# What ruins a book for you? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 26, 2014, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652 "2014-11-26T04:57:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2014, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/61 "2014-11-26T21:37:36Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > How can a house named “Slitherin” be anything but evil? Slytherin as well 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2014, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/62 "2014-11-26T22:11:01Z")
I might be in the minority but I don’t mind Mary Sue characters most of the time. As long as its well written, I can easily imagine that some people just get lucky or have life hand them stuff on a silver platter. Some people are just naturally charming, or good looking, or athletic without having to do a lot of work. I think our escapist fantasy deep down is hoping we are one of these people, so when I read about them, it doesn’t bother me as much as make me jealous ---
**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2014, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/63 "2014-11-26T22:11:21Z")
The novel “Stoner” contrast the peace loving dad with the neurotic, complaining mother. Mum complains that their little daughter is wearing her out; The dad has that same daughter sitting peacefully at his feet for hours and hours a day while he finishes his master thesis. The daughter is four freaking years old. Anyone who thinks that a four-year-old will let you work for more then ten minutes before interrupting, has never actually babysat one. The author clearly intended for us to sympathise with Stoner and to hate the complaining mother. He achieved the opposite with me. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2014, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/64 "2014-11-26T22:21:29Z")
Expository dialog. "Hello, my best friend Helen whom I have known since I was five. Your husband, whose name is Robert, is waiting outside in his green Oldsmobile that the two of you bought in 2005 after you got a bonus in your job in marketing… " ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2014, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/65 "2014-11-26T22:41:51Z")
When I get to the part where it reads like the author got tired of writing,and turned the manuscript over to one of his grad student to finish for him. Like “Lonesome Dove”. I though it was truly great through the first half, but quit somewhere after that and never even finished it. Never finished “The Tin Drum”, either. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/66 "2014-11-27T00:01:58Z")
> [@erysichthon](#): > > Too many long stretches of unattributed dialogue can ruin a book for me. I get tired of having to backtrack two or three pages to figure out who is saying what. . . . Especially if, somewhere in the publication process, a line gets dropped! The reader gets used to the A, B, A, B alteration of voices, and suddenly realizes that he’s got the wrong guy speaking. This happens a lot in Roger Zelazny’s “Amber” series of novels. I don’t think it’s his fault; it looks like a typesetting screw-up. I like long stretches of unattributed dialogue…when the author is deft enough that you can clearly tell which guy is speaking. Say, in a debate, when one guy is “pro” and the other guy is “anti.” Context tells you who’s who. It also works when one guy has a unique manner of speech – but this requires a smooth and subtle touch. If one guy is speaking in a gross, broad Scots accent, it’s just cartoonish. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/67 "2014-11-27T00:11:10Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > … although, to be fair, that would be _awesome_. 😃 > > "‘Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power’ said the villian with a laugh, as he pulled the trigger … " Lol, I would not mind getting robbed by such a robber. ---
**Author:** ![DingoelGringo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9d8465/32.png) [@DingoelGringo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DingoelGringo)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/68 "2014-11-27T00:14:38Z")
Recently i have run across three books that within the first 20 pages subhuman characters are fighting by throwing balls of fire at each other. That! ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/69 "2014-11-27T00:38:33Z")
> [@DingoelGringo](#): > > Recently i have run across three books that within the first 20 pages subhuman characters are fighting by throwing balls of fire at each other. That! You gotta stop reading those Dragonball Z books! ---
**Author:** ![salinqmind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3ec8ea/32.png) [@salinqmind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/salinqmind)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/70 "2014-11-27T05:59:18Z")
It doesn’t ‘ruin’ a book for me, but I always have to laugh when the detective is scoping out the houses of shady suspects. You can tell they are bad people because their yards are full of weeds, the glass of a window is cracked, and when the detective lets himself inside the house, it is inevitably dark, dirty, depressing, and badly decorated. (The ‘good’ people have flowers on the table; the ‘bad’ people have used underwear strewn about the floor.) ---
