• Misspelled words.
• Bad grammar.
• Stilted and awkward dialogue.
• Clumsy/incorrect use of slang.
• Poorly written sex scenes (and they’re almost always poorly written).
• Formulaic plots.
• Recycled plots – if you’ve read one book by the author, you’ve read them all.
• Indiscriminate use of buzzwords and brand names.
• Over-used favorite words. I read Andrew Greeley in the 80’s and used to keep count of how many pages it took for him to use “implacable.” I’m currently reading Gibbon and laugh every time I read “credulous,” “liberality,” “insensibly,” and variations thereof yet again.
• The “why use one subordinate clause when five or twenty will do?” school of thought (Gibbon again).
• Overused phrases. When reading Philippa Gregory’s “The Constant Princess” I thought I’d scream if I had to read Catalina referring to herself as the princess of Wales or the infanta of Spain one more time.
• Rushed endings. I loved “The Wise Woman” (Gregory again - hey, everyone needs some fluff), and I liked the unexpected ending but it was needlessly rushed.
• The Boss Gets Bigger, aka the Over-the-Top Ending. The first time I encountered this was when I watched Disney’s version of “Sleeping Beauty” as a little kid. In the movie Maleficent turns herself into an enormous dragon for the final battle. It was effective at the time but then again, I was a little kid. I don’t expect to find end-game bosses in the books I read. When I hit the end of “Angels and Demons” I swore I’d never read another book by Dan Brown.
• Affectations. Hilary Mantel’s wonderful “Wolf Hall” was almost ruined by her pronoun-antecedent confusion and sporadic use of quotation marks.
• Woo. Especially woo that uses the word “quantum” for any reason.
• Bleak, hopeless stories like “Less Than Zero.”
• Explicit violence or abuse.
• Dei ex machina.
• Thrillers/horror from production line authors (King, Clancy, Patterson, et al) are non-starters.
• “Chick lit,” “beach reads,” and other sappy nonsense. Unless I’m really in the mood for sappy nonsense.
