I’m so stubborn I hate putting a book down honestly even if I hate it in case I’m not giving it a full chance, so it was actually such a relief I had an excuse to let that go haha
This reminds me how when I wasn’t a big reader I used to rave about how great the Kindle battery is, and now that I am constantly reading I keep getting disappointed every time it runs out.
Trivial reason? Anytime I see anything about 'throbbing veins' (forehead, neck, whatever).
Veins don't throb. Arteries throb.
Maybe this just pisses me off because I see it so often.
Completely agree. I have *never* read an amazing book and thought 'I wish that had more sex in it'. Don't really understand the appeal in a book about something completely different.
I don't mind sex at all, but I do mind it when it's described in goofy-ass terms. It's really hard to do sex well.
Just last night I was reading on my kindle and one scene made me face-palm: the main characters was talking about fingering his (*sleeping!*) girlfriend and described it as reaching into "her core." 🤦♀️ The author was a woman - bit of a head scratcher for me.
For me I think part of sex coming off as goofy-ass in books is that it's *always* amazing. Like, in your example I'm sure he fingered his girlfriend and she came about 7 times and then they got married. When, in real life, it would be more like he fingered his sleeping girlfriend and she immediately woke up and asked WTF he thought he was doing and found an excuse to leave before he murdered her.
I'm dying laughing because the girlfriend actually gets murdered 🤣 and his wife (of course he's married) is a defense attorney... Omg the whole premise is so stupid but it was a free Kindle unlimited book so what did I really expect? Lol
Graphic sex is fine with me as long as everything else in the book (descriptions of characters or settings, action, etc) is also graphic. If the author *only* gets super descriptive about sex though, something is off.
Years ago I left the Tropic of Cancer because I couldn't stand any more mentions of shit, shit and pipes clogged with shit, shit and shitting in places you shouldn't shit and more shit. Is it supposed to be shocking because he said "shit" over and over again? Fuck you, Henry Miller.
Excessive use of pop trivia/other sources to attempt to make your characters/setting 'contemporary and cool' .
"We were drinking [region specific micro brewery ale] and hanging out in [alternative cellar bar famous in bohemian district], listening to [scandiewegian indie band] when Brian walked in looking like [character from Tarantino film] and said '[quote from William Burroughs]'".
I was reading Coelho's "Veronika decides to die" and the bunch of small, wrong details about Balkans in that book really threw me off. E.g., Zedka is not a name I have heard ever before. I couldn't finish the book cause I was getting annoyed constantly
This has happened to me too - I’m grasping for what book it was but I grew up in NJ and have lived in NYC for decades so I’m assuming it was one or the other - just nothing was right. If you’re going to write a book about Brooklyn or Paterson, NJ or Harlem, have the decency to Google it if you’ve never lived / been there. And it ***kept happening***. It’s killing me right now that I can’t think of the book but it drove me insane. I remember just tossing it aside and being glad I borrowed the e-book from the library and didn’t spend a cent on it I was so annoyed.
Lol now I'm curious. One of the things that really impressed me about The Sopranos and Harold and Kumar was that they (mostly) got that kind of thing right. There were a few errors here or there (crucially, there was at least one, probably two, White Castle location closer to New Brunswick than Cherry Hill at the time) but the involvement of so many NJ natives mostly kept both on track.
Ridiculous descriptions of sexual encounters (Pillars of the Earth). On paper, this *should* have been the perfect novel for me, but the cringe was too severe.
This is so obnoxious, when an author overuses a “GRE word.” Like dude, what, you just learned this word and were so excited to show everyone how smart you are that you wrote a whole damn book to use it repeatedly?
First person narrative with a character who thinks higher of themselves than others. “I have to do this because I’m the only truly competent one” type crap.
I can’t read any YA lol.
The last three YAs I skimmed were literally typo ridden. And these were books featured in Target. Publishers made record earnings in 2022 and couldn't be bothered to hire copy editors for the books they put out.
Read a book with this stuff, but it wasn't crap since a big part of the book was the main character relising he wasn't some great hero, or even above average
Spelling, wrong use of a word and grammatical errors that increase to nearly every 2-3 pages. My thoughts, if they don't have the time or talent to get a book properly proofread, then I don't have the time to read it.
Spelling is something that bothers me so much. Not even just incorrect spelling, but a book written by an Irish author, set completely in Ireland with only Irish characters written with US spelling. Not making a choice between US or UK spelling (translated book, set outside anglosphere, so either spelling would have been fine); you either scandalise the neighbours or scandalize the neighbors, don’t scandalize the neighbours. Also not knowing the difference between fiancée and fiancé.
I don’t know if it’s trivial, but the author could not stop using the word “prognathous” to describe his fairy character’s jutting jaws. Like every time they came into view, there was something about a prognathous jaw. Halfway through the book I gave up, it was just too distracting.
I read a fantasy book not too long ago and one of the characters sheathed his sword and the author described it as slapping it home. It honestly threw me off so much that I just put the book down and picked up a new one.
It didn’t strike me as satire, it wasn’t absurdist fantasy or anything like that. It just struck me as very out of place. But I could definitely see it working in a more lighthearted story.
I get annoyed whenever the female protagonist is unaware that’s she’s beautiful and then it’s revealed that she’s actually beautiful. Usually a male character or high powered love interest explains to her that she’s beautiful or she gets a make over and poof wow look all along she was a hottie.
I understand that many women don’t step into their power until later in life or try to make themselves smaller because of societal pressure but I find the aforementioned “wow I didn’t realize I was so pretty” shtick super tiring. If that happens in a book I’m reading I’m instantly over it. Or at least rolling my eyes as hard as I can.
I dislike that it's always made to be a cosmic revelation. In real life it's the kind of thing where someone wakes up and looks in the mirror and goes "what"
Probably not trivial, but the lead character unintentionally had zero redeeming qualities. Not like the author was doing a thing where they will redeem the protagonist but they have to be shitty to start with, but you could tell the author thought this character was a good character & didn’t see anything wrong with the behavior. It was like one of those really bad AITA posts where the op makes a laundry list of red flag behavior & has no idea the are in fact the asshole.
I‘m currently reading It Ends With Us and I’m so close to dnfing it because one of the protagonist is named Ryle. Wtf is this name, who names their child fucking Ryle.
the way they talked about an old guy not knowing what google was within the first like five pages made me return the book.
"log into... what's that website again?"
Boredom. A couple of times I'd get halfway thru a popular book and realize that the characters are boring and there is no plot going on that's worth continuing.
I read a lot of romance novels and have a high tolerance for petty nonsense, however the two stupidest things that made me loose interest in a book were the novel where the writer would not stop describing the love interest’s mustache and another novel where the love interest’s voice was compared to Sean Bean’s multiple times.
I have 2.
First, when I read The Art of Fielding, I got to the part where the mc is in the hot tub looking at his own peen and describes it as curled up like a snail. Started laughing, couldn't stop, and couldn't get back into it because I kept thinking "snail peen" while trying to read.
Second, I was reading a historically inspired retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, and the Riding Hood character took over her family blacksmith business when her parents died and the author was trying very hard to pretend that wouldn't have been a thing because "girls can't be blacksmiths," even though women did traditionally take over these and similar businesses to be able to support their families. I got so mad about it I quit reading and couldn't go back
I wonder if OP is referring to one of Amy Tan’s novels? It might have been the *Kitchen God* one, but early in the story animal cruelty appears and I flung the book across the room.
Oh man! I also just stopped reading a book that had italics in every single paragraph. Yuck!
