What puts the brakes on an otherwise good book? For me:
Characters that turn into Mary Sues/Stu’s. Or worse, the story becoming one huge cliche.
Right now I am reading a pretty good book set in both ancient Rome and Greece. MC is a teenage boy whose father is killed in front of him by Macedonian pirates. Boy is allowed to escape (pirates think he will succumb to the elements) and so he makes his way to his uncles house in a distant town. Uncles turns out to be a complete SOB and so boy must “Become a Man!” and he vows to kill the leader of the pirates.
I am almost to page 200 of a 300 something page book, in that time: (being vague to not spoil anything)
*Boy beefs up while doing farm chores. The scene would have made Rocky proud. Plus he finds some old javelins and a sword in a shed. He practices with those until he is competent.
*Manages to save someone from a band of brigands. He manages to kill at least two and the victim claims he thought MC had brought the army with him. MC by the way, is a 17yr old boy.
*Befriends a nice, caring army guy who happens to be brothers with a drunken spoiled lout who wants to destroy the MC.
*Tons of people flirt and/or fall in love over the MC.
*MC and a single soldier defend a harbor against the pirates. He throws a javelin that hits the pirate ship’s figure head in the throat after bouncing off the Pirate Leader’s armor. Right where he meant to hit the pirate.:smack:
*MC is to told to visit an old retired veteran in the wood who can make him a master with weapons. :rolleyes:
Just about anytime a gun or car is described. “He slid his .22 Glock out of his pocket, released the safety, then slowly got out of his V12 Lamborghini Gallardo Murcielago.”
Cardboard characters, particularly Snidely Whiplash (or King Joffrey) villains
Purple prose and using obscure 12 penny words when well known adjectives would work as well or better
A plot that’s ultimately a “why the he’ll tell it in the first place?” pile of risotto alla meh
If historical fiction, too much presentism in character’s viewpoints and attitudes towards sex/race/religion) is a cardinal sin
It’s so disappointing to find a book with a great premise (!) and the first page grabs you and…the further along it goes you realize Oh. All the characters speak in unnatural dialogue. Or the author tries to pass off thinly-veiled (with a twist?) stereotypes. Or they use the same adjectives over and over again.
I plowed through one book (a mystery) where the protagonist “went around the house to the back” (different houses) at least a couple dozen times. Every time she got out of her car. Every time she stood at the door. Every time she got an idea. Apparently nothing ever happened out front or inside.
And I just stopped reading a book where the protagonist had an epiphany, got laid, and then proceeded on the path he’d just rejected. Nothing during the romantic interlude alluded to his change of heart and there was no further explanation I could find. WTF And this book had a glowing blurb from Stephen King.
Lazy writing is such a waste of potential. I want the books to be good. I want to lose myself in the story. But so many of them aren’t. It makes me sigh.
Joffrey should be excluded because Martin makes you feel sorry for the villains, or they exhibit some sort of redeeming trait, and you keep waiting for Joffrey to do something, you start expecting Joffrey to do something that will give him the slightest hint of humanity…and you wait…and you wait…
A depressing ending. Or over a certain amount of tragedy and suffering and injustice before the ending for that matter. When I start feeling that the best thing that could happen is that an asteroid impact and kill all the characters, I lose interest.
A lot of well regarded novels I’ve read have had the problem of late stage truncation, for want of a better term. It seems especially prevalent in deliberately historical novels. The last 50 pages try to cover the time between the story and the reader and are often garbled, pointless, and ruin the flow of the story. I felt Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and White Teeth off the top of my head gained nothing from late stage catch up. I don’t know how common this is in novels but is often the worst part of otherwise enjoyable novels.
I agree with the OP’s items. I recently picked up a free book from iTunes Store and the whole thing was how these private investigators are all millionaires with fancy cars, who are socially inept, insanely talented in their fields, and able to use equipment that the police can only dream about. Yeah, 'cause that’s how it really works in real life. Get your money for nothing and your chicks for free, and people skills don’t matter, right? Haha, another bumbling cop joke! :smack:
I hate books (or any story) that can only create suspense by being intentionally vague. For example, the characters are repeatedly told things like “Watch out for them. *They *control everything. *He *is coming.” 300 pages later, you realize that “them” is just the secret vampire cabal (or whatever) and if the freaking author had just had a character say that in the first place we could have all been saved much faux suspense. In fact, half the time, it only makes sense to use vague pronouns from the author’s perspective - the characters would have just used a name and they’d have answered questions from other characters to be clear.
Double the previous if the gimmick is that the truth can’t be communicated clearly because the only character in the know is also insane. Conveniently, insanity always clears up when you need to advance the plot by fiat.
Finally… I know this is a personal preference that some people will disagree with, but I’d generally rather have a book do one or two things well than try to be a Swiss army knife with casts of thousands and sub-plots for all of them. If you need to write another book to cover some different characters and their separate stories, please feel free, but your book needs to do something and do it well. (For example, compare Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones.)
Stories that are driven by the main character’s trying to avoid the obvious and deserved consequences of his or her own actions. Not in the sense of “made a mistake and is now trying to head off the resulting disaster,” but “deliberately did something stupid and is now trying to wish away the inevitable shitstorm while whining about how unfair it is that actions have consequences, and for some reason the author expects me to take this twerp seriously.” For some reason, the only example I can come up with right now is Sex and the City.
I can’t stand authors who do a ton of research, and then insist on including every single fact they learned in their book. Colleen McCullough is particularly guilty of this.
When the book tries so hard to please the reader, that the focus shifts from the story to who the writer thinks the reader wants to be. Especially if the supposed reader is not who I want to be. That was why i didn’t mind the Mary Sue-ness of Jean Auel; for me there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a respected, happily married, beautiful, wise herbologist.
But that was what makes Virginia Andrews so yucky to me. I don’t want to want to be victimize and be victimized, and be the sort-of innocent and sexually naive center of tragedy after tragedy.
I think when you can see the cogs of the genre fiction template moving, that’s really bad. All genres have templates that work - Good writers disguise / hide in plain sight / bury / subvert the template, whereas bad writers cannot and write to the formula. So if I can feel the generic template surfacing, like the author is moving the characters around in some bogus way, then that’s a bad sign.
Should say that it’s a privilege to read bad books, from a certain perspective - if you want to be adventurous in your reading, get off the beaten track of what is critically-acclaimed, then you’re bound to read some shite along the way.
[I’m a conservative reader myself - tend to stick to well quoted stuff due to limited reading time]
I agree with pretty much all the above. I’ll also throw in sudden religious proselytising in a book which gave no indiciation of that being a key part of the story. Doesn’t matter if it’s allegorical, like in the Narnia books, but that Charlie St Cloud book went suddenly very religious and preachy and made me want to throw the book across the room with great force, a la Dorothy Parker.
Authors who turn their books into political screeds. I’m a conservative, but right or left doesn’t matter, I want to read an action thriller/SF novel/spy thriller not your political bully pulpit. It’s one thing to make a political point subtly, but I hate it when authors beat you over the head with it. Brad Thor has become horrible about this to the point where I won’t read his stuff anymore.
Transcriptions of dialects that force me to speak the passage out loud to understand what the character is trying to say. It’s a book, darn it…state that the character has a heavy brogue or a thick Spanish accent at the beginning and write their dialogue IN ENGLISH!