This weeks question is: Do you have a bookish pet peeve? If so, what is it? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)
I hate poorly-edited books. I feel like I spend almost as much time reporting grammatical errors to Amazon as I do actually reading books.
OK, not really. But still. I have stopped reading books that were otherwise fine because the writing pulled me out of the story over and over again.
I get that indie writers might not be able to afford professional editing. But I see the same problems in books published by major publishing houses. And it just…sets my teeth on edge.
What about you? What’s the one thing about books that just gets you all riled up? I’ll do my best to calm you down in the comments.
The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer @ Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the hop on February 15, 2013. Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end the following Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book-related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog
fifty-two 
Overwriting and forced dialogue irritate me to no end.
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Mine is badly researched books – especially anything to do with Jews or being Jewish (which are usually done by non-Jewish writers). I’ve DNF several books because they got too much wrong!
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Dialog where I can’t tell who is speaking given lines. Yes, I understand you want it to flow better, and don’t want to keep tagging each quote with “Jack said” or “Jill said”. And that’s fine; it’s quite possible to get that flow while still letting me track who is saying what. But when you’ve got dialog lines that logically have to come from the same character but are broken into two quotes with nothing in between that’s just confusing; because the convention I’m used to is when two characters are talking a break in the quote (other than to insert descriptive text) signals a switch in speakers.
Take:
“I saw you this morning while picking up coffee.” “Your hair was looking especially nice.” “Thank you; I had it done yesterday.”
Why aren’t those first two sentences a single quote? It’s two people talking, and the first two sentences are clearly from the same speaker, with the third being a response to them. But extend this issue into a longer conversation and it gets confusing quickly about who is speaking at any given point.
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It’s extra tricky if you are reading a book with two protagonists of the same gender…even the “he looked out the window before replying” trick doesn’t work!
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I don’t like it when POVs switch too often, and I get confused.
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