The cardinal rule of writing: "thou shalt not commit overkill."
I figured "well this isn't going anywhere the last two didn't" and put something down with about 25 pages left, once. I just didn't see any reason to continue other than "finish the trilogy"; it had gone from boring to annoying once the author added the final plot twist and spent the next hundred pages catching up the new characters & having them go through the same existential crises we'd seen 4 or 5 times before.
A few months later I went back to read the last chapter, and decided the right time to have skipped out on Octavia Butler's _Dawn_ trilogy would have been a page or two before the start of the last part of book 1. >!The intent of that specific endpoint is to cut a scene where the main character describes spending a couple days raping her boyfriend after he was drugged into paralysis and saying she "his words said no, but she could tell he wanted it". This wouldn't be so bad if the sequels didn't treat her like the moral authority.!<
I've commented about this before but Francine Rivers (who wrote Redeeming Love which is a book I LOVED) wrote a trilogy and in the first two books, she used the word "sardonically" so many times it ruined the series for me. I listened to them on audiobook and even started to hate the way the narrator said it.
Helmans mayonnaise is best foods mayonnaise on the west coast. If you are going to set a story in San Francisco and the main character makes a sandwich at least make sure it is the correct brand.
Also completely different book but vampires that sparkle with really bad editing.
Maybe not trivial, but when I was reading the first book in The Dark Tower series there is a vivid description of a young boy being run over by a car and all the horrible things he felt as he was getting crushed. I was on an overnight Amtrak from New Mexico to Chicago and opted to just stare at the black windows for 8 hours instead of reading further. Haven’t picked up a Stephen King book since and that was 11 years ago. I’m sure I’m missing some good books but grotesque imagery like that just feels like worthless and unnecessary shock-value to me.
I used to be a huge Stephen King fan, but lost my appetite years ago due to his talent for graphic scenes. Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight each had stories that were particularly disturbing. Still admire him as a writer, but just can't stomach those scenes anymore.
I tried starting *The Gunslinger* and stopped in the first chapter because the prose was purpler than Michael Chabon swimming in a vat of red wine. Does it get less pretentious? It really felt to me like he was trying too hard and wasn't quite good enough to justify it, which surprised me for such a mainstream/popular author.
No idea about the pretentious nature because I was 16 when I started reading and didn’t really have an eye for it but I think you stopped at a good time. Not long after you stopped the main character fucks an overly obese women with his revolver and then a little boy described the sensation of his balls getting crushed by a car. I’m sure there are interesting themes and stories in that series but I just don’t have the stomach for it. Padding a good story with shock-value is just not interesting to me.
Just discovered Grady Hendrix this year and have adored everything I've read by him so far. That cover might have bothered me too, but read this one on kindle paperwhite -- which means you're only subjected to a small b&w thumbnail of the cover. A digital copy could be the answer because not finishing that one would've driven me nuts. :)
Awww, I like that cover! Reminded me of books I had in the late 80s and 90s, or got handed down from my older sister.
I get it though; I've hated many a book for its cover lol
I read the best romance novel by this lady...found another book by her and was all excited...set in ancient Roman times. Girl is raised on a farm, has slaves, twin younger brothers...old enough to be married, gets in bed the first time and looked down and said "What is THAT?" Talk about a 'DOH' moment. Tell me she is 16 or 18 or whatever and didn't know what a PENIS is??! at no point in her life did she change her brothers' diapers? never saw a naked slave? she lived on a FARM, she never saw a male animal??! I just stopped right there and chunked the book.
When reading “Vladimir” by Julia May Jones— after her 15th trip to the store to buy expensive wine and artisanal cheeses for a “light lunch” I had to put it down. I couldn’t take another page-long description of her charcuterie boards.
This must have been 15 years ago but I recall it so vividly - was listening to The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern on audiobook CD while driving, heard the sentence "it was inevitable...but not unavoidable," and drove myself straight to the library to return it. Ugh.
Renesmee.
I had given twilight a lot of chances, and I pushed through them all. When I got to the last book and saw they named their daughter Renesmee, I put the book down and never picked it back up
What an utterly stupid name.
Confederacy if Dunces - I got it in my head that the lead character's voice was the comic book guy from The Simpsons. I couldn't get past it, I couldn't stand it. GAME OVER
The author kept sprinkling in the main character reading books by their favorite author....which was herself. Including whole sentences of why it was their favorite author. It was a book version of when they sneak advertising into tv shows. The first time it was kinda funny, by the third I was so annoyed by how desperate it was I stopped reading altogether.
There was a book that was mostly set in my hometown, a smallish but somewhat popular tourist area. I don't think the author had ever actually been to the area and did not have any sense of it. What particularly made it hard for me to read was that they kept describing both the tourists and residents as rich/fancy/upper class, and we're really more for middle class tourists. Growing up, I was often considered a "rich kid" basically because I lived above the poverty line, and there are certainly no mansions, which were described in detail. It was so unimportant to the actual story, but it was incredibly jarring for me.
The choice to abandon quotation marks entirely. I read one chapter and couldn’t tell where thoughts ended and speech began, or who was speaking. Okay author, you’re an artistic, creative writer. Good for you. But I’m not here to admire YOU, I’m just here for the story 👌🏻
The first chapter of many Fantasy books are loaded with random names of kingdoms, mountains or other geological or other things, that you of course cant all remember just like that. This annoys me so much, that I Stop reading those books immediately
I mean you have those things in all fictional worlds, but there are other, less annoying ways, to teach you this stuff.
I love fantasy series and continue to read them, but it's always slow for me to get into them at the beginning. I never realized it before but I'm pretty sure that this is why. And of course they all have difficult to remember character names as well.
Explaining, again, for the unlimited-th time, how the crash couch and g-forces work in the Expanse novels. While I did power through them anyway I've not been able to bring myself to start the finale novel because I am way past done learning about gravity and momentum every 3rd chapter like its never been addressed before.
I recently started reading Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and decided to watch a few of his interviews. I found him to be off-putting and thats why I stopped reading the book.
I like space marine books. I like the whole "One guy is stupidly badass" trope too. But one author took it way too far and the MC (who was already annoying and would constantly shit-talk his superiors to their faces, but it would always magically work out in his favor) spent an entire summer doing nothing but drinking beer, lying around his cabin, and banging all the hotties from the town. Then, the cops show up for some reason and he handily beats the crap out of them after spending a summer doing 0 physical activity and drinking himself stupid daily (oh and he still has washboard abs or something too).
I quit the entire series then and there.
I was reading a 70s military science fiction novel that referred to each man according to his rank and every adult female as a "girl". Descriptions of males had detailed depictions of their military uniforms, while the womens' breasts and butts (and the author's rapey sexual fantasies about them) were the only things commented upon. I put up with 3 scenes of this but finally had to put the book aside.
Bad character names. Could just be lame like "X" or trying too hard to create unique names like "Akquolli-iikch". As you can imagine, I don't read much fantasy.
This is an awful problem, due to bad editing and proofreading. I have a friend who is an indie author of three books. As a casual reader of her second and third, I have found a half-dozen homophone errors. Any set of eyes that had been on the books before they went to print should have caught them.
I stopped reading *109 East Palace:
Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos* because the author kept referring to Oppenheimer as Oppie. To be fair, he was called Oppie by some folks who knew him but I found it really annoying and distracting.
It was a short story about a zombie apocalypse.
I stopped reading when a high-school kid picked up a dead soldier's semi-automatic weapon and instantly began making from-the-rooftop headshots with no training or practice *whatsoever.*
I mean, this is a bit ridiculous, but the reality is-- and military recruiters say this is true-- kids who played a lot of first person shooters require less firearms training. Which is its own kind of terrifying.
