Reading/Book Pet Peeves

[Winterlight]

Can I add, I have a pet peeve around hair.  Some authors seem to love their characters to have really long hair, and yet have no idea how much work it is to keep tidy or how to manage it realistically.  I like having longer hair but it is more work, it does take longer to dry and it is more difficult to manage. 

I was reading one of Mercedes Lackey's less good books and got fed up of the number of men with immaculately kept waist length silver hair and the lengthy descriptions of the things they braided into it.  Not everyone needs to want hair down to their rear and it was just infuriating to read.  The Anita Blake books are quite annoying for this too as all the men appear to have excessively long and well groomed hair. 

My long hair is easy, but I don't try to do anything fancy with it, either.  But have you noticed that none of those men have curly, tangle-prone hair?

Elves, of course, are an exception.  They have perfect hair.  It's just part of being an elf.   

As a long curly-haired person, I just assume it's all straight hair because there's no way curls are going to be that neat without enough gel to cause an oil slick.

[Mental Magpie]

Can I add, I have a pet peeve around hair.  Some authors seem to love their characters to have really long hair, and yet have no idea how much work it is to keep tidy or how to manage it realistically.  I like having longer hair but it is more work, it does take longer to dry and it is more difficult to manage. 

I was reading one of Mercedes Lackey's less good books and got fed up of the number of men with immaculately kept waist length silver hair and the lengthy descriptions of the things they braided into it.  Not everyone needs to want hair down to their rear and it was just infuriating to read.  The Anita Blake books are quite annoying for this too as all the men appear to have excessively long and well groomed hair. 

My long hair is easy, but I don't try to do anything fancy with it, either.  But have you noticed that none of those men have curly, tangle-prone hair?

Elves, of course, are an exception.  They have perfect hair.  It's just part of being an elf.   

As a long curly-haired person, I just assume it's all straight hair because there's no way curls are going to be that neat without enough gel to cause an oil slick.

Ditto, Winterlight.  There is no such thing as coming my hair when it's dry.  I only ever do it if I'm going to be pulling back it right away.

Edited because I swear I speak English.

[alkira6]

Can I add, I have a pet peeve around hair.  Some authors seem to love their characters to have really long hair, and yet have no idea how much work it is to keep tidy or how to manage it realistically.  I like having longer hair but it is more work, it does take longer to dry and it is more difficult to manage. 

I was reading one of Mercedes Lackey's less good books and got fed up of the number of men with immaculately kept waist length silver hair and the lengthy descriptions of the things they braided into it.  Not everyone needs to want hair down to their rear and it was just infuriating to read.  The Anita Blake books are quite annoying for this too as all the men appear to have excessively long and well groomed hair. 

My long hair is easy, but I don't try to do anything fancy with it, either.  But have you noticed that none of those men have curly, tangle-prone hair?

Elves, of course, are an exception.  They have perfect hair.  It's just part of being an elf.   

As a long curly-haired person, I just assume it's all straight hair because there's no way curls are going to be that neat without enough gel to cause an oil slick.

Ditto, Winterlight.  There is no such thing as coming my hair when it's dry.  I only ever do it when it's when if I'm going to be pulling back it right away.

Try having extremely tight natural AA hair that is below shoulder length when wet, hits mid back almost when straightened, and curls into a 4 inch Afro when dry.  Yeah, knots and I are intimately acquainted.

[faithlessone]

Or when a book is part of a series, but it doesn’t make it very clear that it actually is part of a series, or which book of the series it is. I know that some authors try to claim that you can read their series in any order, but I like reading them in chronological order (or the canonical order, or publishing order, whatever)—particularly if I plan on reading the whole series!

Ugh, I had this issue with the Charlaine Harris "Sookie Stackhouse" books. The edition I bought had pictures of the covers of the others in the series in the back. I assumed that they were in order. They weren't.

I ended up reading Book 1, then book 3, then a chunk of book 7, at which point I was so confused that I looked up the correct order online. This is the sort of series where you do have to read them in order (extra characters, lots of plot and world development) so reading them out of order just made me really grumpy and spoiled the whole series (in both senses of the word).

