with-a-pint-of-cherries-on-top endings. I‘m fine with standard „happily ever after“ and even „happy-with-a-cherry-on-top“ endings – if the cherry isn‘t the size of an apple – but endings that really pile on the happy like there is no tomorrow really get my goat. Example: the YA romance I read recently in which the „simple girl of the people“ (kudos if you recognise the reference) and the sweet, gorgeous male movie star heart-throb got together (=happy ending) and he got the career-changing role he had been longing for (a cherry-on-top) – so far so good – but he also won an Oscar for it (multiple cherries).
I have mentioned this one before, and here it is again: 98% of suicide endings in crime novels, especially when they take place in countries where there isn‘t a death penalty. I get that authors can be squemish about letting a murderer be executed, but in my opinion most suicide endings even in such situations are cheap. The occasional author manages to portray a murderer for whom suicide would be logical, but in most cases it comes out of the blue. Two such endings from the same author has resulted in me not reading any more by that author.
In romance novels when either hero or heroine sleeps with someone else after the romance between them has properly started and especially when the hero runs away from the prospect of falling in love with the heroine and has sex with someone else to try to forget the heroine. (Does not apply when there is some kind of interval in the relationship, e.g. they share a passionate night and then she goes off and enters a marriage of convenience, or he is shangahied away and years later finds her married on his return or the running away took place in the back-story).
Ditto when either of them cheats. I find it equally disturbing when they cheat on each other as when they cheat with each other. This trope can, however, make an excellent plot device in e.g. chick-lit and literary fiction.
When a particular author reuses the same trope too often. For example, I am weary of all the terrible villanous mothers in Nora Roberts‘ novels.
Another oldie: Too many sex scenes. I don‘t care how hot they are, if there‘s more than three long ones in a typical romance novel (250-380 pages), it‘s too much and usually means that the author is trying to replace relationship development with sex. Speaking of which:
Sex scenes when the couple in question should be doing something more important, like saving someone‘s soul or saving the world. This means you, Katie MacAlister (among others).
Gratuitous graphic rape scenes. You don‘t need to be a rape victim to find these triggering.
A third oldie: Long, detailed infodumping. Shows lack of skill on the author‘s behalf.
Characters that suddenly disappear and plot threads that fizzle out and go unresolved.

P.S.
Hearty thanks to the disapproving person who pointed out the typing error in item 8. If one typing error is, in your mind, on par with the crimes against literature enumerated above, I advice you to stop reading altogether before you come across one bad enough to give you an aneurysm.

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

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

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme

Anne@HeadFullofBooks said…

I am in agreement about too much sex and gratuitous fowl language. When books seem formulaic to me, I stop reading them. Thanks for this post.

October 14, 2013 6:12 pm

George said…

I'm with you on info-dumps. They slow everything down to a crawl. It's just lazy writing. With sex scenes, less is more.

October 15, 2013 3:56 pm

Alex in Leeds said…

I hadn't really thought about the murderer-commits-suicide trope before but you're right, when I read crime fiction that did drive me nuts as a too-neat solution designed to wrap everything up with a socially acceptable bow at the end.

October 19, 2013 9:07 am

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