What are your 'pet peeves' as a reader of fiction?

[auscatherine]

One of mine is authors who favour ambiguous endings to their stories. I find this particularly gallign when it is a very plot driven story, eg, a mystery, and you read all the way through, anxious to find out how the story is resolved and then just find yourself hanging at the end. Tim Winton's The Riders is a book that I have felt this way about, ie, a very compelling read but then at the end, you just feel like throwing the book at the nearest wall in frustration and/or hunting down the author and demanding they tell you what happened.

Anyone have any others that they would like to share?

[Aurélien]

Thanks for the soapbox, Catherine...ranting from same is in my genes.

I read a lot of mystery/detective fiction and am getting a tad weary of two stereotypes over-used by too many American mystery/detective writers - that:

• 1) protestant ministers shown in their books are invariably sleazily corrupt, self-serving hypocrites; and
  2) any wealthy American appearing in their books will turn out to be the evilly corrupt villain.

I am becoming rather bored with this formula and would appreciate rather less character stereotyping.

‘Aurélien Arkadiusz’

[Laura]

One of my pet peeves is authors who kill off my favourite characters for no reason. Or even if there is a reason, like a war (and I read a lot of war books), it still makes me annoyed. Ambiguous endings are also irritating, I agree.

[Moonraker]

Daphne du Maurier's The Birds (made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock) really irritated me. The film is always billed as having a fantastic ending. It doesn't, the two people in the story simply drive slowly away from the village in their car, thousands of birds watching them. We never knew why the birds were so vicious. This was originally a short story. In du Marier's book, the following story starts, "After the birds had gone..."

[Fiona1986]

Probably not what you werre getting at but my biggest pet peeve when reading is having gotten halfway through the book to find there are PAGES MISSING especially when the eBay seller has described the book as good condition and failed to mention large chunks of text are missing. This happened with Ring o Bells, luckily I still had an old paper back from which to tear the relevant text.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Have you ever seen the Hancock's Half-Hour episode called "The Missing Page," Fiona? Hancock borrows a murder-mystery book from the library and finds it thrilling, but unfortunately the last page is missing. Unable to rest until he finds out "whodunnit," he determines to discover how the story ended. One of my favourite parts is when he tracks down the previous borrower of the book, only for them to scream at him as the page was already missing when they read it, and they had to undergo years of therapy to get over it! Sadly, it's years since I watched that episode and I can't now remember how it ends - AAARRRGH!

Anita

[Aurélien]

Reminds me, Anita, of that scene in 'Bedazzled' in which the devlish Peter Cook is busy ripping out the last pages of a number of detective mystery books....

‘Aurélien Arkadiusz’

[Eddie Muir]

Have you ever seen the Hancock's Half-Hour episode called "The Missing Page," Fiona? Hancock borrows a murder-mystery book from the library and finds it thrilling, but unfortunately the last page is missing. Unable to rest until he finds out "whodunnit," he determines to discover how the story ended. One of my favourite parts is when he tracks down the previous borrower of the book, only for them to scream at him as the page was already missing when they read it, and they had to undergo years of therapy to get over it! Sadly, it's years since I watched that episode and I can't now remember how it ends - AAARRRGH!

Anita

I remember this classic episode of Hancock's Half-Hour, Anita. I seem to recall that after much investigation, Hancock discovers that the author died before completing the book and it was published, in response to the demands of his fans, without an ending. On making this discovery, Hancock vows never to read another book!!

[Anita Bensoussane]

Thanks, Eddie! Now I can sleep at night! I'm afraid I've never seen Bedazzled, Aurélien.

[Fiona1986]

No, I have never seen any episode of Hancock's Half Hour, but I too would probably be extremely annoyed to find the book had never been finished! (Surely though a ghost writer could have been drafted in to add a final page? But then again that would have ended this story before it began....)

[Anita Bensoussane]

Normally, an unfinished book contains a foreword or something pointing out that the story is not complete. Then people can decide whether they still want to read it or not. But as you say, for the Hancock story to work we have to overlook things like that! It's well-known that Charles Dickens died halfway through writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The unfinished book has been published in a number of editions, though I believe several authors have had an attempt at completing the story.

Anita

[auscatherine]

Probably not what you werre getting at but my biggest pet peeve when reading is having gotten halfway through the book to find there are PAGES MISSING especially when the eBay seller has described the book as good condition and failed to mention large chunks of text are missing. This happened with Ring o Bells, luckily I still had an old paper back from which to tear the relevant text.

This happened to me with a copy of Those Dreadful Children I bought in a bulk lot on ebay. The pages weren't just missing but there were about 20 pages repeated. When I contacted the seller, she tried telling me that that just made the book (which was a 70s Armada edition, I think) more valuable to Blyton collectors! I didn't bother pursuing it as it was a double up anyway and I had only bought it because if was in a lot with other books I did want.

Bedazzled is a fantastic movie, Eddie. We also have the soundtrack on CD. It is really funny too.

[Eddie Muir]

Bedazzled is a fantastic movie, Eddie. We also have the soundtrack on CD. It is really funny too.

I agree, Catherine, I saw the film in the late sixties, but I haven't heard the soundtrack on CD.

[RDMorrell]

One of my pet hates is abridging. It makes feel cheated. Similarly, I really loathe over-editing of books to make them more "PC" (a problem that afflicts all too many books by our favourite author). I want to read the book the author actually wrote, not the bits some uptight editor thinks are inoffensive enough to satisfy my "delicate sensibilities". When I was collecting the Just William series, I concentrated on the MacMillan paperbacks, although even one of them (William The Detective) omits two stories, so I had to get an older Newnes edition to read those. But I avoided Collins or Armada versions like the plague. In like fashion, with Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, I am only getting the Girls Gone By editions, because nearly all other versions are abridged and original versions are pretty hard to find. But the GGB editions restore the full and original texts, which is just awesome.

Another thing I hate in fiction is too much of one particular emotion. It's boring (and kind of irritating) when everyone is happy and upbeat all the time, but at the same time, there are few things I find worse than "misery fiction", where everything is constantly bleak and depressing. I prefer a good mixture of ups and downs.

Stereotyping is kind of annoying too - e.g. if someone is "foreign" or "swarthy", it automatically follows that they must be a villain!

Last but not least, too many spelling or grammatical errors are really distracting. Editors should spend more time weeding these out instead of censoring classic texts!

[Stephen]

Have you ever seen the Hancock's Half-Hour episode called "The Missing Page," Fiona? Hancock borrows a murder-mystery book from the library and finds it thrilling, but unfortunately the last page is missing. Unable to rest until he finds out "whodunnit," he determines to discover how the story ended. One of my favourite parts is when he tracks down the previous borrower of the book, only for them to scream at him as the page was already missing when they read it, and they had to undergo years of therapy to get over it! Sadly, it's years since I watched that episode and I can't now remember how it ends - AAARRRGH!

Anita

"Who was the bird who drunk the carbolic milkshake?"