Straw Man oversimplification of politics.
Cringeworthy or lame names (“Senator Sedgewick Sexton” from Deception Point.)
Deux ex machina solutions to problems.
Patrick Robinson is particularly over-political.
Also, trying *too *hard to make a character sympathetic. It backfires.
If we accept comics as ‘a book’…complaining that you’re constrained by canon. If you have a good story to tell, then you can make canon sit up and beg for you. What you derisively refer to as ‘canon’ is actually a rich tapestry.
If you can’t make it work, and it’s not good enough to convince your editors to market it as an alternate history book (like Red Son), then it’s probably not worth publishing.
I’m looking at you Byrne Doom Patrol.
I need at least one character with whom I can identify. If they are all incomprehensible, or dumb, forget it.
Regards,
Shodan
Misspellings, especially when the errors are homophones.
To me a good book is a good story being told well. That is it, it seems obvious but it isn’t. The story should flow as if you were sitting in rapt attention listening to the finest storyteller, only it is on paper.
What turns me off is clunky dialog that would never be spoken by real people even if they were aliens. A few artificial words are fine but whole passages of made up languages that I am supposed to grok 
just get in the way of the flow of the story. Heinlein did that better than most, a few new words, new ideas, then back to the flow of story.
And then there are authors who seem to be getting paid by the word rather than the content. On and on and on descriptions of mundane background. Jean Auel, I couldn’t get through the winter or across the plains, it was just too much work. I swear they weigh her books and pay by the pound.
Sure there should be active parts of the book and calmer more descriptive parts but, come on Tolkien! I really don’t need so much about the Shire, I get it, move the story along. Sorry fans, I really tried reading him when I was young but I am glad that movies were made.
I don’t really care how long the book is as long as the story moves along. But don’t bog me down while you create your special universe unless it is interesting and relevant to the story. Sometimes you can tell when creating these worlds and fleshing out their descriptions is more important to the author than it is to the story, and that is what loses me.
Mine is related-I hate when authors over-describe a place I know. I live near Seattle and am very familiar with it. I can’t remember the name of the book, but it was historical fiction set in Seattle. I swear the author managed to mention every single street and landmark in the city. A good author can make references to places I know enjoyable, but that one was torturous.
I’m also annoyed by rushed endings. I can almost hear the editor on the phone saying, “Wrap it up! Wrap it up!”. :rolleyes:
James Michener is the author I thought of when I read this complaint.
I’ve been known to stop reading when I realize (pretty early on) that the author has used unpronounceable or impossible-to-remember names as it makes the characters hard to keep straight in my head. “Now, is ‘ftinp’ the female mercenary for hire or is that ‘cxokpk’?”
A too-obvious romantic setup. Mary Higgins Clark is terrible with this. Always a female heroine, and always an obvious perfect man to swoop in at the end.
I hate plots that depend on protagonists being idiots. Idiot plots they are called. The idiocy is not so bad if it’s not the main protagonist, but if it’s somebody you’re supposed to identify with, and he keeps doing the same stupid thing over and over and over again, I tend to kind of withdraw mentally from the characters and lose interest in the book. You can’t have your protagonist be someone you want to slap repeatedly in the face frequently for being so dumb. 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.
Also, I have noticed that male writers who do kinky erotica frequently fail to establish any human connection between the male characters who are doing kinky things to the female characters, and said female characters (some describe them as “erotic romances” a freaking lie if ever there was one). So it turns into a long account of One Horrible Thing After Another done to Damsel X with no human feelings other than “Bwahahahaha!” and “Aaaaaargh!” And gets really hard to read as a result.
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.
Also, I hate sequences of short, one-sentence paragraphs.
Like this.
They annoy me.
I’m looking at you, David Baldacci.
Yes, you.
When the author decides to end the story by curb-stomping the protagonist and everyone he cares about.
The ending of North Dallas Forty really pissed me off.
If a novel about China involves the characters quoting Chinese proverbs all the time. That’s a giveaway that it was almost certainly written by a Westerner.
Chinese people don’t talk like that in real life, just like Americans don’t go about quoting Poor Richard’s Almanac.
Over-description is a pet peeve of mine as well, possibly to the detriment of my own writing. The things I care most about in a story are dialog, character development, and action. Attending to the minute details of the building a person inhabits or the field they are standing in is extremely boring to me. I don’t care about objects and buildings, I care about people.
I want people fighting, fucking, or moving closer to doing either of those two things. That’s an oversimplification, maybe, but a pretty good one.
… 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 … "
I hated when the Roman Empire did this, too.
Septimius Severus and Maximinus Thrax, I’m looking at you! 
How can a house named “Slitherin” be anything but evil?
The** Dominion of the Draka** are CLEARLY evil as hell, just from the name alone.