Bookish Pet Peeves


Elizabeth Bluemle - September 4, 2013

Customers with strong opinions are the best. They know what they like, or at least what they don’t, and that can make recommending books so much easier. Let’s face it; it can be hard to suggest books to people who say, “I like everything,” because it doesn’t give us a starting point. And, frankly, it isn’t true. No reader likes EVERYTHING. (I’m always tempted to hand those folks some cowboy fiction or a convoluted space opera, any books from a very specific or relatively narrow-interest genre, just to see if I can shake loose an, “Okay, maybe not that.”)
Some of the most opinionated customers are pretty hilarious about their dislikes. Once, Josie recommended Like Water for Elephants to a customer who shuddered, then shook her head dismissively and pronounced, “I hate circus books set during the Depression!” as though that were a tired and teeming genre.
Another customer came in recently and said, “I can’t stand child narrators in adult books. Although… I did like Room.” [Which, for the record, is about as child-narrator as you can get.] She continued, “I also hate unreliable narrators. Or animal narrators; my book group read a God-awful book narrated by a dog.” [These three pet peeves, expressed so firmly stacked, catapulted me into a private mental tangent during which I pondered the viability of an unreliable child-dog (i.e., puppy) narrator — and then cursed James Howe for beating me to it with the Howie series.] I couldn’t help asking if this customer had other pet peeves. “Sure,” she said. “I always know if there’s a family tree or a map at the beginning, the book is going to be tedious.” [For the record, I disagree! Especially about maps. Although I know what she means; it does happen sometimes. Perhaps only in adult books.] She concluded her parade of personal literary horrors with, “And if a book switches between two time periods, usually the contemporary story is better. …Although I didn’t feel that way about Possession.” All right, I can work with that. I ended up recommending Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, a rich little plum cake of a novel, in the hopes that someday this customer will return and say, “Oh, I just love books about female chicken pluckers in Napoleon’s army who are disguised as men for safety and fall in love with beautiful married Venetian women! More of those, please!”
My favorite recent customer pet peeve was a 12-year-old girl with a great, dry sense of humor whose reading taste runs toward fantasy. “I like some realistic books,” she said, “but not the kind that are, like,” [she adopted a melodramatic, quavery Southern accent], “I saw the rain … on the farm … and it reminded me … of Papa.” That made me laugh for days.
Readers, what are your bookish pet peeves?

9 thoughts on “Bookish Pet Peeves

  1. Kelly

    I agree with the 12-year-old: no melodrama.
    The rest of my pet peeve list is way too long, but #1 is probably something along the lines of: anything resembling “Twilight.” We didn’t mesh.

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  2. Elizabeth

    Heavy-handed foreshadowing. I read a lot of mysteries, and I prefer that the author not deliberately include spoilers . Or a last page clumsy “read my next book” ploy.
    And amateur sleuths who repeatedly explain why they have to investigate instead of leaving it to the professionals. (I don’t mind the sleuthing, it’s the constant rationalizing that I find tiresome.)

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  3. Christie

    The too stupid to live ‘heroine.’ I read a lot of mysteries too and usually don’t mind amateur sleuths except when they do something so ridiculous–and dangerous–that they must be rescued by the hero, who’s then exasperated by their stupidity. Also any ‘woe is me’ character; their constant wallowing in self-created misery gives me hives.

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  4. Linda Marshall

    I couldn’t finish a mystery I recently checked out from the library. Every item the protagonist wore was not only described but used the brand name. When she “looked at my Chico’s watch,” I turned my e-reader off.
    I like good description. Describing things by telling us their name brands is not good description. It looks like the writer gets paid to mention name brands.

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  5. Cathy

    I get tired of all the plucky, independent heroines in historical romances. If circumstances force them to change, that’s fine, but women of the 18th century, for example, did not have the same mindset of contemporary women.

    Reply
  6. Kitti

    I hate being immediately dipped in seething romantic-political intrigue. I have boundaries, you know!
    I also hate movies about making movies, or where the lead character is an actor trying to get a job.

    Reply

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