Things in books that annoy you

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I also had this exact experience with a psychological thriller last year, except I was A LOT annoyed by the ending. I wonder if it was the same book?

The author's initials are:

Spoiler:

S.P.

Yes, that's the one.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by barryem

"Smilla's Sense of Snow" fits that description pretty well. At the very end it turned into science fiction with no clue to that beforehand. It was a beautiful book.

I remember an old rather conventional western I saw on TV, probably about 1955 or so, that took place just across the Mexico border from Texas where a rancher from the USA was having problems with the caballeros from a much larger nearby ranch. Finally at the end they had surrounded his little ranch house with the intention of killing him and a dinosaur came out of the woods and ate all the bad guys. I always liked that ending.

Barry

I wonder if the movie you saw was The Beast of Hollow Mountain?

[barryem]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I wonder if the movie you saw was The Beast of Hollow Mountain?

Could be. I googled some phrase like "western with a dinosaur at the end" and that was the one that came closest to fitting but it really doesn't fit what I remember. It's probably been 40 or 50 years since I saw it so it might be a faulty memory.

Barry

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by barryem

Could be. I googled some phrase like "western with a dinosaur at the end" and that was the one that came closest to fitting but it really doesn't fit what I remember. It's probably been 40 or 50 years since I saw it so it might be a faulty memory.

Barry

What's most important is that a movie featuring cowboys fighting dinosaurs exists.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

What's most important is that a movie featuring cowboys fighting dinosaurs exists.

Yep! The American cowboy is why dinosaurs haven't yet taken over the world.

Barry

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by barryem

Yep! The American cowboy is why dinosaurs haven't yet taken over the world.

Barry

I thought God put them bones in the ground.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

I thought God put them bones in the ground.

Well, Yeah! But it was Cowboys what put them ON the ground.

[Tarana]

Only two things bother me about books in general. One is the unnecessary cussing. I think these are lazy authors just in the shock jock mode. I just stop reading (it doesn't improve) and diss the novel in any review. The second is complete ignorance of police procedures. Since the stupidity is done primarily by women authors, I have almost ended reading post 2000 mystery cozies. That genre currently has a preponderance of romance writers without a clue. There is no excuse for it.

There are some sub-genres I no longer read because, as mentioned early in this thread, the authors simply come up with the most outlandish and gruesome ways to kill people rather than a good plot. Zombie and post-apocalyptic books are now off my radar for this reason. The last good zombie book I read (ok...listened) that kept me engaged was "The Reanimation of Edward Schuett". I read that in 2013. Dan Shamble series is more humorous fantasy than zombie novel.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by barryem

Genre doesn't exist as pertains to reading. It's a marketing term.

Thank goodness for that marketing or I would have great difficulty finding something to read that I enjoy!

Barry, I don't know your area or age, but they've had genre demarcation at bookstores even when my mom was a girl and she's 84 now. I think what's changed is that there are more genres, or at least more sub genres. Many department stores or other stores like Walgreens only have like 50-100 tiitles, so there's no reason for them to separate genres. There's a photo of my grandmother in 1932 or 33 at the book section of a department store with the titles of several genres on the bookshelves behind her including mystery, adventure, western and macabre (I think that is horror).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Tarana

There are some sub-genres I no longer read because, as mentioned early in this thread, the authors simply come up with the most outlandish and gruesome ways to kill people rather than a good plot. Zombie and post-apocalyptic books are now off my radar for this reason. The last good zombie book I read (ok...listened) that kept me engaged was "The Reanimation of Edward Schuett". I read that in 2013. Dan Shamble series is more humorous fantasy than zombie novel.

One of the few zombie apocalypse series I liked was John Ringo's Black Tide Rising. The sad part is that I can see his version of the zombie apocalypse being caused by a biotech hobbyist working in her/his basement whose last words are going to be "I just wanted to see what would happen!"

[Mivo]

My biggest, and pretty much only, pet peeve is when authors have their characters utter foreign words or phrases that don't exist, are used in the wrong context or are downright incorrect. If I know the language, it kills immersion for me and rips me right out of the story. For a large publisher or a best-selling author it shouldn't be much trouble to find a native speaker

It's surprisingly frequent in otherwise properly edited novels published in the past 25-ish years. It's rare in older books, though, which is curious as it's much easier now to get in touch with people from all over the world.

I do feel slightly silly for rambling about this, though. I'm not normally bothered by poor grammar or spelling (it would make me a hypocrite), but characters that sound like Google Translate really do spoil the reading experience for me.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Mivo

It's surprisingly frequent in otherwise properly edited novels published in the past 25-ish years. It's rare in older books, though, which is curious as it's much easier now to get in touch with people from all over the world.

I do feel slightly silly for rambling about this, though. I'm not normally bothered by poor grammar or spelling (it would make me a hypocrite), but having characters sound like Google Translate really does spoil the reading experience for me.

I think you have nailed the reason for those poor translations in your second paragraph. In the bad old days, the author would need to have someone translate a phrase while now the quick and dirty way is to type the phrase into Google Translate or equivalent then copy and paste the translation regardless of how silly it will look to a native speaker.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Barry, I don't know your area or age, but they've had genre demarcation at bookstores even when my mom was a girl and she's 84 now.

I suspect your grandmother misremembers. I'm 77. I grew up in Texas. From about 14 on I lived in Houston. I was an avid reader since before first grade (I learned to read at home) and an avid bookstore browser since about age 12.

During my younger years I shopped in bookstores in various places in Texas, Louisiana, California, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The first time I ever saw genres in fiction books in a book store was in a Crown Book Store in Houston, probably about 1980. Could have been as early as 1975. I'm really not sure.

It was a few years after that before genre became popular in other bookstores.

There was an occasional exception to that much earlier. A few stores, not many, had a separate section for westerns. Most stores simply had shelves of fiction books arranged in alphabetical order by the last name of the author. There were other shelves for non-fiction, periodicals, pornography in some stores, and hidden somewhere so that decent people wouldn't be offended, science fiction.

Barry

[Pulpmeister]

I think with much older novels, eg Agatha Christie's French, the foreign language was okay because the author actually spoke it. (She never attempted any other language). Authors like E Phillips Oppenheim were themselves fluent in French, and could use it in their books without a problem.

If you've ever read "Trilby", by George Du Maurier (1895) it includes some untranslated French which would cause a modern high school French student consternation. It was the street French of the working class of the 1850s, which du Maurier of course knew. (The author's French name is a clue) and du Maurier was an art student in digs in a poorer quarter of Paris in the 1850s.

I am sure that if I seriously wanted a few sentences in almost any language I could, within my city (Perth Western Australia) find a cultural society of the country, and have a few lines written for me.

For example, I might want to know something as simple as how a Frenchman responds to a phone call from an old and close friend. I am fairly sure it would not just be 'Allo mon ami.'

It is a minefield. Regretfully, I speak no other language, although I can understand very simple German (short declarative sentences, but not those wonderfully complex sentences full of sub-clauses where the verbs all pile up at the end) so I don't get shaken out of a book if something is wrong.

[sydmalicious]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

If I sense that something is almost impossible -- that it goes against human nature -- that will probably stop me reading the novel. Maybe that's why I mostly read non-fiction.

Same here though I am trying to get into sci-fi and fantasy. Most of me reads are non-fiction as well.