I can just about to suffer through this, but in general gimmicks just suck - sure they make me remember a book, but they make me remember it with seething, red-hot anger. For Whom the Bell Tolls and Feersum Endjinn are my two top culprits for greatly inconveniencing the reader for tiny, insignificant increase in flavor. I was still a teen when I tried to read the latter the first time and English is my second language, so when I hit the first chapter of phonetic English I had very hard time understanding any parts of it. I remember throwing the book at the nearest wall a few times.
For Whom the Bell Tolls was a lot easier to understand and I was older when I read it, but the sheer pointlessness of the gimmick still made me furious. Sure it happens in Spain and the characters originally spoke Spanish, that doesn’t still mean you have to create some sort of mongrel breed English to point the fact out in every sentence of dialogue. Just thinking of the book still makes me angry.
Funny enough, I was going to say long chapter lengths were something I hate.
Maybe it’s just a product of my generation’s shortened attention spans, but for whatever reason, I’ve found I vastly prefer books with lots of small chapters over only a few big chapters. Maybe it’s because it gives better pacing, or just allows me to stop in a logical place when I want to, I dunno. But I vastly preferred Wise Man’s Fear, which has some chapters only a page long, to other novels I’ve read where a 500 page book will only have 10 chapters.
It takes getting used to, but I don’t mind when the mindset (though not written in first person) changes from character to character as long as it is those set characters that are telling the story. Right now I’m reading World Without End. There is no way I could read two thousand pages of Carice and Merthin. I also don’t mind Ken Follet’s lessons in architecture and medieval superstitious medicine. Another writer who is good at this is Amy Tan.
It also took me awhile to get used to Frank McCourt’s writing style. He has a lot of run-on sentences and doesn’t use quotes. I like it, though, and it definitely influenced my writing.
Unfortunately, most writers can’t handle multiple narrators or unusual format. I can’t read anything that rakes my eyes. I was told to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by a lot of my friends and I couldn’t. What vomit.
Ooh, don’t read A Visit from the Goon Squad, I think every chapter has a different gimmick. One is in the second person (annoying as hell), and one whole chapter is in the form of PowerPoint slides, for god’s sake.
Bizarre-o names. I can just picture the author, taking a slow pull from cig, looking skyward and thinking, “Let’s go with Pippy Shufflebottom”. Can’t stand it and names like that are usually enough of an indicator for me to not continue further.
Also totally implausible dialogue. I remember reading some fiction and early on, there’s a kid who’s supposed to be preternaturally smart so the author gives him lines like, “I know my polysyllabic utterations are beyond the grasp of the mass of proletariat flotsam cast before me…” and blah, blah, blah.
The novel gets closed up and then flung to the opposite wall of the room.
This is what I came for…I now skim or skip dream sequences entirely. They are always just clumsy free-verse wankery by the author and never contribute a thing to the plot.
Another is when common contemporary names show up in fantasy or sci-fi amid fantastic names. “Ra’aman-ack, Lethologor, Gnarl Skullcrusher, and Steve confronted the evil wizard…”. I’m-a lookin’ at you Jon Snow!
: silently hands CalMeacham her copy of Hunchback :
I hate dream sequences too. NO ONE CARES. If you must, keep it short and sweet and totally relevant. I should not be consulting a dream-seer to figure out what you meant.
For some reason this doesn’t bother me nearly as much in fiction. I actually like the digressions in War and Peace and Moby Dick. I find it easy enough to skip over the incessant room-describing of the Victorians. And I read Pynchon … which reminds me …
Lord, stay away from Against the Day, it is 1200 pages of exactly this.
I’m drawn in by that sort of thing, too. If it’s separated into discrete chapters, they’re called mezzanine chapters. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had them and I enjoyed them a lot. I read later that some of them had been published separately as magazine articles, but I’m not sure I was reading a reputable source.
Monte Cristo is one of my all-time favorite books ever, but the chapters with Sinbad the Sailor bored the piss out of me.
I’ve been thinking about some of the things stated here:
Bad punctation/grammar: Hate it too, but for some reason I loved The Road. I felt that the minimality of the prose really brought forward the devastation and heartbreak of the world, and really brought it to life, painted it, as it were.
I’m also not a big fan of present tense…but Hunger Games didn’t bother me at all.
Here is another thing, and it kind of goes with the stream-of-consciousness thing earlier. I generally glaze over at really long paragraphs. I mean paragraphs that go on for a page or more. Really? You couldn’t break that wall of text down? And you know what? 99.9% of the time I have never missed anything by skimming that HUGE paragraph of stupid information.
Whenever I read a book with really strange fictional names, I wonder did the author ever try to say these names aloud? I read a lot of books out loud to my wife and I’ve become a lot more aware of these. I get that the story is set in a fantastical place full of mystery and wonder. But why make the reader stumble repeatedly over the names? They can be original and still be pronounceable at a glance.
What bugs me about long complex fictional names is when authors make lots of them that are too similar. I generally just recognize complex names by look rather than try to read or pronounce them, so if the names have a similar look I tend to become hopelessly confused. I remember one book a while back I had to drop since it had three parallel plots all involving three characters with ridiculous names that were near identical.
Oh, you mean like in “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (one of my favorite books ever), where important plot and character development is constantly interrupted by John Irving’s neverending diatribe about the Methodist church and religion in general?
I found I had a really difficult time with Hunt for Red October, and they weren’t even ridiculous names, they were just really really long Russian names.
I, Claudius also has this trouble because of the Roman penchant for repeating names. It was really difficult to keep track of which generation someone was talking about, when uncle and nephew are named the same thing. I loved the BBC show though.
Heh, Graves had his authorial stand-in Claudius mention this very problem in the book … unfortunately there is simply no way around it: Roman names are just plain confusing.
Edit: it doesn’t help that upper-class Romans liked to adopt each other, marry close relations, and get divorced a lot!
I understand that words in foreign languages are traditionally italicized in fantasy/science fiction: ‘Thank you, but I don’t participate in rishathra.’ This is generally considered a shorthand for “here’s a foreign word that we all know what it means, and I’m just going to use the foreign word.”
However, when two people are stated as speaking in the foreign language and you still use the foreign word, and italicize it, suddenly, to me, it means “I can’t be arsed to come up with a translation for this word.”
It’s one thing if there’s a reason for the punctuation. For instance, a click (which isn’t used in English, but does occur in other human languages) is commonly denoted by an exclamation point. Or if someone uses a designator to indicate parentage or clan, for instance, O’(whatever) to designate “son of”. It’s another thing when random punctuation is thrown in for no good reason, other than the author is trying to make the language or name more exotic.
Speaking of Stephenson, his book Anathem was horrible in so many ways, so even the little things got to me.
Especially the word substitution. Picking out some from Wikipedia:
avout: a devout person, get it?
fraa: a male monk, like fra/friar,
suur: a nun, like soro(ity)/sister.
He even had a odd word for rabbit.
But the thing was in English, lots of technical and whatnot English terms. Why are a few dozen things subbed? It made reading the novel harder, took me out of it, etc. For no good reason at all.
Dear Authors: Don’t invent a new word for something that already exists in English. It makes you sound like a emo teenager hack and reduces the enjoyment of the book.
