Book Club

[stevieb]

This is becoming a pet peeve of mine too...  Among lots of other genres, I tend to read a lot of mysteries, and while some authors are far more guilty of it than others, the norm increasingly seems to be repetition... I'm weary of characters ruminations that are completely redundant. You just want to say: 'all right, we get it, we got it the first time'...  Among others, Sheila Connolly's efforts come to mind and for this reason, among others, I'm giving her books a nice long rest.

A few months back, taking a break from my usual 'cozy' mysteries, I thoroughly enjoyed Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper.  I so enjoyed this book I obtained several others by her. Her stores are beautifully and intelligently written, nimbly crafted and exquisitely integrated, but, I discovered, the woman simply never met a turn of phrase she didn't adore...  Her books are simply too long. Somewhere along about the 400th page, they stop being compelling and I find I simply want to find out how she's going to wrap it up... 

[LoriLori]

I wouldn't call it "filler" since it's not, it's an absence of tight editing or an author so popular (Stephen King, looking at you) that no editor wants to risk his wrath and have him take his books to another publishing house but that said --

There was an entire storyline in "The Goldfinch" I wish had been edited out (Las Vegas)  because it went on and on and I felt added little to the book...

...and pretty much everything horror Stephen King has written since his first novel, "Carrie", which was short and tight

Proust's "In Search of Time Lost" is over 2,000 pages and I wouldn't take out a single word.

[MacDUFF]

I used to think the single most needlessly wordy author was Ayn Rand...and she probably still holds the title for me if we're talking single books...until I started reading a Bodie Thoene book loaned to me.  I knew it was a series, but didn't realize the series contained NINE "installments!!"  And not to get too wordy about it, but this series was filler-gone-wild, superfluous, redundant, over-loaded with non-essential repetition, and enough already!!  Don't get me wrong, the story was great historical fiction, but would have been excellent in a series of 3, max.

[Sooner]

I am sick of cookbooks that start out with the author's story--I could care less where they were born or went to grade school or what the dog's name was.  

Then they go on and on about what you "need"--like baking books that tell you you will need, and give you big pictures of: measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, flour and baking soda.  REALLY?  I need a SPATULA to bake?  And HERE's what it looks like?  OH I am so happy that I know that?  Oh and THIS is a square baking pan?  Let me take some notes.

[gardenman]

This is a big pet peeve of mine. I think the worst example I've read was "les miserables" by Victor Hugo. There's one section where he's describing the color of the bricks in a building and goes back to a bloody battle that took place in the field where the clay used to make the bricks had been collected and the blood from that battle had stained the clay. By the time I finally got back to the story I was like "Jean Val Jean? Who's this guy and what's he doing in this story about a war and brick making?"

A few years ago one of the entrants in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel awards submitted an entry that used twelve colors in the first paragraph to describe waves crashing into a coastline. He was trying to be descriptive, but it turned into a Technicolor mess.

I think writers are smarter limiting descriptions and letting readers fill in the blanks. Most readers are perfectly capable of inhabiting the scenes and characters without the writer telling them everything. Pretty much everyone has seen waves crashing into a shoreline, so you don't have to be overly descriptive. 

[SAGal]

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@Sooner wrote:

I am sick of cookbooks that start out with the author's story--I could care less where they were born or went to grade school or what the dog's name was.  

Then they go on and on about what you "need"--like baking books that tell you you will need, and give you big pictures of: measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, flour and baking soda.  REALLY?  I need a SPATULA to bake?  And HERE's what it looks like?  OH I am so happy that I know that?  Oh and THIS is a square baking pan?  Let me take some notes.

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OMG I am laughing out loud at your description - so funny and so true!

[sunala]

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@Sooner wrote:

I am sick of cookbooks that start out with the author's story--I could care less where they were born or went to grade school or what the dog's name was.  

Then they go on and on about what you "need"--like baking books that tell you you will need, and give you big pictures of: measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, flour and baking soda.  REALLY?  I need a SPATULA to bake?  And HERE's what it looks like?  OH I am so happy that I know that?  Oh and THIS is a square baking pan?  Let me take some notes.

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Sooner, I both agree and disagree. I am like you, as I hate reading tripe about the author's life and the fact that her great grandmother on her great step-uncle's side invented this recipe. That's useless to me. 

However, some people don't bake or cook much (or very well), and they need the whole picture of what the recipe entails. They need to know what size pan they will need, that they will need a spatula and a wire whisk along with the electric mixer and a big bowl, and that they have to preset the oven temperature. 

There are some recipes that I'm very glad those instructions were included. 

Just don't tell me the family cat's name 

[Bridgegal]

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@Marsha2003 wrote:

I just wish all books had decent copy editors.  I'm so tired of reading books with misused words and typos. 

Oh my , me too.  I'm about 1/2 way through Picnic in Provance (non fiction by the way) and the author, an American,  has used than instead of then more than once.  But the worst is that she lives in France and keeps spelling French macarons 'macaroons' which is an entirely different thing.  She describes French macarons but spells them macaroons.  

It makes me wonder if she really does live there and claiming this is a memoir, or ...... not.

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[stevieb]

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@Marsha2003 wrote:

I just wish all books had decent copy editors.  I'm so tired of reading books with misused words and typos. 

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I strongly agree. I'm also tired of glaring inconsistencies and obvious contradictions that no one caught before printing. I don't honestly know how some editors remain editors. 

Were I an author, I'd be very annoyed. I can understand an author not wanting an editor to touch certain aspects of their work, but things like continuity and accuracy should be givens. I recently read a little cozy mystery that was so badly edited I decided I'd not be reading anything else from the author. Had the book been more compelling I might have overlooked the numerous issues, but it wasn't... Sort of a double whammy...

[nomless]

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@Marsha2003 wrote:

I just wish all books had decent copy editors.  I'm so tired of reading books with misused words and typos. 

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Agreed.  For that reason, I no longer read self-published books or Amazon imprints.   When a book interests me, the first thing I check is who published it.  I stick with the old, established publishinhg houses.  Occasionally, I find an error even in these, but for the most part, their editing is still fairly good.