Just to start off, I like books. I read an awful lot of them and mainly read them in one sitting. Being unemployed helps with that. I have even read Tom Clancy novels all night just to finish them.
However I have just started this book by Phillip Kerr called Second Angel and I have thrown it away several times because the style just annoys me. It is a SciFi heist story. Not a problem, I like SciFi and am very forgiving. He makes up his own world and so on.
The bit that really annoys me is that he feels it necessary to put everything in footnotes. He explains background in the footnotes (and then explains it in the text later), he mentions things which have no relevance to the story (or haven’t so far as I’ve read- such as stuff relating to Japan and China, It’s set on the moon), he lists the books and reports he cites from - such as the bible and made up stuff. He has even explained the etymolgy of various words, utopia being an example. There is basically a large footnote every 5 pages. He has done a lot of research and thought about it, good, why condescend to the readers about it?
Terry Pratchett knows that footnotes are a good way of explaining a little extra, but Kerr has just run way too far with it. It is trememdously interupting to the story to be continually taking myself out of it and trying to fit in what he is talking about.
Then there is the narrator coming in and out of the story, another device which I don’t have a problem with, if it adds to the story. This doesn’t, the narrator is just putting up a little gameof guess which character I am. Again, removing me from the actual story and making it harder to like the book.
This wasn’t meant to be a rant, but oh well. So my little poll is to find out what styles of writing annoy the teemings out there. I gave my example and would be interested in others stylistic dislikes.
Philip K. Dick’s writing style is horrible. I mean, he writes cool stories, but his writing is just painful for me to read. He reads better in French translation, probably because the translators whose work I read must have had some sort of sense of literacy.
Of course, science fiction writers in general don’t seem to have a good grasp on how to write. That’s probably part of why I don’t like science fiction that much.
I’m currently reading Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine. It’s a good book, I guess (as far as required reading goes), but what really bugs me is the way she sets up her dialogues. Here’s an example of what two people talking looks like the book (Warning: Not actual quotes from the book):
“Alexias, what do you mean by staying out late at night?” “I’m sorry father. I’ll never do it again.”
She doesn’t seperate people’s quotes, like:
“Alexias, what do you mean by staying out late at night?”
“I’m sorry father. I’ll never do it again.”
It kind of bugs me, as it gets hard to tell who’s talking. I wonder if her other books do this.
It really bothers me when an author/narrator switches from third-person to first-person in different chapters. I don’t mind switching from one first-person to another, as long as it’s clear who’s who, but I can’t stand the omniscient narrator switching with the first-person chump. Especially when the chapter starts out with some long descriptive passage that leaves you wondering whether this one’s going to be first-person or third-person.
To counteract the OP, I loved Gateway because of some of the postings and events that were taking place around the space station. They had absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but they helped to just make the story, the universe, real.
Footnotes can be funny if used the right way. If the novel is humorous in tone, the footnotes can add so much by trying to pretend it’s a serious research project. OTOH, if the author is being serious with the footnotes, then it just looks pretentious. I mean, it’s fiction for God’s sake! Let it go.
I absolutely cannot stand anything, no, nothing at all, that Hemmingway spewed forth. It’s not even writing, in my not-so-humble opinion. While I can see the fun in writing what amounts to drunken tour guides of Spain, he does it IN SIMPLE SENTENCES. No compound sentences, no use at all of punctuation with the exception of the period. For some reason, it drives me buggers. Probably because it reminds me a bit too much of Dick and Jane books, only with more drinking and sex.
Steinbeck is on my hit list too, but mostly 'cause of a HD English teacher’s piss-poor teaching style.
Tom Clancy (who can dream up an interesting plot, I admit):
“Ding, will you cover the south entrance?”
“You got it, 'mano.”
(Later)
“This is going to really set off a firestorm, you know what I mean, 'mano?”
Repeat about 7 times.
Clancy grabs onto a phrase and has his characters say it over and over. Anyone who read that last book should recognize the phrase “John Chinaman.”
There was another military techno thriller that was so bad I still remember the part that warned me not to buy it. The phrase that sticks in the mind is, “The ship bucked on the waves like a lover coming back for more.”
I don’t know exactly how to describe her writing style (though the word “simpering” comes to mind) but if it wasn’t a library book, I’d have pegged it at the wall!
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
Like fingernails on a blackboard; I forced myself through two chapters and gave up.
I’ve hit a horrendous dry spell for books. Roving around in desperation I stumbled across an admittedly obscure book/author that epitomized annoying style: A year in Van Nuys by Sandra Tsing Loh. It’s a somewhat amusing spin on Mayle’s A year in Provence from the perspective of a chronic underachiever stuck in a hellhole suburb of L.A.
There are some killingly funny bits but they’re buried in a psuedo-journalistic style that finally became unreadable: endless strikeouts, parentheses, rambles… I tossed it aside after the third chapter. (And it’s short!) The idea was fun but the style killed it.
And having posted THAT forgettable insight, now down to business: ahem!
Mod thing:
Since this discussion is definitely literary it’d fit best over at the Cafe Society.
FloChi, Frank Herbert did the same thing, only he put the notations at the beginning of each chapter as quotations from his universe’s source. (After all, what did Princess Irulan Corrino have to do but write?)
I enjoyed the first three Dune books, but found the latter three annoying. I kept waiting for the ommniscient third-person narrator to begin making sense of it all, and was sorely disappointed by the end of Chapterhouse: Dune. It just didn’t seem like it should take three entire novels to make his point. One of my friends called it “mental drooling”.
Whoever translated my English translation of Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Or maybe it is Herman Hesse’s real style, but only reads better in German. Or maybe it is the same way in German.
I’ll see that Tom Wolfe and raise you a John Updike. I liked the movie Witches of Eastwick so when I saw the book in my favorite used book store, I bought it. I can’t read it. There’s something so odd about the way the narration is written… Tom Wolfe, though, I once made a professor sad when I told him that Wolfe was too pretentious sounding to bear(I think the same thing about Kurt Vonnegut, come to think of it) but I finished the book he suggested for my project,Madmen and vine, after he pleaded with me to, and hated it anyway.
