Things in books that annoy you

What sort of thing bugs you when you're reading? Fonts, character traits/types, plot devices, tenses, POVs, descriptions, etc. Some things that really bug me:

Repetitive physical descriptions - but mainly when they are unrealistic. I don't need to hear about how her violet eyes sparkled against her raven black hair that almost looks blue in the sunlight. I forget what book it was, but every time they mentioned her hair, they ALWAYS mentioned that it could look blue in certain lighting, even if that lighting wasn't applicable in the scene. It drove me nuts.

Love triangles can bug me a lot, too. However, these can be done well sometimes. I just don't really like it when it's the primary focus. It also almost always seems to be female-male-male love triangles. Why not try switching it up and have the female protagonist be one of the choices instead of the one deciding?

I have more, but I'll leave it here for now.

 

font like this that goes on for page after page after page after page after page after page after

Fix your formatting guys!!!

 

I can't stand readng a book thats full of gramar and punctuating mistakes... (See what I did there?) I'll bet even you got a bit irritated just reading that first sentence!

 

Yes. That's really irritating.

Deus ex machina when it is really obvious and badly done as if the author couldn't think of anything better.

 

Grammar mistakes are really irritating. I'm not sure if this is plot planning or what, but I really hate to read an entire book waiting for something to happen and it never does. I just feel like I have wasted my time. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn come to mind.

 

I agree with the grammar issues. Unfortunately, self-published books are some of the worst offenders.

My biggest pet peeve is with rushed endings. This is why I never read another Dean Koontz or Stephen King book. I kept reading and then the ending was summed in three or four pages. It's so unsatisfying.

 

Self-published books are definitely the worst offenders. I applaud the authors for their efforts and all but sheesh, if I spent that much time writing something I would find a way to make some money for an editor before I released my hardwork out into the world.

All of the rest are great, or at least great in the way that they are terrible to see in a book.

I feel like this happens a lot in nonfiction books, especially memoirs. I haven't read the book you mentioned but I've heard of it. I didn't know it was like that. That's very irritating.

A few books are coming to mind for me, but I'm curious which books come to yours?

Oh, the dreaded rushed ending. Those can be awful. They're especially terrible when they're rushed and too neat, you know? Everything is all tied up perfectly and done in record time. This is really annoying when there are a lot of unnecsesarily drawn out parts in the rest of the book.

 

I giggle when I think of "rushed endings." It reminds me of the way some of us ended our stories when we were kids. I know you remember ...."and they all went to bed." The teacher always gave them back and made us write another ending.

 

I'm a big old bookworm, and once I start reading a book, I just have to get to the end of it, no matter how bad it is, so I've read more than my fair share of books with all of these annoying things and more. I can't remember any of the titles right now, though...

 

Props to you, Belle for pushing through bad books. I used to finish everything I started, but after some time in libraries and working with kids who I often told could stop reading things they didn't like, I started listening to myself.

Once I even did some training on making book recommendations and the slogan of the session was "Life's too short to read bad books."

 

Haha, Donna, you are so right about that. I guess that's the beauty of children's books - kids believe in the "and then everything was perfectly fine and normal" deal.

Belle, props to you. I try my best but sometimes I just can't force myself to endure it. Like Jordan said, life's too short to read bad books.

Jordan, that kind of training sounds really interesting. What kind of stuff did you learn?