Discussion Friday!

[telophase]

Because my primary work-type responsibility today is teaching myself AJAX!

So ... when reading fiction, what sort of thing is likely to keep you from getting into a book, throw you out of a book, or at least give you enough mental whiplash that you're pulled away from it enough to not enjoy it as much?

Bonus points if you've gotten into arguments about it on the intartubes from people who apparently believe that if they just argue hard enough about said things you will spontaneously stop having said problems.

My personal pet peeves:

1) A shift of point of view (POV) deep into the book, when there's been no indication for a long time that this is actually a multiple POV book, instead of a single POV. If I'm this deep into the book, I'm invested in the POV character and, dammit, I don't want to travel with someone else for a while! But if I know from near the start that I'm traveling with several people, not just one, I'm OK with that.

2) A piece of technology thrown in at some point far into the book that abruptly changes my mental image of the tech and social level of the world. The canonical example of this for me is Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magics, which I'd somehow tagged as mid-19th century level with trains, until at some point I ran across a mention of a car, which abruptly wrenched my mental image from mid-Victorian to Edwardian, and it was damn unpleasant, let me tell you. (It's entirely possible I missed an earlier mention of cars, that first time I read it, but it still stands.)

3) Going on from that, mentions of fashion, architecture, or other cultural things from history that are jumbled up. By which I mean, if your peasants are at a feudal level suitable for 9th-century England, but your nobles are wearing ruffs and living in Jacobean manor houses, it's going to annoy the hell out of me. I don't care how many people tell me "But it's FANTASY, not HISTORY!" If you're using details that match the history of our world, you're going to have to explain why they differ to get me invested in it. (And if you transplant Asian cultures so that they live in countries next door to European cultures, you're going to have to explain why there's not been more cultural exchange between the two over the centuries.)

4) ... I've forgotten #4. I shall return and add it when I remember. ETA: remembered it! I shall leave it in a comment.

Comments

My #4

[telophase.livejournal.com]

4) When a writer doesn't give me enough description of a character, or coyly reveals essential things late in the book, a la Heinlein in Starship Troopers*. I don't need much, just enough points to hang my own visions on.

I'm listening to John Scalzi's The Last Colony right now, and it's driving me nuts that he doesn't describe his aliens. He's mentioned on his blog that it's part of his writing that he does as little description of characters as possible, so as to allow the reader to put his or her own images in, but I am not the sort of reader for whom this works. (I am also treading lightly on the subject of Scalzi's post about this, as it was involved in the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate Part I.)

I've just finished listening to a section in the book where two different aliens have a long conversation, and the only mention of a physical description is near the end, when one of them raises a paw. And as I'd tentatively tagged that guy as insectile to start with,** it annoyed the hell out of me. I did spend most of the conversation not paying attention to it, but annoyed at Scalzi for not having the guts to just describe his damn aliens.


--

* Which I totally missed the first time I read it, I admit. :D And if I'd also alerted on "Rico" and "Tagalog," it wouldn't have been a problem for me. But I was oblivious enough as a kid reading it that I didn't notice the late mention of dark skin until after I'd read an essay telling me about it. So it wasn't actually a problem in ST, it's just that I know most everyone here will understand the sort of thing I'm talking about if I mention it ehre.

** My default aliens are insectile, it seems.

Re: My #4

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

I hate it when I have no idea what characters look like. If they're aliens it's even more important that I have at least some mental picture.

Re: My #4

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I just read the first Alexander McCall Smith, and something I noticed about halfway through was that, aside from the fact that Precious was apparently both stout and attractive, I really had no idea what some characters were supposed to look like, but the descriptions of their personalities had me creating physical characteristics.

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

I pretty much share your disconnects and also any deus ex machina but especially one that entirely shifts the plot arc (His Dark Materials, I am looking at you).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I got through book 2 and bought book 3, then realized that not only did I not remember any of the plot from 1 and 2, I didn't actually care, so I never read it. XD

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I remember that jolt from A College of Magics--and having read the book more times than I can count, I think you're right in not remembering any earlier mention of cars. (Though I think in my case the shock was lessened because when I checked the back cover of my copy it did set the time period as 1904 or something, so I felt it was my own fault for not paying enough attention.)

