For example, I often don’t like it when authors choose to take quotation marks as a suggestion, and forego their use for the most part.
Another pet peeve of mine is when the author just peppers their book with sesquipedalian words, which sometimes feel like an attempt to make the reader believe they’re reading something smart (especially with YA). If not done well, it doesn’t flow well and it feels disingenuous.
Purple prose is atrocious to get through as well.
One-dimensional characters are also a huge turn off, but I suppose everyone dislikes that.
**_It isn’t that I will always dislike books written like this, but these are just aspects that will hold me back from giving an otherwise great book the full 5 stars_**
I’m curious to hear what are you guys’ rational or irrational pet peeves!
by inferache
10 Comments
Re: OP’s pet peeves, I think quotation marks are overrated. Books without them have an entirely different feel which took a bit to get used to but is actually quite nice IMO.
Re: my own pet peeves, I hate terrible prose that sounds like a teenager wrote it and yet I’ve finished books written like that if it’s a genre where I expect little. I used to hate present tense but I forced myself to read a couple of books with it and now I don’t mind it. Really I think a lot of reading pet peeves are just lack of familiarity.
Exclamation points. In my personal opinion, the parameters for using them should be *tight* tight.
I’m not sure how you tell that someone’s word choice is an attempt to fool you into thinking they’re reading something smart. They might just have a better vocabulary than you.
By your own peeves you’d rule out Cormac McCarthy who has written some truly outstanding works including Pulitzer Prize winner The Road.
The only book that really put me off, I literally could not get through the first chapter was Nothing but Blackened Teeth. The narration was fine but the dialogue and the characters were God awful, the only thought that kept popping into my head when ever I would think about that first chapter was. “Wow, someone must be a real big fan of American Horror Story.”
So I guess horrid dialogue, I can deal with shit characters so long as they don’t sound stupid. Like the narrator for Diary of an Oxygen Thief is a shit character but he’s self aware and isn’t asking for sympathy which makes the climax of the book more impactful. And he isn’t stupid.
I dislike when characters have dialects that are expressed phonetically. Sometimes I can’t figure out what the heck they are saying, like in Wuthering Heights. Also, when the dialogue is not believable bc the different characters all use the same speech style and similar word choices.
Too much repetition. Sure, remind me what color the MCs eyes are here and there but dont tell me over and over and over again what the same scenery looks like or how attracted one character is to another. I get it and now it seems like page filler.
If there’s any kind of stereotype that tells me they know no one from that group of people. It takes me out of the immersion if they can’t be bothered to write a character in a way that isn’t a stereotype
when the author is a bigot.
when the series will most likely never been finished despite what author says.
Have not run into books without quotation marks but i already know it would put me off cause it be hard to tell between dialog and text.
not related to books but more so how there is this judgy atmosphere when it comes to reading and how there is this obsession with reading habits.
Love triangles. I never want to see one again.