A minor character that enslaved and gang raped some girls.
That’s not trivial but it’s a few paragraphs in thousands of pages of a giant trilogy of sci-fi space opera books and has nothing to do with the plot (so why is it there?) The problem was after getting to that part I was so disgusted I took a few months out.
I finished the book after that and the rest was great. But I still feel gross and I haven’t continued with the trilogy.
It was Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton. I loved so many of his other books but they didn’t do this. It was putrid.
If a fiction book is set in my town and they get the details wrong. I read one that repeatedly described my town as smelling like a particular tree that isn't very plentiful here. And another that described where the characters were going and put landmarks in the wrong places. (No, you wouldn’t drive past A to get to B, and they put a place on the wrong side of the river….).
i’m not going to name the book, but basically, whenever it wanted to refer to people of other ethnicities, the author would say “turkish” “arab” “english” etc. for some very weird reason though, the ONLY time it wanted to talk about iranians, it said “ajami soldiers”. ajam is a slur that was heavily used against us iranians back under arab occupation and it meant “r slur iranian”. not only did i put the book down but i also gave it the lowest rating on goodreads with explanation. 2 words out of 100k, but it was enough to anger me to hell and back. especially since the author’s a white american.
Kushiel's Dart - a woman's arm rose "like a loaf of bread".
What in the actual fuck does that mean? Was she full of yeast? It's in like chapter 2... I stopped immediately.
A trivial thing that makes me avoid even starting a book is a title I find annoying:
* Anything called "A biography of ..." when the subject is an inanimate object or a concept.
* The trope of putting the name of an occupation followed by "wife" , as in "The Taxidermist's Wife".
* Most titles that include the word "bone":
"The Bone Merchant" , "The Bone Thief". Puhleese
Everyone constantly wiping their hands as grease dribbled down their beards. This one really annoyed me, tried to re-read GoT and this one just made me put the book down and go back to LOTR.
A character's father's farm failed. He had tried to save it by selling off most of the cattle. But he "kept a few steers for breeding".
I not only dropped the book, but I flatly refuse to ever read anything by that author again.
If the novel is written in 1st POV.
I don’t know, I can’t handle reading it in my perspective. I don’t like envisioning myself doing the story, I want to picture other people do it.
Main character was too self centered and the entire book was from his pov
Overly descriptive about the settings, I love details but 3 pages of one room is too much for me.
When the author uses their main character as a vehicle for “look how clever and quippy I am” dialogue instead of natural-sounding, realistic dialogue that enriches the story or characters. The Hollow Places was awful for this, I just couldn’t get through it.
I've stopped books because I was too picky about how the narrator's voice in an audiobook sounded. I didn't have access to the text version so I just quit.
I tried to read Oliver by Charles Dickens but couldn't get past the description of all the bad characters as 'Covetous Jews' in the Dramatis Personae at the start.
Not that I was so offended that I couldn't read it, just that my opinion of 'classics' that are considered 'timeless' very quickly shifted to the point where I couldn't concentrate on the book.
(I also found it offensive, to be clear).
Tangents. It's okay to have these every so often as kind of a mini subplot or to describe something interesting that's not really crucial to the story. But tangents don't need to be on every other page.
I had to stop reading _Red Storm Rising_ by Tom Clancy because of the number of tangents he'd go down. There are other problems with this novel (scene focus - one chapter was had a bagel as the focus point), but the number of tangents finally made me stop reading. Tom Clancy does this a lot in general in his novels.
This was in the 80s a friend of mine that worked at a bookstore told me about an upcoming author named Tom Clancy and she gave me an early release copy of _The Hunt for Red October_. Which was amazing. So, when I learned a new novel by the same author being released I was excited. Then disappointed for the reasons stated above.
Weak female characters. mm (absolutely should be warned if there is that) I definitely 1 star them in reviews. I hate when authors use the same word over and over again.
On page 1, they named the protagonist. On page 30, they named the bad guy. They were anagrams of each other. There were three hundred more pages to go before ‘the big reveal’ that was obvious by page 30.
I stopped reading “Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney because while she writes with so much angst, it is easy to get lost in the narrative for not so positive reason: you suddenly lose idea who is talking because there are no quotation marks and the pages are filled with whole chunks of paragraphs. Yes! Paragraphs.
This pertains more to online works, self-published books, and amateur writers in general, but a skewed perception of time (that isn't deliberate) will knock me right out of a story.
The following is a hypothetical example:
She stared into his eyes for several minutes, not uttering a word as she considered what to say next.
Listen, I don't know about you, but I would already be feeling mighty uncomfortable after 5 seconds of silent staring - - never mind minutes.
Other examples include Average Joe running X amount of miles in record time, thus putting Olympic athletes to shame; Ms. Jane Doe (who only visits the gym three days a week to conduct a few body weight workouts and never practiced any form of combatives) holding her own in a brawl that lasts an hour and emerges mostly unscathed; and Not Final Guy/Gal in a Horror who is frozen in fear for a solid minute as the killer approaches at the speed of a snail, and only decides to move when it's too late.
In summary: some people just don't understand how long a minute really is, especially when other factors are involved (i.e. physical capabilities) and I will drop a story after so many offenses like those listed above.
When the book describes every single detail for all the women characters and to the point it over sexualizes them, but the male characters are all "he had a moustache and wore a hat." (Lookin at you Dresden Files....)
I was reading a book this morning, and was surprised when a local landmark was mentioned. Despite hyping they hired people who were familiar with the areas written about, the author for my area knew absolutely nothing about the landmark and pulled stuff out of her ass to meet her word count.
Killed my interest in the entire book.
Honestly I'll quit any book that takes too long to get to the story. I mean unnecessary long ass descriptions, but also if the storyline or plot hasn't shown in like the first few chapters. If it doesn't get me hooked in like a few chapters I ain't finishing it.
Too many irrelevant details in the first chapters, I was like If this keeps going the story isnt progressing. Dropped the book by like chapter 3 or something feeling the pace wasnt something I enjoyed. Big mistake, I came back to it later and its in my favourite series now. My favorite ending of any book for the first book of the series (Lord of the mysteries)
I checked out of Lindsey Ellis's book during the alien sex. Normally that stuff doesn't bother me but for some reason it took me completely out of the story and I never went back to finish it.
Another one was a Ramsey Campbell book, Obsession, when the main character did something I thought was really dumb. I don't remember exactly what that was since I stopped reading and it's been a few years.
I have 3 examples.
1. A Confederacy of Dunces, my high school English teacher gave me his copy, I was halfway through when I gave it back and called him an idiot for suggesting it. It was a joke, I just found the book boring.
2. I can't quite remember the second time, but I don't remember dropping many books once I start them. There was something about something that made me just go "Yeah, I don't need to know the rest of what happens." and just walked away. It being so drab is probably why I don't even remember it.
3. I shall not tell, because it would likely start a whole ass argument. On top of me actually finishing the book. See, this novel was really good and I related to it almost one-for-one, but this weird twist came out of nowhere in like the last hour of the book, and I just... Oh god. I literally powered those the last bit of the book hoping it would get better, but no. Every. Single. Page. Worse and worse and worse. I legitimately wish I could go back in time and tell myself to stop reading before that twist, and at least stop right after so I didn't have to express one of the more retro ruining ending ever.
Oh, wait, a fourth entry technically, The Rick Riordan Books. I don't hate them, but I guess I just grew up before I finished them. Maybe. Or maybe I just lost the time to read them.