Terrible infodumping always does it for me. I remember picking up Bitten and being, if not really drawn in, at least engaged enough to keep reading--and then at about page 60 the narrator actually used the phrase "As you know". And she did it to relate something she'd already talked about a few pages before. Book, meet wall.

Also, characters or situations used as excuses for blatant agenda-pushing and proselytizing. Even if I happen to agree with the sentiment behind it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the big infodump pretty much works only when it's the sort of book for which it works. Er, like for example, Scalzi's books tend to stop and explain FTL skip drives, or the process of creating genetically-modified soldiers to you, but for me it works, because part of the appeal of the book is the technofetish, if that makes sense. And I much prefer the author just saying, "Here's how it's done! [blah]" without having the characters explain it to each other.

And re: your last point - yeah. There's a difference between exploring the consequences of a particular situation as an inherent part of the plot or worldbuilding, and manipulating it to proselytize.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Number 3 really really REALLY gets my goat. If I had a goat, it would be gotten. This is amongst my (many) issues with Merlin. Geoffrey of Monmouth? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Also, any form of soul-bonding at first sight. Urgle.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait, and since I aparently have many thoughts on this.

Making your political-foes into staw(wo)men, especially uncaring evil people for the sake of being evil. *sigh*

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I learned about College of Magics through stumbling across a copy of Scholar of Magics which, by the description and cover illustration, was clearly Edwardian. I wonder if I would have made the same mistake without that.

For me? Similar things. Plus:

Worlds with only men tend to throw me out unless it's a plot that simply doesn't work if the main cast isn't all male. For example, Lies of Locke Lamora worked fine for me because women clearly had an important place in that world, the plotline just required a primarily male cast. But other things have given me whiplash with the "well, we just don't see why there should be women."

Romantic pairings with huge power imbalances, especially if said imbalance is supposed to add to the appeal of the pairing. I don't particularly care if my fiction has a romance or not (well, outside of romance novels, of course) but I tend to not do well when there is a romantic plotline that bothers me.

And first person present tense narrative kills me.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I can take things like military fantasy that's all-male, or with women in a subordinate role, because that's the sort of society that historically has been that way. And while I do appreciate women fighters and integrated fighting forces in fantasy, the author really kind of has to explain how it works to me, what with women having pregnancy issues and all. :)

Although it would be really nice if ANY sort of military fantasy dealt with soldiers of any gender getting the clap. Looking back, I'm not entirely sure I can think of any that have done that.

[sleary.livejournal.com]

Grammar issues will make me put the book down. If the author's style is "alright" and she has overruled her copyeditor, I'm out, especially if I notice it early on.

If the heroine is a feisty redheads with flashing eyes that match her temper... BZZT. Thank you for playing. NEXT! Lots of things from The Tough Guide will get me, in fact.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, yes, flashing eyes throw me out of a book right away. XD

[affreca.livejournal.com]

Slightly idiosyncratic of me, but bad geology gets me everytime. Troll Quest and its completely wrong infodump on the sandstone caves under the Appalachians. Rinn's Star and its quartz in basaltic flows (Ok, I was pissy about this one because of racism before that).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough about geology and geography for it to bother me when reading, but when attempting to worldbuild, my ignorance drives me crazy, because I'm positive any first-year geography student would read three paragraphs and say "What the hell's a desert doing there? The rain shadow's all wrong!" and I get very intimidated. XD

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Bad prose. A mounting suspicion that the author is stupid, shallow, or doesn't know what he or she is really doing here. The author appearing to have no sense of humor at all. Silly conceits that aren't made up for with a good execution of them. Characters who swear by the lord and lady and/or other polytheistic pantheons in massively inappropriate circumstances; other evidences of poor characterization. Plots that take too long to become evident when the author's prose and style aren't pleasurable enough to make the wait feel worthwhile. Being written by Mercedes Lackey.

