What is something stupid that ruined a book or author for you?
It doesn’t have to be stupid, per se, but something that made you jump outside the book and pause. We’ve had a thread here about parts in movies like that but I had a book experience like that over the weekend.
I was reading The Hearing by John Lescroart this weekend. It’s a legal/murder thriller. Lescroart isn’t an attorney but he seemed to do a fair job doing research (a few nits, here and there). I’m reading along and a character is having a flashback to the last time he’s seen an old friend of his. The last time he saw his friend was at a frat party at Notre Dame.
I re-read it to make sure that he meant the same ND where I went to college. Yes, he did. Notre Dame doesn’t have frats. There’s no Greek system there at all. I don’t know the difference between a chi omega blah blah and a delta theta blah blah. We have a definite GEEK system, but no Greek system. It made me crabby. No REAL good reason but hey, sometimes that shit happens. It wasn’t all that important but it made me wrinkle my brow and rolls my eyes at the author. I wanted to poke him in the side and say, “Hey! Yeah, Mr. Typewriter, you. Do your research!” I’d say I won’t read more of his stuff but that seems sorta silly to me. Plus, I went to the used bookstore and picked up 3 more of his books before I got to that part. :rolleyes:
Maybe being a crabby nit-picker is what happens when you have nothing but sloth and gluttony keeping you company for the weekend.
So how about it? What’s something that’s ruined a book for you?
I was reading a Star Trek novel by William Shatner (I know, big mistake right there) and he described how four Borg cubes combined into one large cube. What!?
Sue Grafton - I think it was “N is for” and the series had gotten stupider and stupider, but for some reason I was still reading (even knowing how stupid it was).
Anyway, the heroine was talking about the sandwiches she made, and how she loved them so, and had been making them the same way since she was a child. And that it was absolutely essential to the sandwich that she used Hellman’s Mayonnaise or else it wouldn’t work.
She’d grown up in California. The book took place in Nevada. You can’t get Hellman’s west of the rockies. Unless she’d had imported mayonnaise (and what kind of freak imports mayonnaise?) she wasn’t using Hellman’s.
It was at that point I couldn’t take the stupidness, sloppiness, and bad fact checking of the books anymore and I put it down (and never read the author again.)
I read A Thousand Acres and honestly thought it was one of the best novels since 1970. Then I read more of her stuff. First, Moo - A load of steaming poo containing every stereotype of a paranoid lefty that exists. All the men are either stupid and only have their positions due to the help of an unseen suffering woman, or else they are out to rape the rainforest for the sake of a large multinational corporation.
I t was the most cliche ridden bit of tripe I have ever read outside of a Cal Thomas article. And still, the woman can write. What a waste of a gift. Don’t get me started on her Atlantic Monthly column on Ton Sawyer.
I read A Thousand Acres and honestly thought it was one of the best novels since 1970. Then I read more of her stuff. First, Moo - A load of steaming poo containing every stereotype of a paranoid lefty that exists. All the men are either stupid and only have their positions due to the help of an unseen suffering woman, or else they are out to rape the rainforest for the sake of a large multinational corporation.
I t was the most cliche ridden bit of tripe I have ever read outside of a Cal Thomas article. And still, the woman can write. What a waste of a gift. Don’t get me started on her Atlantic Monthly column on Ton Sawyer.
It’s impossible to make one big cube from four smaller cubes. The minimum is eight, thus my “joke” above. Twenty-seven would work as well, but if you’ve got twenty-seven Borg cubes on your case, you’ve got some serious problems.
Alan Dean Foster. I like his books. I really, really do. They’re like literary dessert; full of good stuff but not especially good for me.
Anyway.
The latest book in his Commonwealth series involving Flinx has our hero traveling into hostile space. He has many wacky adventures and eventually arrives at ancient artifact the size of a small moon. In re: this artifact, our Hero muses that “…he was soaring over a manufactured surface that had been fabricated when his ancestors were still hiding in trees…”
Say what? Perhaps your ancestors were still hiding in trees Mr. Foster, but mine were striding upright around Europe, painting on cave walls and burying their dead. Maybe Mr. Foster is descended from gibbons. I swear, I lay awake on hot nights, trying to work out how he thinks humans went from hiding in trees to advance space travel in 500,000 years.
Also, in his latest book The Mocking Program, he uses “irregardless” three times in a hundred pages. Ruined the entire book for me.
Elizabeth Peters. She has a PhD in Egyptology but believes the primary colours are blue, white, and green.
Well, I’ve hidden in a tree or two in my day. Living in trees, that’s another story. What hiding in trees has to do with manufacturing moons I don’t know.
Of course, for using “irregardless,” he deserves nothing but scorn, derision, and remainder bins.
Dave Wolverton’s Courtship of Princess Leia* decided me quickly that nothing else he wrote was worth my time. He took a set of established characters, and so completely screwed them all up, that I ended up throwing the book across the room in disgust. I kept wondering to myself, “Did he even watch the bloody movies? They were only the most popular sci-fi flicks of my generation…”
Steven King gave me a rather intolerable headache with The Regulators/Desperation. I bought both of these in hardbound, read about halfway through one (it really doesn’t matter which), got bored, and started in on the other. Fairly quickly I found myself going back and forth between the two, scratching my head.
“What the hell happened, Steve? Couldn’t decide which way to run with the story, so you wrote out both of them at the same time, with the same characters, and didn’t really give a damn about either one? I’m sure your publishers told you they’d make a mint if you published your laundry list, but damn… Didja have to try so hard to prove 'em right?”
I’ve avoided his work since. Sadly, for me, I really did enjoy most of his books up to that point.
*[sub]I may have the title or author’s name wrong, but I got rid of the book before I’d finished reading it, so it’s not here for me to refer to now.[/sub]
Kim by Rudyard Kipling. This guy won the Nobel prize for literature. It’s a fantastic book, but damnit he has the Tibetan lama quoting Chinese buddhist texts.
This simply would not happen. Like having Catholic priests slip into English scripture quotations while giving a Latin mass. Arggghhh. This is probably my favorite book of all time. I’ve read it dozens of times. Not just once but this error is committed several times throughout the novel. Drives me frickin crazy.
** Silence of the Lambs **. Where Lecter escapes. That couldn’t happen IRL in a hundred, million years. The IRL sequence would be: Lecter attacks first cop; second cop shoots him dead. Just cause Harris needed him to escape for the plot line.
Basically, any of Neal Stephenson’s books but Cryptonomicon have no ending. It gets really irratating to go from climax, to one sentance of closing, to the end of the book.
John Sandford, Winter Prey. Someone recommended Sandford to me, and this was the first and last book of his I read.
The plot involved finding evidence in a photograph. The original was not available, but the protagonist found the halftone version that had been printed in a newspaper. He took a magnifying glass to the halftone and found the damning detail.
Uh, no. When you look at a halftone through a magnifying glass you see DOTS.
Scarlett67, that drives me nuts, too. It seems to happen a lot in movies or television shows. They have a picture on a screen of a million people in a crowd and they will blow it up and focus in on one face where you could see if the person had freckles or not. Sheesh.
