Tell us something you hate about an author you love.

[wonky]

@TruCelt

At least once per book, GRR Martin seems to find the need to refer to a woman’s breasts as “dugs.” I get what he means by it, and fully recognize the brilliant short-hand illumination it provides into the personality of the character who says or thinks it; but it still makes me want to vomit every time.

Using an archaic term for breasts seems to fit the general setting for the books, doesn’t it? I only read the first book, but I guess I wouldn’t have thought archaic terminology would be that remarkable in them.

[Noelq]

Laurell K. Hamilton.

LOVE her Anita Blake series. Great concept of characters, great take on a supernatural universe, damn involving writing.

HATE all of the sex scenes. They started off simply, but after about Book 5, they became downright pornographic in description. She wrote ANOTHER SERIES devoted to the sex stuff, so I was hoping the Anita Blake novels would tone down, but nope, didn’t happen.

[Stratocaster]

@MrDibble

You’d really hate Umberto Ecco’s Name of the Rose, then. Blocks of untranslated Latin and, I think, Greek.

Yeah, I probably would. I don’t need the author to write for the lowest common denominator, and I don’t mind at all the occasional obscure or foreign phrase. It adds spice to the work. I’ll look it up later or figure it out in context.

But page after page of Spanish dialogue, while I sit there thinking in annoyance, “What the hell are you guys saying to each other? What?!”–well, that seems like an odd choice by the author.

@Enginerd

I speak (well, not so much anymore, but I still read) Spanish, so that doesn’t bother me. What does is the lack of punctuation. It makes for great dialog, but it also evokes the idea of dialog in parts of the story where it shouldn’t.

The lack of punctuation doesn’t bother me, though I also see that as a bit of an affectation. After a few pages I hardly notice it.

[TruCelt]

@jsgoddess

Using an archaic term for breasts seems to fit the general setting for the books, doesn’t it? I only read the first book, but I guess I wouldn’t have thought archaic terminology would be that remarkable in them.

But it’s not just archaic; and he doesn’t use it that way. It’s the term you’d use for the hanging nipples of a just-weaned bitch, or an elderly cow. It’s a word that indicates a mammalian part, not necessarily a human one. It reduces a human being to a function, and indicates an attitude toward a woman as something to be used like a farm animal.

Florian does not sing of Jonquil’s beautiful dugs.

[Little_Nemo]

@Prof.Pepperwinkle

Alan Moore, author of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Watchmen and other majorly influential comics/graphic novels does tend to use rape overly much, and comes off as a cranky, grumpy, cantankerous madman in interviews.

I like Robert Conroy’s books but every book he’s written has had a female character being raped. I don’t think he has a rape fetish; I think he just uses rape as a way to show how evil his villains are. But his overuse has made it a cliche.

[Penfeather]

@TruCelt

But it’s not just archaic; and he doesn’t use it that way. It’s the term you’d use for the hanging nipples of a just-weaned bitch, or an elderly cow. It’s a word that indicates a mammalian part, not necessarily a human one. It reduces a human being to a function, and indicates an attitude toward a woman as something to be used like a farm animal.

Not necessarily so; dug is an archaic term for a woman’s breast, but not always a pejorative one. Ask the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet:

And she was wean’d—I never shall forget it—
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall;
My lord and you were then at Mantua—
Nay, I do bear a brain—but, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!

Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 3.

[Rick_Kitchen]

@Stratocaster

All the untranslated Spanish in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Pages and pages of it, indecipherable to me. I read them anyway to see if there’s a word or two that might give me a clue. WTF? You write for a English-speaking audience, and you assume…what, exactly? Everyone is bilingual, with Spanish as a second language? We’ll all hire a translator? What?

I love his work, but this seems a ridiculous affectation.

This, with Dorothy Dunnett and French. I had friends tell me that they loved her books, and I gave up after halfway through the first Lymond novel because hey, I don’t speak French.

[Penfeather]

@Little_Nemo

I like Robert Conroy’s books but every book he’s written has had a female character being raped. I don’t think he has a rape fetish; I think he just uses rape as a way to show how evil his villains are. But his overuse has made it a cliche.