[Ereine]

Or when a book is part of a series, but it doesn’t make it very clear that it actually is part of a series, or which book of the series it is. I know that some authors try to claim that you can read their series in any order, but I like reading them in chronological order (or the canonical order, or publishing order, whatever)—particularly if I plan on reading the whole series!

I really dislike that. I don't generally enjoy reading series, I like my stories with closure within a reasonable time and as I have to acquire most of the books I read (because my library doesn't have that good selection of the sort of books I like to read) it can get expensive or difficult to get all the books. That preference can make finding new fantasy books pretty risky, too often I learn about the series on the last page of the book. I guess most fantasy readers don't share my dislike and so it probably should be assumed that all fantasy is part of a series.

[Outdoor Girl]

I've taken to looking at the publishing dates for the books, when it is a series and the order isn't clear.  Unless the author is really prolific and writes more than one book in the series each year, it works out quite well.

[wolfie]

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/

that is a great website for figuring out what order books are in a series. If you like a particular author then it is also easy to see what other books they have and it shows what books will be published in the next year. I love that site.

[Margo]

I would have thought that it was more likely to be  middle class girls who would go, daughters of sucessful merchants etc rather than those of the landed gentry (going back to Austen again, there's no suggestion of any of her heroines going away to school, he assumption seems to be that you either have a governess (with additional tutors for things such as music, dancing or drawing as required) or are taught by your own mother. (remember Lady Catherine de Bourg's comments about Mrs Bennett must have been a slave to her daughters' education, when told they had no governess?)

That's not entirely true - in Persuasion, Anne was sent away to school shortly after her mother died. That's why she didn't like Bath, and where she meets her school-friend Mrs. Smith who comes into play later in the novel. Also, I remember another character (Isabella?) complaining that no children had ever had such long school holidays as the little Musgroves, so presumably they were being sent to school also.

(cut to keep the quote tree smaller)
You're absolutely right. I'd forgotten that (which is odd as 'Persuasion' is my favourite Austen!)
I think I'd mis-remembered Anne as living in Bath with her mother when Lady Eliot was dying, so was thinking of her as having been educated, but not at a boarding school. Probably an association of ideas with sick people going to Bath to take the waters. Not that it did them a lot of good. Whenever I visit Bath Abbey it strikes me how many of the memorial stones are for people who were not local. I imaigine a lot of them came to Bath for cures, without success.

[rose red]

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/

that is a great website for figuring out what order books are in a series. If you like a particular author then it is also easy to see what other books they have and it shows what books will be published in the next year. I love that site.

I love that website too. 

I know a lot of people make fun of romance novels, but I like them.  The only problem is that nowadays, it's almost impossible to find a book that's not a series or spinoffs.  Even if you can read the books in any order, I'm OCD enough to need to read in order.  I never buy/borrow a romance until I check with that website first.  Learned that lesson the hard way. 

Which brings me to my annoyance of the neverending series.  I never read those unless the author comes right out and say how many books there are (like how they said Harry Potter is seven books and that's it.  Finished.  Done.  That's all she wrote.  Goodbye.)

[wolfie]

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/

that is a great website for figuring out what order books are in a series. If you like a particular author then it is also easy to see what other books they have and it shows what books will be published in the next year. I love that site.

I love that website too. 

I know a lot of people make fun of romance novels, but I like them.  The only problem is that nowadays, it's almost impossible to find a book that's not a series or spinoffs.  Even if you can read the books in any order, I'm OCD enough to need to read in order.  I never buy/borrow a romance until I check with that website first.  Learned that lesson the hard way. 

Which brings me to my annoyance of the neverending series.  I never read those unless the author comes right out and say how many books there are (like how they said Harry Potter is seven books and that's it.  Finished.  Done.  That's all she wrote.  Goodbye.)

There are series where it is just the same characters having different adventures. Those I read as they come out. Then there are series where each book is an extension of the one before it and yo won't get a payoff until the very last book is published (wheel of time, game of thrones). Those I will buy the book but I won't read until the last book is printed. I really hate having to wait at least a year to find out what happened next!