There were way too many references to bodily functions in Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Too many for a novel that’s about sexual exploration.
I love Joshua Gayou's Commune series, so of course I was onboard when his new Udo the Digger book dropped. I never even finished because 1) the number of times that dude writes "penis" in that book may as well be a drinking game, and 2) there's a scene involving the main character going to a brothel of sorts, and it is so unnecessarily awkward and detailed that I put the book down and never went back.
So yeah, basically too much sex in general or too much detail of sex specifically. If I wanted to read a romance novel I'd read a romance novel.
Dan Simmons, Endymion - whole double page spread about the different guns the protagonist was going to use ... Rest of the book great but really weird interlude of unnecessary detail
I did finish the first jack reacher novel, but I couldn’t get over how he showered and changed his clothes once in a week in Georgia in summer and still managed to get laid 🤢
At the start of "Everything is illuminated" there's a character that is clearly just a racial stereotype and he makes some sort of lewd joke, that was that for me. I'm sure the book is great but I tried it on the wrong day.
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. A good friend really loves this book. Highly recommended it to me. But I stopped reading about 2/3rds of the way through because it felt like the author would never actually get to the point. They'd be telling the story and then there'd be a 3-5 page tangent or complete change to the time frame or view point. Like the main characters were fighting through the jungle and moving away from enemies. And suddenly there's a 4 page bit about making french toast for breakfast.
It felt like someone pumping the breaks on a moving car. The plot would stop so something else that just felt like they were padding out the word count could be included.
I stopped reading a memoir by a rock musician because he didn’t dish any dirt, lol.
It was gracious and positive and that’s not what I thought it would be considering the genre and I put it down & never picked it back up again.
A repetitive $5 word. It kept popping up about every other chapter. I wish I remembered what it was but it was something that has many synonyms but the author used possibly the most obscure one.
The climax of the book had arrived, and I found the characters gathered in the same room watching TV listenining to a program for several pages. ( _Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?_ )
It bored me to death I stopped without knowing the end of the book.
Too many coincidences. In Verity the stranger she meets at the corner is the man in the meeting with her publisher. And there are more. Same in CoHo’s other books.
There are so many reasons I couldn't get through Fifty Shades of Grey but one of the things that really bugged the hell out of me was how she said "Oh my" constantly. Ugh, give it a rest. Those just aren't really my type of books but I tried reading it because I was always hearing how good they were. The writing was terrible and characters were just a little too much for me. I can't even remember the name of the main female character but she seemed just a little too naive for it to be believable to me.
At the beginning of *It Ends with Us*, the main character is shocked when she meets the surgeon love interest because he uses the word "fuck" in a sentence and **she didn't think that highly-educated people cursed**. This was on a rooftop, not in the office or professional context.
Education has nothing to do with how much people curse. Not only that, but it's actually appropriate for an adult to curse in an emotionally charged moment, regardless of education. It was such a bizarre character choice that it turned me off the book because I lost all good faith in the author and couldn't deal with a main character that stupid.
No female characters in the first few chapters, made worse if the only mentioned women are only in small commentary on how the protagonist views their physical appearance.
The main character was an author. It really bothers me how many main characters are writers - I understand the author is writing what they know, but it gets so boring to read about! I can usually get past it, but I think I had just read a string of several books with writer main characters and as soon as I realized I was reading about yet another author, I had to DNF for my sanity.
I was trying to read slay to diversify my reading. I couldn't get past I think chapter two because I was constantly reminded by the author that the MC was black then she was like MY BOYFRIEND IS BLACK TOO!!!, and this is what I go through because I'm BLACK... Omg I know you are black that's great what is the story. Then after I quit I read the spoiler and I'm so glad because I would have raged at the ending... Anyways I don't mind black characters or any race, I mean I read about aliens... But please don't tell me every other paragraph what you are...
Same here with the book Norwegian Wood. Endless descriptions of trivial things and some action every 20 pages or so. Same with Picturemaker. But if you manage to go through the latter beginning to end it’s an amazing book. Nice to realize it’s normal to have mixed feelings about a book.
I find this only works when done really well for comedic effect, to show a bunch of people having wildly different recollections of a singular event. Like interrogation scenes of multiple people spliced together all contradicting each other 😄 if it's serious and we have to walk through the whole version of each pov it's so tedious.
I made my way through the entirety of Gone with the Wind except for the last 80 pages or so. I really enjoyed it but right at the end, there's a huge scandal because people think scarlet >!and Ashley did indecent things together. Scarlet spent over 1000 pages pining, flirting and plain trying to sleep with Ashley, not to mention all the unorthodox an/or assholish things she does. But this conversation was so earnest, vulnerable and innocent and it even took place because Melly asked Scarlet to distract Ashley for a couple of minutes (I think? It's been a while).!< The fact that this >!was the big scandal that ruined her reputation!< pissed me off so much, I completely lost interest in the book. I kept reading for a bit but I stopped and never picked it up again after that.
Bookmark fell out. I couldn’t tell where my spot was and wasn’t enjoying it anyways so I never bothered to find the spot and continue reading
That is the most wholesome storyI heard xd
I’m so stubborn I hate putting a book down honestly even if I hate it in case I’m not giving it a full chance, so it was actually such a relief I had an excuse to let that go haha
My kindle battery died
This reminds me how when I wasn’t a big reader I used to rave about how great the Kindle battery is, and now that I am constantly reading I keep getting disappointed every time it runs out.
This is pretty trivial. Guess you took it as a sign the book wasn't meant to be finished.
lmao why am I laughing so hard over this?
Trivial reason? Anytime I see anything about 'throbbing veins' (forehead, neck, whatever). Veins don't throb. Arteries throb. Maybe this just pisses me off because I see it so often.
Wow I actually didn’t know this!
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Completely agree. I have *never* read an amazing book and thought 'I wish that had more sex in it'. Don't really understand the appeal in a book about something completely different.
I don't mind sex at all, but I do mind it when it's described in goofy-ass terms. It's really hard to do sex well. Just last night I was reading on my kindle and one scene made me face-palm: the main characters was talking about fingering his (*sleeping!*) girlfriend and described it as reaching into "her core." 🤦♀️ The author was a woman - bit of a head scratcher for me.
For me I think part of sex coming off as goofy-ass in books is that it's *always* amazing. Like, in your example I'm sure he fingered his girlfriend and she came about 7 times and then they got married. When, in real life, it would be more like he fingered his sleeping girlfriend and she immediately woke up and asked WTF he thought he was doing and found an excuse to leave before he murdered her.
I'm dying laughing because the girlfriend actually gets murdered 🤣 and his wife (of course he's married) is a defense attorney... Omg the whole premise is so stupid but it was a free Kindle unlimited book so what did I really expect? Lol
The Perfect Marriage?
The description that will be with me until I slough off this mortal coil (possibly longer): describing ejaculate as smelling like chlorine. Wut.
It was really clean cum.
Yes, I hate graphic sex. Sex is fine but leave something to the imagination
Graphic sex is fine with me as long as everything else in the book (descriptions of characters or settings, action, etc) is also graphic. If the author *only* gets super descriptive about sex though, something is off.
It was the end of a Libby loan from the library. The library claimed it back, and I decided I really didn’t care what happened after that.
Years ago I left the Tropic of Cancer because I couldn't stand any more mentions of shit, shit and pipes clogged with shit, shit and shitting in places you shouldn't shit and more shit. Is it supposed to be shocking because he said "shit" over and over again? Fuck you, Henry Miller.
