Top Ten Tuesday: Book Turn Offs

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.  

Here are my top ten book turn offs, or the techniques and character types I typical don't enjoy.  There are always exceptions for me when a book does so much right that I can overlook the downsides, but usually these things make me want to throw my book.

1. Love Triangles. These CAN be done well, but they usually aren't.  I only like a love triangle when there is legitimate confusion about which person you love (Raven Boys I love you) and none of the wishy washness that is Twilight.  I think we all knew you were going to choose Edward, Bella.

2. Hand of God rescue endings (Dues Ex Machina) I'm sorry Dean Koontz, but you are the primary offender.  Any time the characters should die at the end of a story or something bad should happen but there is a last minute rescue from a completely unbelievable source.

3. Mary Sue characters.  I make a few exceptions, but when a character is kind and pretty and good at EVERYTHING it is boring.  They need faults to balance them out. The worst is when characters have faults that are actually strengths.  This is not an interview!

4. Lack of quotation mark.  A lot of the time when quotations are dropped it just makes the reading more confusing and turns a lot of readers off. (not you "The Road", I love you always). 

5. An Object of Power in fantasy.  Just let the lord of the rings have this one guys, you know you can't top it and you seem like copycats.  Harry Potter kind of overdid this in my opinion, but I still love it.  Please don't stone me for saying that.

6. Reworkings of literature that butcher everything beautiful about the originals. Some people will never get to read the original story because you poisoned them.  I'm all for allusions to other works, but using it as the basis of your own feels too much like theft to me.


7. The morally and emotionally tortured Vampire.  I accept it in Louis from the Vampire Chronicles, otherwise it just feels stale.   If you really cared that much you'd step into the sun, you emo.


8. Prophecies.   Let me tell you the entire story in a few paragraphs so that the rest of the book has no suspense.  Sometimes there are cool twists on the meanings of prophecies that saves them from this fate, but often times they just suck the life out of a story.


9. Series Recaps. I hate it when the second book (or third or fourth...) does a tv style recap of "what you missed in the last episode".  Anyone who can't remember should reread the first book or look up a summary.  I know I don't pause midlife and say "in case you didn't know me when I was 12, here's what you missed".


10.  Characters that are blatantly a glorified version of the author. I'm talking to you Stephen King, Joe Hill and especially Glen Duncan.  I can't prove it, but I know you think you're that werewolf.

  

What's are your Book-turn-offs?  Leave us a link & we'll be sure to visit!