[LEMon]

Point of view pet peeve - perpetually shifting point of view and depth of view.  One paragraph we are deep inside the hero's mind, knowing all this thoughts and feeling, and the next we are looking on the whole scene from a distant and unemotional point of view.  Drives me nuts. 

Bad writing, bad author, (whap on the nose with a rolled up newspaper), stop that.

[Barney girl]

I listened to an audiobook recently, (Bury your dead), which I chose because it was set in Quebec City, which I'd visited last year. I had a number peeves with it, such as finding it strange that all the Québécois were unaware that there was a Presbyterian church in the city, when I'd noticed it within half an hour, but what really put me off was that part of the book related to reinvestigating the murder from a previous book and deciding on a different murder. So that made it pointless going back to read the earlier book in the series and, honestly, if the killer was found with the same apparently arbitrary methods as were used in this book I'm not surprised the hero detective got it wrong.

[Elfmama]

I know next to nothing about the subject material, but... isn't that a touch on the revealing side?

If we're talking about the LIW book, YES!  In Laura's day, clothes buttoned up all the way to the chin.  Opening one button on a very hot day was just permissible.  Two buttons would cause raised eyebrows on all the proper ladies of the town, and three would cause dreadful gossip over the teacups.  Wearing one's shirtwaist open ALL THE WAY DOWN was something that even wh0res didn't do.

[Elfmama]

I read two books of a Philippa Gregory series a few years ago and couldn't bring myself to read a third.  It was the Wideacre series and it read like V.C. Andrews doing historical fiction.

I've noticed her books are kind of hit or miss.  I liked "The Other Boleyn Girl" (hated the movie) and "The Queen's Fool" but there was another one I almost gave up on...I think it was "The Wise Woman".

That one, by the time it ended, had me hating every single character. 

[kglory]

I read two books of a Philippa Gregory series a few years ago and couldn't bring myself to read a third.  It was the Wideacre series and it read like V.C. Andrews doing historical fiction.

I've noticed her books are kind of hit or miss.  I liked "The Other Boleyn Girl" (hated the movie) and "The Queen's Fool" but there was another one I almost gave up on...I think it was "The Wise Woman".

That one, by the time it ended, had me hating every single character. 

I did like "The Other Boleyn Girl", and really liked the characters of Mary, her husband, and George.  I thought I had read all her books, but apparently not, because I've never read "The Wise Woman".

Of the royal history books, the first one I read was "The Other Boleyn Girl".  After that, I've read pretty much all of them.  I couldn't figure out for the longest time why I liked "Boleyn Girl" so much more than the rest until it hit me -- it is the ONLY book where the main character has a happy ending!  I mean, it doesn't end well for Anne, but it ends well for Mary.

The White Queen (Elizabeth Woodville)?  Has a wonderful period of her  life, but doesn't end well.
The Red Queen?  Has an empty life, and I guess it ends well in her definition, but in a hollow sort of way.
The Lady of the Rivers? (Jacquetta).  Has some very cool experiences in life, but doesn't end well.
The Constant Princes? (Catherine of Aragon)  Really doesn't end well nor does most of her life go well.
The 3 queens in The Boleyn Inheritance?  Doesn't end well.
The Kingmaker's Daughter (Anne Neville)?  Doesn't end well.
The Other Queen (Mary, Queen of Scots)?  Really doesn't end well.
Queen Mary I?  Really doesn't have a good life at any part.
And even some of the side characters, like Cecily Neville -- really don't end well either.

Only Mary Boleyn, who fell off the grid of the rich and famous, had a somewhat happy ending!  (Note: I know from further research after reading the book that her true ending was probably closer to desperate poverty than to a blissful country lifestyle, so maybe she belongs in the list above too.) 

Ugh.  It really is depressing. If anything, Gregory probably wrote MORE excitement and happiness into her protagonists' lives than they really had, to make the plot better.  So the main lesson I take from this is it really would suck to be a medieval noble woman, that you have no control over your own life, and even if you start with everything going for you -- wealth, beauty, power, etc. -- that is no guarantee of anything in your life.