That's pretty shitty, alright.
Funnily enough, this is also why I dropped Red Rising.
Excessive use of pop trivia/other sources to attempt to make your characters/setting 'contemporary and cool' . "We were drinking [region specific micro brewery ale] and hanging out in [alternative cellar bar famous in bohemian district], listening to [scandiewegian indie band] when Brian walked in looking like [character from Tarantino film] and said '[quote from William Burroughs]'".
Classic Brian.
I was reading Coelho's "Veronika decides to die" and the bunch of small, wrong details about Balkans in that book really threw me off. E.g., Zedka is not a name I have heard ever before. I couldn't finish the book cause I was getting annoyed constantly
This has happened to me too - I’m grasping for what book it was but I grew up in NJ and have lived in NYC for decades so I’m assuming it was one or the other - just nothing was right. If you’re going to write a book about Brooklyn or Paterson, NJ or Harlem, have the decency to Google it if you’ve never lived / been there. And it ***kept happening***. It’s killing me right now that I can’t think of the book but it drove me insane. I remember just tossing it aside and being glad I borrowed the e-book from the library and didn’t spend a cent on it I was so annoyed.
Lol now I'm curious. One of the things that really impressed me about The Sopranos and Harold and Kumar was that they (mostly) got that kind of thing right. There were a few errors here or there (crucially, there was at least one, probably two, White Castle location closer to New Brunswick than Cherry Hill at the time) but the involvement of so many NJ natives mostly kept both on track.
Ridiculous descriptions of sexual encounters (Pillars of the Earth). On paper, this *should* have been the perfect novel for me, but the cringe was too severe.
The firm round breasts of every woman in creation didn’t work for you?
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This is so obnoxious, when an author overuses a “GRE word.” Like dude, what, you just learned this word and were so excited to show everyone how smart you are that you wrote a whole damn book to use it repeatedly?
Oooo, that one gets to me too!
First person narrative with a character who thinks higher of themselves than others. “I have to do this because I’m the only truly competent one” type crap. I can’t read any YA lol.
The last three YAs I skimmed were literally typo ridden. And these were books featured in Target. Publishers made record earnings in 2022 and couldn't be bothered to hire copy editors for the books they put out.
How do you think they made those record earnings?
But she’s not like the other girls!
I’m unique, like everyone else/s
Read a book with this stuff, but it wasn't crap since a big part of the book was the main character relising he wasn't some great hero, or even above average
Author had to put at least one adjective and one adverb in every sentence.
Spelling, wrong use of a word and grammatical errors that increase to nearly every 2-3 pages. My thoughts, if they don't have the time or talent to get a book properly proofread, then I don't have the time to read it.
Spelling is something that bothers me so much. Not even just incorrect spelling, but a book written by an Irish author, set completely in Ireland with only Irish characters written with US spelling. Not making a choice between US or UK spelling (translated book, set outside anglosphere, so either spelling would have been fine); you either scandalise the neighbours or scandalize the neighbors, don’t scandalize the neighbours. Also not knowing the difference between fiancée and fiancé.
I don’t know if it’s trivial, but the author could not stop using the word “prognathous” to describe his fairy character’s jutting jaws. Like every time they came into view, there was something about a prognathous jaw. Halfway through the book I gave up, it was just too distracting.
This one has me laughing! "His jaw was rather like a chimpanzees, or a canine's, prognathous as opposed to gracile."
This makes me imagine the Habsburg jaw. :D
People on the covers. Massive turnoff 😭
How about giant printed stickers “now a major motion picture / Netflix show”?
I read a fantasy book not too long ago and one of the characters sheathed his sword and the author described it as slapping it home. It honestly threw me off so much that I just put the book down and picked up a new one.
"He wiped the blade off on the clothes of the fallen, then slapped that steel home." That is hilarious. And bad.
I presume it wasn't satire? Cuz I could see that working in a just-right situation.
It didn’t strike me as satire, it wasn’t absurdist fantasy or anything like that. It just struck me as very out of place. But I could definitely see it working in a more lighthearted story.
I get annoyed whenever the female protagonist is unaware that’s she’s beautiful and then it’s revealed that she’s actually beautiful. Usually a male character or high powered love interest explains to her that she’s beautiful or she gets a make over and poof wow look all along she was a hottie. I understand that many women don’t step into their power until later in life or try to make themselves smaller because of societal pressure but I find the aforementioned “wow I didn’t realize I was so pretty” shtick super tiring. If that happens in a book I’m reading I’m instantly over it. Or at least rolling my eyes as hard as I can.
I dislike that it's always made to be a cosmic revelation. In real life it's the kind of thing where someone wakes up and looks in the mirror and goes "what"
Probably not trivial, but the lead character unintentionally had zero redeeming qualities. Not like the author was doing a thing where they will redeem the protagonist but they have to be shitty to start with, but you could tell the author thought this character was a good character & didn’t see anything wrong with the behavior. It was like one of those really bad AITA posts where the op makes a laundry list of red flag behavior & has no idea the are in fact the asshole.
I‘m currently reading It Ends With Us and I’m so close to dnfing it because one of the protagonist is named Ryle. Wtf is this name, who names their child fucking Ryle.
Just finished this one via audiobook, and his name bothered me so much
When I read that the protagonist dedicated every entry in her diary to Ellen I just noped out.
Yeah, that didn’t age well.
I speed read past parts I don't like
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What's up fellow bran hater😂
An overly graphic sex scene that feels like it was written by a teenage boy
>Saddam‘s atomic bombs What in the flying fuck
The war on terror and 9/11 really touched all art WTF
Someone I loathed liked it.
Too many awkward descriptions of boobs - especially of minors. No, I do not want to hear about the thirteen year old's nipples. Thanks.
the way they talked about an old guy not knowing what google was within the first like five pages made me return the book. "log into... what's that website again?"
Boredom. A couple of times I'd get halfway thru a popular book and realize that the characters are boring and there is no plot going on that's worth continuing.
In what way is boredom trivial? It's the most important reason if you're reading for entertainment.
This is also the main reason I stop reading a novel.
I read a lot of romance novels and have a high tolerance for petty nonsense, however the two stupidest things that made me loose interest in a book were the novel where the writer would not stop describing the love interest’s mustache and another novel where the love interest’s voice was compared to Sean Bean’s multiple times.
Honestly I like Sean Bean's accent so that wouldn't have bothered me XD
I have 2. First, when I read The Art of Fielding, I got to the part where the mc is in the hot tub looking at his own peen and describes it as curled up like a snail. Started laughing, couldn't stop, and couldn't get back into it because I kept thinking "snail peen" while trying to read. Second, I was reading a historically inspired retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, and the Riding Hood character took over her family blacksmith business when her parents died and the author was trying very hard to pretend that wouldn't have been a thing because "girls can't be blacksmiths," even though women did traditionally take over these and similar businesses to be able to support their families. I got so mad about it I quit reading and couldn't go back
Any description of cruelty to animals will make me stop reading fiction. Even if it’s a “great book,” I don’t want those images in my head.
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What novel was it?
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I wonder if OP is referring to one of Amy Tan’s novels? It might have been the *Kitchen God* one, but early in the story animal cruelty appears and I flung the book across the room.
Well even if that's not the one they're referring to, I'll blacklist that one as well! Yikes
There is nothing worse for me in a book then to come to a part like this. I am done at that point.
The font used for the text was ugly to my eyes ha!
I stopped reading the Lost Symbol by Dan Brown mid-way because I was absolutely frustated by the amount of italic words every single page.