Re: Stevermer: weird! I'd pegged it as fantasy early 20th century from the beginning; maybe it was something about a young woman being shipped off to college that made me unconsciously place it later? Or all the talk about political revolutionaries, which does not make me think Victorian era? I love the feel of that book; it's no wonder I later discovered I have a massive love for fiction and non fiction dating from or set in that era.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've gotten into arguments over the Stevermer book, with people who think that saying "But it's set in pseudo-Edwardian times!" will somehow negate my first reading of the book. XD

I'm less familiar with the political history of the Victorian and Edwardian eras than the social and cultural, so discussion of revolutionaries doesn't particularly clue me in to a specific time period.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Point of view is big for me, whether it's sloppy first person narration -- "Had I known that on the other side of town ..." Lauren K Hamilton I'm looking at you -- or the POVs of characters I don't give a damn about while the main characters don't even appear in the damn book -- Robert Jordan, I'm looking at you now. Speaking of Wheel of Time, if I have to reread 8 books just to remember enough of the backstory to read #9, I'm out of there.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Someone's doing a reread, 6 or 7 chapters at a time, of WoT over on the tor.com blogs, if you feel the need for a quick reminder. XD

But on a slightly more serious note, yeah. Spending large amounts of time with characters I don't care about is highly annoying.

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

i almost always hate first person narration. you gotta be magic to sell me on it. i dunno why, but it's the way i am.

hilariously, i also hate when people start to sing in a story and they tell me the lyrics.

no thanks

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't *hate* first-person narration, but it's very hard for it to work for me in pre-modern settings. I think it has to do with the voice of the character - unless the author nails it, it's usually far too modern. I couldn't get into Poison Study, for that very reason: the world was pre-modern, but the voice was indistinguishable from a modern woman.

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

aaaaajaaaax...
I love ajax.
I need to work with it more.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I suspect a great deal of our next webpage design is going to involve it. XD

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

#1. I'm less sensitive to the POV thing, since my default assumption is light omniscient, but I do know when an author is going for tight third and it does throw me when they do a sudden switcheroo, and I'm aware this happens to a lot of other readers. So.

#2. ZOMG the tech level thing! This is why I nearly flung Megan Whaler Turner's The Thief (among other reasons) across the room and refused to finish the trilogy. Based on the information reasonably available to me (as I was not a classics major) I could not have guessed the level of tech that was, in fact, in play. I think this is a glitchy thing in my brain from RPG tech levels.

#3. You'd probably hate the way I synthesize different cultural influences, which is totally fair. Mainly, I don't want to go "straight" Western/European because that brings with it its own horde of cultural assumptions, but I don't want to go "straight" to ninja-land either. (And as for Korean tropes, I'd have to explain them as I wrpte them. for the average English reader.) Agreed that history should diverge interestingly and well-thought-edly for maximal effect. Law of unintended consequences is particularly useful here.....

#4. I learned the hard way Not to Include Poems/Song Lyrics/etc. in stories. I mean, Robert Jordan had a penchant for rhyme (I'm being nontechnical as hell, as I never took anything on poetry), and the hymn-bits in Gordon R. Dickson's Soldier, Ask Not are genuinely bleak and beautiful...and then there's crud like the well-meaning but ultimately rather pathetic poetry dumps found periodically in Steven Erikson's MALAZAN books.

I mean, I can turn out a poem that scans in English, but it's not going to be Wordsworth; and I am hampered by the fact that my brain believes that almost ever sf/f poem in a sf/f setting of mine is not in English but in some other (con)language, and then you get into the problem of translation &c. It's the whole question of rigidly translating morae counts from Japanese haiku vs. a breezier approach that aims to capture the essence of the form even if the syllable counts are off.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It's hard to say about the cultural synthesis. I'll confess I was thinking more about stuff like Tamora Pierce's second knight trilogy, where there's a party of young women from an island nation present at the ... academy, or wherever it was, holding classes in naginata, and in all obvious ways being samurai-class Japanese girls with the serial numbers filed off.

If this TOTALLY NOT JAPAN island nation is close enough to the main character's solidly Eurostyle nation to be sending cultural envoys and fostering girls there, why isn't there more cultural mixing?

Also, I have no problem with Hughart's remixing of Chinese history and legend in Bridge of Birds, because the language and voice of the book places it in Mythland for me, where Minekura's Saiyuki lives, not in a pseudo-historical world. I agree I may have had a much different reading of it if I were more versed in Chinese history and culture when I first encountered the book. I acknowledge the truth of the readings by people who hate it for precisely that reason (I think the primary objection is that it turns the book into an appropriated Western view of China, rather than a Chinese view of China, but it's been a while since I read the objections to it).