**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/71 "2014-11-27T15:31:23Z")
Here’s a [nice piece on how to write intelligent characters](http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing). Here he describes why he hates the scene where Tolkiens dwarves leave Bilbo at the ledge of Mount Doom: > [@](#): > > The movie version goes like this: The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo Baggins have just spent one and a half movies fighting their way to the place where Thorin, leader of the dwarves, expects to find a secret entrance into the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor. This entrance can only be opened on a particular day of the year (Durin’s Day), and they have a decoded map saying, Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of Durin’s day will shine upon the keyhole. > > And then the sun sets behind a mountain, and they still haven’t found the keyhole. So Thorin… I find this painful to write… Thorin throws down the key in disgust and all the dwarves start to head back down the mountain, leaving only Bilbo behind to stare at the stone wall. And so Bilbo is the only one who sees when the light of the setting moon suddenly reveals the keyhole. > > That thing where movie-Thorin throws down the key in disgust and walks away? > > I wouldn’t have done that. > > You wouldn’t have done that. > > We’d wait at least an hour in case there was some beam of sunlight about to shoot through the side of the mountain, and then we’d come back tomorrow, just in case. And if that still failed we’d try again a year later. We wouldn’t drop the key. We wouldn’t wander off the instant something went wrong. > > The scriptwriter thought it would make a Dramatic Moment to leave Bilbo watching the side of the mountain alone. But the price of that Dramatic Moment was to populate the movie with strange, bizarre creatures who do not think like you or I; and so the Dramatic Moment fell flat, at least for me. > > We could say that these strange creatures lack a certain sort of awareness. The scriptwriter wants us to be yelling at movie!Thorin, “No! You fool! Don’t do that!” but it does not occur to the scriptwriter that Thorin might yell this at himself, that Thorin might detect his own idiocy the way we see it plain upon the screen. Movie-Thorin has no little voice in his own head to yell these things at him, the way that you or I are the little voices in our own heads. We could call movie-Thorin a Hollywood Zombie, or H-Zombie for short. > > Okay, now let’s talk about the concept of ‘intelligent characters’. ---
**Author:** ![Infovore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/infovore/32/420_2.png) [@Infovore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Infovore)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2014, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/72 "2014-11-27T19:46:17Z")
A few things for me (and stuff I try hard to avoid in my own writing): - Death/torture of animals (if you’re going to kill the hero’s cat and nail its corpse to his garage door to show him you mean business, tell me in advance and I just won’t read the book, k?) - Too much description, especially when it pulls me out of the story (I hate reading along to be suddenly hit by a paragraph-long infodump about what the main character looks like, or three pages of description of the idyllic little town where he finds himself stranded) - Overused cutesy devices (worst example I can think of: I love Chuck Palahniuk, but I couldn’t finish “Doomed” because everything was stupid internet jokes, like beginning all the chapters with “Gentle Tweeter,” and everything being “Ctrl + Alt + \” (like “Ctrl + Alt + words fail me”). Ugh. - Too many weird adverbs of dialog tags (I particularly hate “retorted,” “shot back,” and “countered.”) - Boringness! If the action isn’t moving along at a good clip, I put the book down. Life’s too short to read boring books. The worst of all, though, is a book by one of my favorite authors. I love almost everything he’s written, but this one…ugh. It was fine until the end. The heroine had a bunch of bad things happen to her, dealt with them, and prevailed…and then on the last couple of pages, when she’s settled back in her apartment with her child, winding down, there’s a knock on the door. She opens it…and gets shot to death. Uh…WTF?? After that, I wanted the time I’d invested in that book back. I considered it a huge betrayal on the author’s part. I have no idea what he was thinking. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2014, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/73 "2014-11-30T17:48:26Z")
> [@koeeoaddi](#): > > Loving descriptions of serial killings/human torture/murder scenes. Not sure what this means - depicting it too nicely? ---
**Author:** ![Infovore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/infovore/32/420_2.png) [@Infovore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Infovore)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2014, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/74 "2014-11-30T18:52:08Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Not sure what this means - depicting it too nicely? I’m guessing it means “torture porn,” where it’s obvious that the author really gets off on describing horrific violence. ---
**Author:** ![tim-n-va](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tim-n-va/32/3001_2.png) [@tim-n-va](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tim-n-va)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2014, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/75 "2014-12-01T00:56:17Z")
Getting basic geography wrong like confusing Cumberland, MD and Cumberland Gap, VA. Another example, having a character drive an hour out of DC on I66 and stopping at a rest area when the only ones are much closer to the city… David Baldacci in both cases. The latter would have been acceptable if it were rush hour. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2014, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/76 "2014-12-01T01:28:22Z")