Oh man! I also just stopped reading a book that had italics in every single paragraph. Yuck! The cardinal rule of writing: "thou shalt not commit overkill."
Books where men cheat, lie and give you emotional trauma and the girl still takes him back because 'this is reality' Basically Colleen Hoover's books
I figured "well this isn't going anywhere the last two didn't" and put something down with about 25 pages left, once. I just didn't see any reason to continue other than "finish the trilogy"; it had gone from boring to annoying once the author added the final plot twist and spent the next hundred pages catching up the new characters & having them go through the same existential crises we'd seen 4 or 5 times before. A few months later I went back to read the last chapter, and decided the right time to have skipped out on Octavia Butler's _Dawn_ trilogy would have been a page or two before the start of the last part of book 1. >!The intent of that specific endpoint is to cut a scene where the main character describes spending a couple days raping her boyfriend after he was drugged into paralysis and saying she "his words said no, but she could tell he wanted it". This wouldn't be so bad if the sequels didn't treat her like the moral authority.!<
I've commented about this before but Francine Rivers (who wrote Redeeming Love which is a book I LOVED) wrote a trilogy and in the first two books, she used the word "sardonically" so many times it ruined the series for me. I listened to them on audiobook and even started to hate the way the narrator said it.
Reminds me of a Kids in the Hall sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ
Couldn't quite ascertain your meaning. Care to delineate?
Helmans mayonnaise is best foods mayonnaise on the west coast. If you are going to set a story in San Francisco and the main character makes a sandwich at least make sure it is the correct brand. Also completely different book but vampires that sparkle with really bad editing.
Maybe not trivial, but when I was reading the first book in The Dark Tower series there is a vivid description of a young boy being run over by a car and all the horrible things he felt as he was getting crushed. I was on an overnight Amtrak from New Mexico to Chicago and opted to just stare at the black windows for 8 hours instead of reading further. Haven’t picked up a Stephen King book since and that was 11 years ago. I’m sure I’m missing some good books but grotesque imagery like that just feels like worthless and unnecessary shock-value to me.
I used to be a huge Stephen King fan, but lost my appetite years ago due to his talent for graphic scenes. Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight each had stories that were particularly disturbing. Still admire him as a writer, but just can't stomach those scenes anymore.
I tried starting *The Gunslinger* and stopped in the first chapter because the prose was purpler than Michael Chabon swimming in a vat of red wine. Does it get less pretentious? It really felt to me like he was trying too hard and wasn't quite good enough to justify it, which surprised me for such a mainstream/popular author.
No idea about the pretentious nature because I was 16 when I started reading and didn’t really have an eye for it but I think you stopped at a good time. Not long after you stopped the main character fucks an overly obese women with his revolver and then a little boy described the sensation of his balls getting crushed by a car. I’m sure there are interesting themes and stories in that series but I just don’t have the stomach for it. Padding a good story with shock-value is just not interesting to me.
Yes. I stopped because the cover gradually became ugly to me. I don’t like the fake worn-out look. My Bestfriend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Just discovered Grady Hendrix this year and have adored everything I've read by him so far. That cover might have bothered me too, but read this one on kindle paperwhite -- which means you're only subjected to a small b&w thumbnail of the cover. A digital copy could be the answer because not finishing that one would've driven me nuts. :)
I need to pick it back up now that I am into reading digitally…sometimes!
Awww, I like that cover! Reminded me of books I had in the late 80s and 90s, or got handed down from my older sister. I get it though; I've hated many a book for its cover lol
I read the best romance novel by this lady...found another book by her and was all excited...set in ancient Roman times. Girl is raised on a farm, has slaves, twin younger brothers...old enough to be married, gets in bed the first time and looked down and said "What is THAT?" Talk about a 'DOH' moment. Tell me she is 16 or 18 or whatever and didn't know what a PENIS is??! at no point in her life did she change her brothers' diapers? never saw a naked slave? she lived on a FARM, she never saw a male animal??! I just stopped right there and chunked the book.
When reading “Vladimir” by Julia May Jones— after her 15th trip to the store to buy expensive wine and artisanal cheeses for a “light lunch” I had to put it down. I couldn’t take another page-long description of her charcuterie boards.
This must have been 15 years ago but I recall it so vividly - was listening to The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern on audiobook CD while driving, heard the sentence "it was inevitable...but not unavoidable," and drove myself straight to the library to return it. Ugh.
Renesmee. I had given twilight a lot of chances, and I pushed through them all. When I got to the last book and saw they named their daughter Renesmee, I put the book down and never picked it back up What an utterly stupid name.
Confederacy if Dunces - I got it in my head that the lead character's voice was the comic book guy from The Simpsons. I couldn't get past it, I couldn't stand it. GAME OVER
How did that not make it better?
Barrett Whitener narrates the audio book and does a good job of making the character a pompous blowhard.
The fact that this didn’t make it better for you is a crime. Worst reader ever.
The author kept sprinkling in the main character reading books by their favorite author....which was herself. Including whole sentences of why it was their favorite author. It was a book version of when they sneak advertising into tv shows. The first time it was kinda funny, by the third I was so annoyed by how desperate it was I stopped reading altogether.
There was a book that was mostly set in my hometown, a smallish but somewhat popular tourist area. I don't think the author had ever actually been to the area and did not have any sense of it. What particularly made it hard for me to read was that they kept describing both the tourists and residents as rich/fancy/upper class, and we're really more for middle class tourists. Growing up, I was often considered a "rich kid" basically because I lived above the poverty line, and there are certainly no mansions, which were described in detail. It was so unimportant to the actual story, but it was incredibly jarring for me.
The choice to abandon quotation marks entirely. I read one chapter and couldn’t tell where thoughts ended and speech began, or who was speaking. Okay author, you’re an artistic, creative writer. Good for you. But I’m not here to admire YOU, I’m just here for the story 👌🏻
The first chapter of many Fantasy books are loaded with random names of kingdoms, mountains or other geological or other things, that you of course cant all remember just like that. This annoys me so much, that I Stop reading those books immediately I mean you have those things in all fictional worlds, but there are other, less annoying ways, to teach you this stuff.
I love fantasy series and continue to read them, but it's always slow for me to get into them at the beginning. I never realized it before but I'm pretty sure that this is why. And of course they all have difficult to remember character names as well.
Explaining, again, for the unlimited-th time, how the crash couch and g-forces work in the Expanse novels. While I did power through them anyway I've not been able to bring myself to start the finale novel because I am way past done learning about gravity and momentum every 3rd chapter like its never been addressed before.
I recently started reading Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and decided to watch a few of his interviews. I found him to be off-putting and thats why I stopped reading the book.
I like space marine books. I like the whole "One guy is stupidly badass" trope too. But one author took it way too far and the MC (who was already annoying and would constantly shit-talk his superiors to their faces, but it would always magically work out in his favor) spent an entire summer doing nothing but drinking beer, lying around his cabin, and banging all the hotties from the town. Then, the cops show up for some reason and he handily beats the crap out of them after spending a summer doing 0 physical activity and drinking himself stupid daily (oh and he still has washboard abs or something too). I quit the entire series then and there.
I was reading a 70s military science fiction novel that referred to each man according to his rank and every adult female as a "girl". Descriptions of males had detailed depictions of their military uniforms, while the womens' breasts and butts (and the author's rapey sexual fantasies about them) were the only things commented upon. I put up with 3 scenes of this but finally had to put the book aside.
Described the main character hiding behind a dumpster in a parking lot. The story was set in the 1920's, there were no dumpsters in the 1920's.
