Actual content! Hey, it had to happen some time.
thassalia has a list up of things in a book that turn her off. I found it interesting because it intersects with mine at so few points, and yet I totally see where she's coming from (most of the time -- I'm still finding the second point a tad impenetrable). Most of the time I'm a fairly uncritical reader, so much so that in my more paranoid moments I wonder if I just have no taste whatever and will read anything that comes my way. (In my less paranoid moments I figure I'm just good at telling beforehand what I'm not going to like, and avoiding it.)
I do have things that will yank me out of the story and, in some cases, make me stop reading, though. A stab at a list:
- I prefer to like, or at least be interested in the fate of, the protagonist. I find it harder to care when the protagonist is boring, irritating, or too stupid to live. (The last two categories overlap.) Assholes may or may not work; depends on the book.
- Infodump annoys me. It can be done well, but it so often isn't.
- Technical inaccuracies sometimes, although not always, bug me. I'm willing to let things slide if I don't know a lot about the topic or if I'm enjoying the story anyway, but this can be a tipping point. (In Lunar Park, nearly every character is medicated to the eyeballs, including the kids; when I hit a paragraph where someone was discussing methylphenidate and Ritalin as though they were two separate things and as though they were knowledgeable about those things, it irked me. If I wasn't writing an ADHD website at the moment it probably wouldn't bother me much at all, but there you go. By contrast, crankygrrl kept telling me what you could and couldn't see out of the third floor of the Louvre, at least until I made her stop last week; I had a lot of issues with The Da Vinci Code, starting with how slow you have to be to not get the clues before the main characters, but that wasn't one of them.)
- Plain clunky writing will stop me. Although it has to be pretty clunky before I notice. Clumsy use of third person omniscient and head-hopping come under this category. Incorrect word choices also, if I can't convince myself it's the copy editor's fault. Bad, stiff, or unnatural dialogue. Plot contrivances that make no sense and haven't been sold to me (some writers can sell me anything, however ridiculous, because I trust them and the story's working for me). Like that.
- Writing that's too impressed with itself also gets my nose out of joint. I like to read good writing that's invisible, seamless. If it's straining too hard for the beautifully-turned phrase it can be offputting. Charles de Lint occasionally veers into this territory for me, much as I love him. Likewise if I'm weeping with frustration that I'll never be able to write like this, it's harder to get into the story. Post-Sandman Neil Gaiman had a certain amount of this, for me; I think he's really hit his stride with Anansi Boys, though.
- I find contact embarrassment (thank you Pratchett and Gaiman for the term) very hard to take. Sometimes it works brilliantly. Sometimes if a character is working up to doing something that is going to make me (and the character) cringe for pages and pages, possibly for the rest of the book, it's just painful.
- I can't handle very graphic violence or too-loving descriptions of corpses. (It took me a while to get into Ian Rankin before I learned you could skip the first chapter and it wasn't so bad after that.) I know I write about gross things inside the human body all the time, but it's the living human body, however poorly it happens to be functioning. It makes a difference.
Hm. Doubtless there is more. That's what's been bugging me lately.
I do have things that will yank me out of the story and, in some cases, make me stop reading, though. A stab at a list:
- I prefer to like, or at least be interested in the fate of, the protagonist. I find it harder to care when the protagonist is boring, irritating, or too stupid to live. (The last two categories overlap.) Assholes may or may not work; depends on the book.
- Infodump annoys me. It can be done well, but it so often isn't.
- Technical inaccuracies sometimes, although not always, bug me. I'm willing to let things slide if I don't know a lot about the topic or if I'm enjoying the story anyway, but this can be a tipping point. (In Lunar Park, nearly every character is medicated to the eyeballs, including the kids; when I hit a paragraph where someone was discussing methylphenidate and Ritalin as though they were two separate things and as though they were knowledgeable about those things, it irked me. If I wasn't writing an ADHD website at the moment it probably wouldn't bother me much at all, but there you go. By contrast, crankygrrl kept telling me what you could and couldn't see out of the third floor of the Louvre, at least until I made her stop last week; I had a lot of issues with The Da Vinci Code, starting with how slow you have to be to not get the clues before the main characters, but that wasn't one of them.)
- Plain clunky writing will stop me. Although it has to be pretty clunky before I notice. Clumsy use of third person omniscient and head-hopping come under this category. Incorrect word choices also, if I can't convince myself it's the copy editor's fault. Bad, stiff, or unnatural dialogue. Plot contrivances that make no sense and haven't been sold to me (some writers can sell me anything, however ridiculous, because I trust them and the story's working for me). Like that.
- Writing that's too impressed with itself also gets my nose out of joint. I like to read good writing that's invisible, seamless. If it's straining too hard for the beautifully-turned phrase it can be offputting. Charles de Lint occasionally veers into this territory for me, much as I love him. Likewise if I'm weeping with frustration that I'll never be able to write like this, it's harder to get into the story. Post-Sandman Neil Gaiman had a certain amount of this, for me; I think he's really hit his stride with Anansi Boys, though.
- I find contact embarrassment (thank you Pratchett and Gaiman for the term) very hard to take. Sometimes it works brilliantly. Sometimes if a character is working up to doing something that is going to make me (and the character) cringe for pages and pages, possibly for the rest of the book, it's just painful.
- I can't handle very graphic violence or too-loving descriptions of corpses. (It took me a while to get into Ian Rankin before I learned you could skip the first chapter and it wasn't so bad after that.) I know I write about gross things inside the human body all the time, but it's the living human body, however poorly it happens to be functioning. It makes a difference.
Hm. Doubtless there is more. That's what's been bugging me lately.