I have exactly the same problem with Lawrence Block. Terrific writer, but he is always having women raped “fore and aft”, as he puts it, and then murdered. He has a real thing about women being tormented and degraded and then killed, it makes quite uncomfortable reading sometimes.

[Octarine]

P. G. Wodehouse is an author I love - his books are what Terry Prachett or Douglas Adams would write if they wrote realistic fiction (or vice versa, since Wodehouse came first). But when France was occupied by the Nazis in 1939, he was interned as an “enemy alien.” There, he made some statements on a radio program that . . . well, they weren’t exactly pro-Nazi, but they weren’t anti-Nazi. Later on, he chose to live in Paris while it was still under German control - still, not really a full Nazi sympathizer, but definitely treading the line.

[Penfeather]

@Octarine

There, he made some statements on a radio program that . . . well, they weren’t exactly pro-Nazi, but they weren’t anti-Nazi. Later on, he chose to live in Paris while it was still under German control - still, not really a full Nazi sympathizer, but definitely treading the line.

That makes it sound as if Wodehouse voiced pro-Nazi propaganda, whereas the real issue wasn’t with the content of his broadcasts - which were pretty innocuous, mostly observational humour about life in a German internment camp - but that Wodehouse made them at all, which was seen as borderline treason in a wartime Britain still rankling at Lord_Haw-Haw. Making broadcasts on German radio certainly showed an unworldly naivete which bordered on the imbecile, but it wasn’t the act of a Nazi sympathiser or propagandist. George Orwell wrote an essay in 1945 which provides a pretty good summary and a sensible verdict:

There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that Wodehouse’s talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several letters to the press claimed that “Fascist tendencies” could be detected in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity.

[Penfeather]

There are links to the full transcripts of his broadcasts here, and as far as the content goes, the worst charge that can be levelled at them is flippancy.

[carnivorousplant]

@TruCelt

But it’s not just archaic; and he doesn’t use it that way. It’s the term you’d use for the hanging nipples of a just-weaned bitch, or an elderly cow. It’s a word that indicates a mammalian part, not necessarily a human one. It reduces a human being to a function, and indicates an attitude toward a woman as something to be used like a farm animal.

Florian does not sing of Jonquil’s beautiful dugs.

I’ve not read this author, but I agree with TruCelt.

[gallows_fodder]

I adore Wodehouse, but the man only knew how to write like 3 plots, max, and he committed the more egregious error of repeating some of the same jokes in different books.
Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors but, one, she can come off as insufferably snide (especially in interviews), and two, she has a habit of stringing multiple brief similes together when one would suffice, and more, she does this in different books narrated in first person, when it’s unlikely all these very disparate characters would have the same linguistic quirk.

Michel Faber is annoying because he wrote my favorite book, The Crimson Petal and the White, and nothing else he has ever written has come anywhere close to its greatness. His most recent (IIRC) book, The Fire Gospel, was atrocious.

[vontsira]

@Penfeather

That makes it sound as if Wodehouse voiced pro-Nazi propaganda, whereas the real issue wasn’t with the content of his broadcasts - which were pretty innocuous, mostly observational humour about life in a German internment camp - but that Wodehouse made them at all, which was seen as borderline treason in a wartime Britain still rankling at Lord_Haw-Haw. Making broadcasts on German radio certainly showed an unworldly naivete which bordered on the imbecile, but it wasn’t the act of a Nazi sympathiser or propagandist. George Orwell wrote an essay in 1945 which provides a pretty good summary and a sensible verdict:

I understand that as well as Orwell, other British and Irish authors – holding a wide range of social and political views – defended Wodehouse re his doings in German hands, or at least appealed to the authorities for clemency for him. Largely their representations – as with Orwell – were along the lines of Wodehouse’s extreme “unworldly naivete” and totally apolitical mind-set.

Wodehouse – though in the end not punished for any treasonous activity – was not happy with his situation in Britain post-war, and left Britain to spend the remainder of his life in the USA, becoming an American citizen in 1955. One wonders whether this course of action stemmed from his feeling ill-used by his own country, or from shame, or some of each.