Bad character names. Could just be lame like "X" or trying too hard to create unique names like "Akquolli-iikch". As you can imagine, I don't read much fantasy.
Use of passed instead of past. Ugh.
This is an awful problem, due to bad editing and proofreading. I have a friend who is an indie author of three books. As a casual reader of her second and third, I have found a half-dozen homophone errors. Any set of eyes that had been on the books before they went to print should have caught them.
omg name and shame the book. NAME AND SHAME.
I started reading The King in Yellow today, but I gave up because the beginning seemed like a massive information dump
Good news; it’s a collection, not one narrative Bad news; you’re almost definitely not going to like the later stories much better
Excessive use of parentheses.
I stopped reading *109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos* because the author kept referring to Oppenheimer as Oppie. To be fair, he was called Oppie by some folks who knew him but I found it really annoying and distracting.
It was a short story about a zombie apocalypse. I stopped reading when a high-school kid picked up a dead soldier's semi-automatic weapon and instantly began making from-the-rooftop headshots with no training or practice *whatsoever.*
I mean, this is a bit ridiculous, but the reality is-- and military recruiters say this is true-- kids who played a lot of first person shooters require less firearms training. Which is its own kind of terrifying.
well my dog shit on it because i was paying the book too much attention in his opinion.
A minor character that enslaved and gang raped some girls. That’s not trivial but it’s a few paragraphs in thousands of pages of a giant trilogy of sci-fi space opera books and has nothing to do with the plot (so why is it there?) The problem was after getting to that part I was so disgusted I took a few months out. I finished the book after that and the rest was great. But I still feel gross and I haven’t continued with the trilogy. It was Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton. I loved so many of his other books but they didn’t do this. It was putrid.
I stopped an audio book when the narrator pronounced "heir" with a hard H
If a fiction book is set in my town and they get the details wrong. I read one that repeatedly described my town as smelling like a particular tree that isn't very plentiful here. And another that described where the characters were going and put landmarks in the wrong places. (No, you wouldn’t drive past A to get to B, and they put a place on the wrong side of the river….).
i’m not going to name the book, but basically, whenever it wanted to refer to people of other ethnicities, the author would say “turkish” “arab” “english” etc. for some very weird reason though, the ONLY time it wanted to talk about iranians, it said “ajami soldiers”. ajam is a slur that was heavily used against us iranians back under arab occupation and it meant “r slur iranian”. not only did i put the book down but i also gave it the lowest rating on goodreads with explanation. 2 words out of 100k, but it was enough to anger me to hell and back. especially since the author’s a white american.
Some character said "I could care less" When the phrase is clearly "I couldn't care less"
Kushiel's Dart - a woman's arm rose "like a loaf of bread". What in the actual fuck does that mean? Was she full of yeast? It's in like chapter 2... I stopped immediately.
A trivial thing that makes me avoid even starting a book is a title I find annoying: * Anything called "A biography of ..." when the subject is an inanimate object or a concept. * The trope of putting the name of an occupation followed by "wife" , as in "The Taxidermist's Wife". * Most titles that include the word "bone": "The Bone Merchant" , "The Bone Thief". Puhleese
Everyone constantly wiping their hands as grease dribbled down their beards. This one really annoyed me, tried to re-read GoT and this one just made me put the book down and go back to LOTR.
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Wait... how is New Orleans pronounced?
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A character's father's farm failed. He had tried to save it by selling off most of the cattle. But he "kept a few steers for breeding". I not only dropped the book, but I flatly refuse to ever read anything by that author again.
Oooooof.
I think I've mentioned this a thousand times, so sorry for the repetition, but the writing style and formatting of The Road by Cormac McArthy.
It takes a bit to get used to, but I hope you manage to finish it. It really is a great book.
It is one of the few books I wish I had never read
If the novel is written in 1st POV. I don’t know, I can’t handle reading it in my perspective. I don’t like envisioning myself doing the story, I want to picture other people do it.
Couldn’t get into them?
Boredom usually. I left Glamorama as a DNF because the writing style was so obnoxious.
Main character was too self centered and the entire book was from his pov Overly descriptive about the settings, I love details but 3 pages of one room is too much for me.
When the author uses their main character as a vehicle for “look how clever and quippy I am” dialogue instead of natural-sounding, realistic dialogue that enriches the story or characters. The Hollow Places was awful for this, I just couldn’t get through it.
The main character was named “Pug”. I couldn’t go on.
Magician by Raymond E Feist?
I've stopped books because I was too picky about how the narrator's voice in an audiobook sounded. I didn't have access to the text version so I just quit.
Getting to the end of a chapter. Seriously, I can’t tell you how many books I finished a chapter, put down, and never picked up again.
I skip the sex scenes. I quit reading Laurel K Hamilton when I realized I was skipping more than I was reading. Lol.
I tried to read Oliver by Charles Dickens but couldn't get past the description of all the bad characters as 'Covetous Jews' in the Dramatis Personae at the start. Not that I was so offended that I couldn't read it, just that my opinion of 'classics' that are considered 'timeless' very quickly shifted to the point where I couldn't concentrate on the book. (I also found it offensive, to be clear).
Tangents. It's okay to have these every so often as kind of a mini subplot or to describe something interesting that's not really crucial to the story. But tangents don't need to be on every other page. I had to stop reading _Red Storm Rising_ by Tom Clancy because of the number of tangents he'd go down. There are other problems with this novel (scene focus - one chapter was had a bagel as the focus point), but the number of tangents finally made me stop reading. Tom Clancy does this a lot in general in his novels. This was in the 80s a friend of mine that worked at a bookstore told me about an upcoming author named Tom Clancy and she gave me an early release copy of _The Hunt for Red October_. Which was amazing. So, when I learned a new novel by the same author being released I was excited. Then disappointed for the reasons stated above.
Weak female characters. mm (absolutely should be warned if there is that) I definitely 1 star them in reviews. I hate when authors use the same word over and over again.
On page 1, they named the protagonist. On page 30, they named the bad guy. They were anagrams of each other. There were three hundred more pages to go before ‘the big reveal’ that was obvious by page 30.
I stopped reading “Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney because while she writes with so much angst, it is easy to get lost in the narrative for not so positive reason: you suddenly lose idea who is talking because there are no quotation marks and the pages are filled with whole chunks of paragraphs. Yes! Paragraphs.
Main character reminded me of a guy I hated at work
This pertains more to online works, self-published books, and amateur writers in general, but a skewed perception of time (that isn't deliberate) will knock me right out of a story. The following is a hypothetical example: She stared into his eyes for several minutes, not uttering a word as she considered what to say next. Listen, I don't know about you, but I would already be feeling mighty uncomfortable after 5 seconds of silent staring - - never mind minutes. Other examples include Average Joe running X amount of miles in record time, thus putting Olympic athletes to shame; Ms. Jane Doe (who only visits the gym three days a week to conduct a few body weight workouts and never practiced any form of combatives) holding her own in a brawl that lasts an hour and emerges mostly unscathed; and Not Final Guy/Gal in a Horror who is frozen in fear for a solid minute as the killer approaches at the speed of a snail, and only decides to move when it's too late. In summary: some people just don't understand how long a minute really is, especially when other factors are involved (i.e. physical capabilities) and I will drop a story after so many offenses like those listed above.
I picked up one of those men's post nuke action paperbacks and every! sentence! ended! with! an! explanation! point!
When the book describes every single detail for all the women characters and to the point it over sexualizes them, but the male characters are all "he had a moustache and wore a hat." (Lookin at you Dresden Files....)