So ... when it bothers me, it bothers me, and when it doesn't, it doesn't. XD

ETA: The only way I could write the poetry in my Yuletide Heian-Japan story last year was by convincing myself that I was merely writing the really bad translation of it. XD

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Any of those, including flagrant lack of description, and also along with #3, mixing made-up fantasy names with real Earth names without it meaning anything. So if we have Soelynn, Throq'uz, and Earenith being siblings to Marian and Elwyn, I am rolling my eyes out of there. (Edit: I have had SEVERAL intartubes arguments about this!)

Long passages in italics. It's hard to read and it drives me RIGHT UP THE DAMNED WALL.

The obvious telegraphing that you shouldn't get committed to any character because no matter what they do, they'll get screwed over and die.

Barbarians. No, I'm serious. Throw in barbarians and I leave the book. I just hate them. Partly, I think, because I have enough of an anthropology background to find their cultures totally unbelievable and unworkable. Partly because they all seem silly and derivative. (I also hate "Bedouin" characters who were obviously based on watching a bunch of silly adventure movies.)

Having too many characters whose POVs are switched among. It really dilutes my interest.

(Looking at the last three, can you guess whether I finished the first Game of Thrones book? EDIT: Ditto intartubes arguments. Too bad, y'all, I didn't like it and it's a matter of taste! You can't change my feelings about it! I didn't even say he was a bad writer!)

Mixing up Chinese-Japanese-Korean terms or concepts, or mixing dialects and/or romanization systems. It probably sounds picky, but if an author writes "Dao" on one page and "t'ai ch'i" on the next page, or has a Chinese-speaking character say both "yum cha" and "qipao," (for example), I know that, regardless of whether she speaks Chinese, she doesn't have even basic knowledge *about* Chinese language systems and can't be trusted. From then on I'm totally going to be focusing on surface-level issues like this and it's going to be really hard to pay attention to the story.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I just realized another thing that prevents me from buying a book: if I find on the back blurb and in the pages I peruse in the bookstore, too many Capitalized Words of Portent, I'm outta there. Also, apostrophes.

Ja'heila, the most junior member of the Thieves' Guild, chooses the wrong pocket to pick: that of Thra'alin, the Argent of Light. Armed with only her wits, her newly acquired Lens of Power, and her Luck, she must avoid the Scion of Darkness and the Soldiers of Light while rescuing the Adamantine Princess from the Tower of ph'Ryng'la and returning the Green Blade to the Temple of the Naysayers of Doom.


damn, that was hard even to make up!

[grendelity.livejournal.com]

Certain Grammar Problems drive me up the wall. Such as saying "I/he/she felt badly," or mixing up nauseous and nauseated. I came across the first in the TokyoPop translation of the first Twelve Kingdoms novel, and I think I would have slapped the book shut if I wasn't 200 pages in. :[ As it was I just made an "aaaugh" sound and glared at the page before I moved on.

Overuse of adverbs bothers me, as does the author's inability to use words like "said." That actually irritates me to death, when everything is, "'blah blah,' he conjectured. 'what?' she inquired." It's so self-important and aggravating. There is nothing wrong with small, simple words. Stephenie Meyer, burn your thesaurus, please.

On a more opinionated note, if I don't like the narrator of a story, I just can't read it. It may be a perfectly wonderful plot and world with very endearing other characters, but if the narrator is a nasty person or does stuff that I just can't agree with--even if he/she isn't exactly weak, but just not sympathetic--I just can't stand to read a story as told by them. I threw out Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series in the first book because of how completely unlikable the main character was. Tom Wolfe's books bother me for the same reason. I like reading about people who are good, and that's probably an awful handicap in the form of some societal construct, idk.

A more minor peeve is when I can tell I'm being manipulated as an audience. On principle it annoys me, but I can go along with it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction to Donaldson. I had a friend try to convince me to go on with it - the redemption is the point! he insisted. Well, why should I waste my time on reading something I know I don't like now on the off chance that I might like it later? I think not!