> [@Mean\_Mr.Mustard](#): > > Providing too much detail and cutesy interjections in a misguided effort to heighten realism. Yep. A LOT of writers could gain from applying the rule that if the description doesn’t advance the plot, they should leave it out entirely, or at best, give a cursory description. I mean, it’s one thing to describe the character as bailing out of the flaming plane over enemy territory, and another to describe the character as “pulling the handle of his Martin-Baker H-7 and being violently shot out of the cockpit of his McDonnell Douglas F4C, missing part of the tail with his VFA-102 insignia and part of the right wing, streaming flaming JP-5 and corkscrewing wildly as it plummeted to earth over North Vietnam” ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2014, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/77 "2014-12-01T02:23:31Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Yep. A LOT of writers could gain from applying the rule that if the description doesn’t advance the plot, they should leave it out entirely, or at best, give a cursory description. > > I mean, it’s one thing to describe the character as bailing out of the flaming plane over enemy territory, and another to describe the character as “pulling the handle of his Martin-Baker H-7 and being violently shot out of the cockpit of his McDonnell Douglas F4C, missing part of the tail with his VFA-102 insignia and part of the right wing, streaming flaming JP-5 and corkscrewing wildly as it plummeted to earth over North Vietnam” Also, I’d say that sort of ‘‘description’’ isn’t really description at all, any more than writing ‘‘he was sad’’ is a compelling description of sadness. ---
**Author:** ![Battle\_Pope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Battle\_Pope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Battle_Pope)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2014, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/78 "2014-12-01T02:31:52Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Yep. A LOT of writers could gain from applying the rule that if the description doesn’t advance the plot, they should leave it out entirely, or at best, give a cursory description. > > I mean, it’s one thing to describe the character as bailing out of the flaming plane over enemy territory, and another to describe the character as “pulling the handle of his Martin-Baker H-7 and being violently shot out of the cockpit of his McDonnell Douglas F4C, missing part of the tail with his VFA-102 insignia and part of the right wing, streaming flaming JP-5 and corkscrewing wildly as it plummeted to earth over North Vietnam” Especially when they add detail that’s wrong: I was reading a book a little while ago and the author had an [F-89 Scorpion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-89_Scorpion) attacking a Godzilla-like monster, only problem was the book was set in the early 2000’s and the F-89 was retired in the late 1960’s. I can only imagine that the author or a friend had a quick look online for US fighter with a ‘cool’ sounding name and didn’t go much further than that. ---
**Author:** ![GreedySmurf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a698b9/32.png) [@GreedySmurf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreedySmurf)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2014, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/79 "2014-12-01T06:48:23Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Yep. A LOT of writers could gain from applying the rule that if the description doesn’t advance the plot, they should leave it out entirely, or at best, give a cursory description. > > I mean, it’s one thing to describe the character as bailing out of the flaming plane over enemy territory, and another to describe the character as “pulling the handle of his Martin-Baker H-7 and being violently shot out of the cockpit of his McDonnell Douglas F4C, missing part of the tail with his VFA-102 insignia and part of the right wing, streaming flaming JP-5 and corkscrewing wildly as it plummeted to earth over North Vietnam” This is a bit of a fine line, within the techno-thriller genre I like a lot of descriptions and technical detail. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2014, 11:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652/80 "2014-12-01T11:50:49Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > The one that springs to mind at the moment is Harry Dresden of the Dresden Files, who repeatedly refused to keep his female partner apprised of what he was up to, almost invariably with bad results. Fucking idiot. I stopped reading the series after Book Two. I love the world Butcher created but his protagonist is unbearable. The series improves a lot past the first few books, as does Dresden’s attitude. Although he does on occasion still get criticized by characters in-story for keeping things to himself and making the entire situation about him, usually without realizing it. It’s a character flaw, not bad writing. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-ruins-a-book-for-you/705652.md?page=5)