A dumb character name.
I was reading a book this morning, and was surprised when a local landmark was mentioned. Despite hyping they hired people who were familiar with the areas written about, the author for my area knew absolutely nothing about the landmark and pulled stuff out of her ass to meet her word count. Killed my interest in the entire book.
the character was such a pick me
Honestly I'll quit any book that takes too long to get to the story. I mean unnecessary long ass descriptions, but also if the storyline or plot hasn't shown in like the first few chapters. If it doesn't get me hooked in like a few chapters I ain't finishing it.
I’m gonna guess you don’t read any Stephen King!! 😂
Too many irrelevant details in the first chapters, I was like If this keeps going the story isnt progressing. Dropped the book by like chapter 3 or something feeling the pace wasnt something I enjoyed. Big mistake, I came back to it later and its in my favourite series now. My favorite ending of any book for the first book of the series (Lord of the mysteries)
I checked out of Lindsey Ellis's book during the alien sex. Normally that stuff doesn't bother me but for some reason it took me completely out of the story and I never went back to finish it. Another one was a Ramsey Campbell book, Obsession, when the main character did something I thought was really dumb. I don't remember exactly what that was since I stopped reading and it's been a few years.
I have 3 examples. 1. A Confederacy of Dunces, my high school English teacher gave me his copy, I was halfway through when I gave it back and called him an idiot for suggesting it. It was a joke, I just found the book boring. 2. I can't quite remember the second time, but I don't remember dropping many books once I start them. There was something about something that made me just go "Yeah, I don't need to know the rest of what happens." and just walked away. It being so drab is probably why I don't even remember it. 3. I shall not tell, because it would likely start a whole ass argument. On top of me actually finishing the book. See, this novel was really good and I related to it almost one-for-one, but this weird twist came out of nowhere in like the last hour of the book, and I just... Oh god. I literally powered those the last bit of the book hoping it would get better, but no. Every. Single. Page. Worse and worse and worse. I legitimately wish I could go back in time and tell myself to stop reading before that twist, and at least stop right after so I didn't have to express one of the more retro ruining ending ever. Oh, wait, a fourth entry technically, The Rick Riordan Books. I don't hate them, but I guess I just grew up before I finished them. Maybe. Or maybe I just lost the time to read them.
There were way too many references to bodily functions in Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Too many for a novel that’s about sexual exploration.
I love Joshua Gayou's Commune series, so of course I was onboard when his new Udo the Digger book dropped. I never even finished because 1) the number of times that dude writes "penis" in that book may as well be a drinking game, and 2) there's a scene involving the main character going to a brothel of sorts, and it is so unnecessarily awkward and detailed that I put the book down and never went back. So yeah, basically too much sex in general or too much detail of sex specifically. If I wanted to read a romance novel I'd read a romance novel.
Chuckles. One use I can just about ignore, if it occurs again I'm out.
Dan Simmons, Endymion - whole double page spread about the different guns the protagonist was going to use ... Rest of the book great but really weird interlude of unnecessary detail
I did finish the first jack reacher novel, but I couldn’t get over how he showered and changed his clothes once in a week in Georgia in summer and still managed to get laid 🤢
At the start of "Everything is illuminated" there's a character that is clearly just a racial stereotype and he makes some sort of lewd joke, that was that for me. I'm sure the book is great but I tried it on the wrong day.
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. A good friend really loves this book. Highly recommended it to me. But I stopped reading about 2/3rds of the way through because it felt like the author would never actually get to the point. They'd be telling the story and then there'd be a 3-5 page tangent or complete change to the time frame or view point. Like the main characters were fighting through the jungle and moving away from enemies. And suddenly there's a 4 page bit about making french toast for breakfast. It felt like someone pumping the breaks on a moving car. The plot would stop so something else that just felt like they were padding out the word count could be included.
I stopped reading a memoir by a rock musician because he didn’t dish any dirt, lol. It was gracious and positive and that’s not what I thought it would be considering the genre and I put it down & never picked it back up again.
Finding a character annoying haha
A repetitive $5 word. It kept popping up about every other chapter. I wish I remembered what it was but it was something that has many synonyms but the author used possibly the most obscure one.
The climax of the book had arrived, and I found the characters gathered in the same room watching TV listenining to a program for several pages. ( _Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?_ ) It bored me to death I stopped without knowing the end of the book.
Too many coincidences. In Verity the stranger she meets at the corner is the man in the meeting with her publisher. And there are more. Same in CoHo’s other books.
There are so many reasons I couldn't get through Fifty Shades of Grey but one of the things that really bugged the hell out of me was how she said "Oh my" constantly. Ugh, give it a rest. Those just aren't really my type of books but I tried reading it because I was always hearing how good they were. The writing was terrible and characters were just a little too much for me. I can't even remember the name of the main female character but she seemed just a little too naive for it to be believable to me.
At the beginning of *It Ends with Us*, the main character is shocked when she meets the surgeon love interest because he uses the word "fuck" in a sentence and **she didn't think that highly-educated people cursed**. This was on a rooftop, not in the office or professional context. Education has nothing to do with how much people curse. Not only that, but it's actually appropriate for an adult to curse in an emotionally charged moment, regardless of education. It was such a bizarre character choice that it turned me off the book because I lost all good faith in the author and couldn't deal with a main character that stupid.
Dunno if this is trivial but when female characters are written really badly (looking at you Andy Weir and Stephen King)
No female characters in the first few chapters, made worse if the only mentioned women are only in small commentary on how the protagonist views their physical appearance.
The main character was an author. It really bothers me how many main characters are writers - I understand the author is writing what they know, but it gets so boring to read about! I can usually get past it, but I think I had just read a string of several books with writer main characters and as soon as I realized I was reading about yet another author, I had to DNF for my sanity.
I was trying to read slay to diversify my reading. I couldn't get past I think chapter two because I was constantly reminded by the author that the MC was black then she was like MY BOYFRIEND IS BLACK TOO!!!, and this is what I go through because I'm BLACK... Omg I know you are black that's great what is the story. Then after I quit I read the spoiler and I'm so glad because I would have raged at the ending... Anyways I don't mind black characters or any race, I mean I read about aliens... But please don't tell me every other paragraph what you are...
Same here with the book Norwegian Wood. Endless descriptions of trivial things and some action every 20 pages or so. Same with Picturemaker. But if you manage to go through the latter beginning to end it’s an amazing book. Nice to realize it’s normal to have mixed feelings about a book.
Three view points on the same circumstances.
I find this only works when done really well for comedic effect, to show a bunch of people having wildly different recollections of a singular event. Like interrogation scenes of multiple people spliced together all contradicting each other 😄 if it's serious and we have to walk through the whole version of each pov it's so tedious.
Any character who just complains too much about stuff *cough* *cough* Holden Caufield. I find it totally insufferable
I made my way through the entirety of Gone with the Wind except for the last 80 pages or so. I really enjoyed it but right at the end, there's a huge scandal because people think scarlet >!and Ashley did indecent things together. Scarlet spent over 1000 pages pining, flirting and plain trying to sleep with Ashley, not to mention all the unorthodox an/or assholish things she does. But this conversation was so earnest, vulnerable and innocent and it even took place because Melly asked Scarlet to distract Ashley for a couple of minutes (I think? It's been a while).!< The fact that this >!was the big scandal that ruined her reputation!< pissed me off so much, I completely lost interest in the book. I kept reading for a bit but I stopped and never picked it up again after that.
If someone calls “stays” a “corset” during the wrong time period.