(Take that same argument, change "reading" to "watching" and you have my reaction for Firefly. I have been proselytized to for FAR too long from Firefly fans that there is NO NO NO chance I shall ever watch it because the constant evangelizing makes me so angry. ARGH)

[emtigereyes.livejournal.com]

I agree with the POV change, though I forgive it more if it's a character who has been interacting with the main character (i.e. an acquaintance who becomes more ingrained in the main's daily activity or adventures) and the change either a) gives us more insight or perspective on the main character or b) the activity or thought process of this new character is important to their interaction with the main character. If I remember which book I read that did this, I'll cite it.

As for #3 - Vampire Hunter D and the futuristic Victorian/Western world with a dash of high tech? Oy.
(don't get me wrong, I really like the stories, but whether watching Bloodlust or reading the novels, those things do bug me. I try to roll with them, but sometimes it's hard).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The first Vampire Hunter D novel annoyed me by the overuse of the adjective "gorgeous" to describe D. Come on, translator and rewriter! Don't you have a thesaurus?!

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Bad, clunky prose will throw me out of books faster than everything. I can deal with competent-but-flat, if the plotting and characterization are sufficiently appealing, but anything that has me gnashing my teeth about knowing middle-schoolers who could write better is not going to have much of a chance.

Naming is also a big sticking point for me -- historical novels with inappropriately modern-trendy character names provoke a lot of eye-rolling, as do clunkily-translated and/or wildly inauthentic/offensively-stereotyped "ethnic/foreign" names (CASSIE EDWARDS, I'M LOOKING AT YOU). Keyboard-smash fantasy place/character names tend to stick in my craw, as do giving fantasy/SF characters in particular creatively-spelled variants on common modern names without there being any good reason for it in the worldbuilding. (Future setting where place and personal names have all clearly morphed slightly over the centuries/millenia? A-OK. AU/parallel world where recognizable countries/cultures have names clearly based on the real-world patterns? Also just fine. But a totally made-up, alien/non-human, etc. society, that just happens to have folks running around with popular modern names, just with some random punctuation and spelling shifts thrown in to make 'em fantastical-sounding? HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE.) The related phenomenon that I think you may have mentioned in the D&D-book reviews, where you've got characters running about with monikers taken from multiple unrelated schools of name-generation, and zero hints in the world-building that this is the sort of mobile/multi-cultural society where this would fit, also irks me a lot.

Historical novels, if they're not otherwise meant to be cracky/pastiche/non-serious, where some or all of the characters (usually the "good guys) have suspiciously anachronistic and culturally inappropriate modern, Western attitudes about race, gender, class, religion, etc. (I have no problem with rampant anachronisms if it's all across the board and played for lulz, but if it's a relatively serious book and everybody has the attitudes and worldview appropriate to the time and place except Our Hero and Heroine, who are oh-so-enlightened and ahead of their time, I start to kvetch.)

This one's mainly for fantasy, especially high fantasy, but it's a major, major sticking point for me -- what Ursula LeGuin calls "Poughkeepsie prose". If you can take a high fantasy novel that's set in some distant, ancient world of magic, swap out all the fantasy names for conventional modern ones and do a similar global search-and-replace to upgrade all the tech -- turn the horses into cars and the swords into guns and the kings into presidents and prime ministers and the magicians into scientists, etc. etc., and end up with prose that would seem pretty much identical to any best-selling mainstream airport thriller? DO NOT WANT. There's a certain sort of heightened, distancing tone I want in high fantasy, and any prose that can survive the Poughkeepsie Treatment absolutely does not qualify.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Bad, clunky prose will throw me out of books faster than everything. I can deal with competent-but-flat, if the plotting and characterization are sufficiently appealing, but anything that has me gnashing my teeth about knowing middle-schoolers who could write better is not going to have much of a chance.

THIS. I usually read the first few pages and if the voice doesn't catch me, I bail. It's not worth it.

[cyancat.livejournal.com]

My pet peeve?

The overuse of 'said'
I hate even looking at these books of people that seem to be such good writers yet every line of dialogue is 'said George' 'said Kim' 'Larry said'

Over and over and over. GAH!

[cicer.livejournal.com]

I have oh-so-many pet peeves. Man.

First person POV. I have a really, really, really hard time getting into it. I'm not saying it's impossible for me to enjoy a book written in first person, but I can count on one hand the books I really like that are written in the first person. Ironically, I tend to have a much harder time connecting with the narrator in first person POV. They tend to come off as self-absorbed to me, probably because I just can't stand being in someone else's head for that long.

In fantasy, the use of made up names for people and places. Extra points if the name looks like the author just mashed their keyboard. Also, silly titles. No Tracht'nori the Bone-Crusher for me, thank you.

POV SHIFT. OH GOD NO. DEAR AUTHOR: YOU ARE NOT WILLIAM FAULKNER. DO NOT SHIFT YOUR POV UNLESS YOU MAKE IT VERY VERY VERY CLEAR IN THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK THAT THIS WILL BE A MULTIPLE POV STORY. EVEN THEN IT'S IFFY. I MEAN IT!!!

Overused cliches, many of which are listed above. The princess who runs away from a forced marriage, the young man who is the only one who can defeat the ultimate evil and save the world, etc. Bleh.

Bad characterization of women really makes me grind my teeth. I especially hate it when all the women in the story are slotted into three categories: the innocent maiden (usually the hero's love interest), the maternal and nurturing figure, and the wizened and clever (possibly magically-inclined) old woman. Please to avoid constantly using the maiden/mother/crone concept for all your female character needs.

Also, Strong Female Characters Who Actually Aren't are more likely than anything else to make me hurl a book against the wall, along with Strong Female Characters Who Are Strong Because I Say They Are, Not Because Of Anything They Actually Do. Authors blatantly shilling their characters makes me crazy. Female characters from other time periods having suspiciously modern and feminist attitudes. Not saying that feminist, powerful women didn't exist in times past, but the attitudes and circumstance were very different.

I'm sure I'll have more after I think about this a bit longer...

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I love lack of description (character or surroundings). Too much will put me off, especially if it's in first person or a tight third. People who walk into their bedroom and describe it as if seeing it for the first time. Bzzt! Fail. That just doesn't sound natural for someone walking into their bedroom as they always do. And characters who look in the mirror to give a description of themselves are right out.

I have only seen #2 (surprise technology) once, but I loved it. It was in Chuck Palahniuk's Rant. But I do love that cyberpunk thing where things are very close to our world, but just a little more advanced in ways that may not be obvious right away, so that was very cool to me.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Would a conversation between two aliens, about which the only physical things you know is that they are not human and that they breathe some form of air, as opposed to water or cotton candy, or magma, or... bother you in the least?

If not, then I may have the writer for you! :D

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Bad voice will prevent me from getting into a book. Characters I don't like enough will keep me from liking or staying in a book-- I bailed on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, a book practically everyone tells me is amazing and awesome, because I only liked two people in the book and everything being telegraphed at me said they were about to suffer horribly, and the people I didn't like so much would be even more prominent.

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

If a book doesn't have any characters I like or bond to it better have an incredible plot, because otherwise I'm gone. Reading people I hate doing things that don't catch my interest? Hell no.

Sudden, unexpected POV shifts kill me too.

Any first person POV book that's the recollection of these events from a future time that keeps reminding me that the character gets out of situation X alive and fine, "Little did I know, but...." or "Soon I would discover...." or "Years afterward I would..." It breaks the tension for me.

Books that are a ton of tell that are actually contradicted by the show. I've wanted to get into yelling matches with authors about characters. Unless I can see the unreliable narrator or trust from experience that the author knows what s/he is doing, they can lose me this way.

Authors who italicize a ton of words for emphasis. Mercedes Lackey does this more and more the longer her writing career goes on, which is one reason why I don't read her work anymore.

Personal issue: A book that posits that someone of royal blood will of course be a better ruler and spends most of the plot getting that royal onto the throne. It's not a book, but the movie The Court Jester has the king killed and usurped by his brother. I won't deny that the brother is villainous. The solution, reached in the happy ending, is to throw down the brother and put a baby, the rightful son, on the throne, as if this will end all the fighting and machinations. No, that baby will need a regent, and especially in that court the kid will be someone's puppet or dead soon enough. If the movie gave some impression of knowing this, it wouldn't have bothered me as much.

I even used to own that book

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Now there's an icon that indicates refined, and not coincidentally, excellent taste.

Oh, there are so very many reasons not to read Mercedes Lackey books anymore.