What doesn't work for me

[la_marquise]

At the moment, I'm reading a book by an author whose books I like a lot, and whose characters I always find engaging and attractive. I really loved the last thing I read by them and I expected to be drawn into this one at once, too.
And I wasn't, which made no sense, because all the things I loved about other books in the series were present: the detailed milieu, the strong characters, the intrigue, the sense of danger... yet my eyes kept sliding away and I found myself reaching for my current non-fiction book (which I'm reading for research reasons) instead.
But I kept on, and a few chapters in suddenly my interest picked up and I was happily absorbed.
Which was when it hit me. The first part of the book was set mainly on a ship. Ships just don't do it for me. Even when I writer I love, when characters I find fascinating are involved, one the naval stuff starts, I find I start to skim, to gloss, to rush on to get to the next bit without boats.
It's not the fault of any of the writers. It's me. For some reason, I don't want to read about boats. I never cared for Swallows and Amazons and their sequels, nor for the Hornblower books. I've never been able to get into Patrick O'Brien: indeed, despite many people whose opinions I respect telling me how good those books are, my head drags at the thought of reading them. I'm just not a sea-story person.
I have no idea why. I'm a perfectly good sailor, and I enjoy travelling on boats. I have enjoyed films set on ships, too. I just don't want to read about them. There seems to be no logic to it (unless Arthur Ransome, who I read young and found dull for other reasons as well as the boats, put me off for life -- sorry, chilperic). I don't mind when the characters are on ships and non-sailing/sea battle/pirate stuff is happening. Sea-board politics and romances? Fine. Hauling on sheets and reefing sails, loading cannon and chasing frigate? No, thank you.
It's a fault in me as a reader, I know that. I can see that the ship bits in the book I'm reading are well written and exciting. But I just don't have that button in my head. If someone wrote a book in which Aramis, who, as we know, is my favourite fictional character ever, became a sea captain, I'd read it, certainly. But I might well not be that engaged by it, unless he was all about politics, and not about capturing enemy colours and splicing mainbraces. And I wouldn't believe it, because Aramis doesn't like sea-travel: that's canon -- he tells d'Artagnan so in Twenty Years After.
So, here's a question for you all. What doesn't work for you? I don't mean things you just don't like in books, or find a turn off or a bore, I mean things that you just don't quite get, somehow, that even in the hands of your favourite writers leave you lukewarm? Do you have any idea why? I'd like to think it's not just me!

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

A lot of romance-positive stuff falls into "just don't get" for me, though some other aspects of it definitely falls into "don't like". (I think one is a content issue and the other is an attitude-to-content issue, and even a sympathetic attitude does not make the content work for me.)

Other than that, I'm not thinking of that much that leaves me lukewarm other than lack of ambition; it's possible for ambitious scenes to fail spectacularly but I think it's less likely for them to fail in ways that are merely dull.

Do hovercraft count as ships in this context ? Though come to think of it, there is not that much hovercraft-fic out there for a statistical sample.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I don't mind romance, as long as it isn't the only point of everything.
As to hovercraft, no, I don't think so. It's that 'romance of the sea' thing, I think, that I don't get.

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

Mechanics, and mechanical physics. I have a hole in my head where information about things like gears goes to die. It impacts on some of the sailing stuff, and a lot of yer basic golden age SF. Anything to do with engines, problems solved with garage-level technology. Not into Formula 1, stock-car racing, motorbikes.

I still haven't been able to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Films I handle better because they're over quicker, and there are other things to whizz you through the boring bits. And some engine-head movies I love, the Mad Max trilogy, Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, the Great Race. But when the engine becomes an inefficient tool and the plot centres on fixing it and the people who love to do so, I'm away with the Luddites.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I don't mind those biuts, though sometimes the marquis has to decode them for me. On the other hand, I never finished Zen & the Art of Motorcycle maintenance either, because I disliked the narrator so much.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I have a real problem with old fashioned 'dark fantasy' - it's one of the reasons I really can't stand Moorcock... and am not fond of Tanith Lee.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, goodness. I can see that, though it tends to work for me as long as it doesn't wallow.

[(Anonymous)]

As a library worker I hear a fair few reading peccadilloes. For some reason the revelation that it was the ship-setting that was the problem amused me. Not sure why, possibly because it seems slightly random -though I appreciate that it isn't for you.
Often I find that people don't like a certain subgenre within a favoured genre. Like a fantasy-reader I know who only reads secondary world fantasy, because she find it difficult to suspend disbelief when reading fantasy set in our world.
A lot of crime fans will only read British novels, or at least they won't read American ones -though that's probably a stylistic difference.

Personally I find that certain types of romance don't work for me, I think I have a narrow/limited definition of what's romantic and it takes quite a bit for me to be invested in a fictional relationship. However most books I read aren't just about a relationship, so I can usually focus on other plot strands.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It isn't a logical thing with me at all, it's a just a brain blip, I guess. It surprised me, too, because it seems so odd. I have plenty of active dislikes -- I loathe overly feisty heroines with tragic backstories, for instance, and plots where everything is made safe and cuddly at the end. I avoid historical novels because they hit my professional historian button and thus I get distracted and don't read them fairly. I also avoid many detective novels set in the UK written by Americans, because they feel wrong. But those are prejudices, and I know they are. Ships? Heaven only knows.
I can see how romance can be difficult: we all tend to have quite clear ideas about what it should be, and it's easy for something to just feel wrong.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Arch dialogue. I absolutely hate it unless it was written by Noel Coward, and even then, a little goes a long way. Arch narration is even worse.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I can cope with it in comedy, up to a point, but self-conscious archness is very annoying, I agree.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Sports and horror. No thanks, no interest, my eyes slide (or I flinch, because there is far too much horror in real life, thank you, don't need more in fiction.) I don't care how well-written.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh goodness. It hadn't occurred to me that a novel might be about sport. I don't think that would work for me, either (unless it was fencing).
I don't read horror because it scares me. It's an avoid, rather than an irrational dislike.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I must admit I found Master and Commander about as exciting as watching paint dry, but I loved Hornblower. Of course now I'm writing the magic pirate story... However, though some secenes take place on the ocean there's not much of the hauling on the mainbrace and battening down the hatches. Just enough to make it seem realistic as a setting for story, I hope.

What doesn't work for me? Anything set in Australia - including the Sainted Terry's 'Last Continent.' I've been to Australia. It's a perfectly nice place with some more than interesting features, some way cool flora and fauna and some lovely people, but I don't want to read about it. The one exception is the series of Silver Brumby books by Elyne Mitchell, or at least the early ones where humans are absent.

The other thing that turns me off is anything set on an American college campus. I hated Pamela Dean's Tam Lin despite generally being a lover of all things Tam Lin related. The setting was just so alien - but not in a good alien way. Mars might have been better. Tam Lin in Space anyone? Hmmm, I might have to write that myself.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Australia? That's as odd as me and the ships, I think.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Endless battle scenes. Ships, spaceships, kingdoms, whatever the genre, I don't care about troop movement and tactics. I like military settings well enough, but I can't read a whole book about planning and executing battles. Or watch a film about it, either; Peter Jackson's Two Towers being a very good example of a huge disappointment in that regard. I skip past all the sail reefing and ships of the line stuff in Patrick O'Brian whom I otherwise love.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I can deal with battles if they're well written. Mind you, I haven't read a lot of military fiction.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

What doesn't work for me?

Grot. Gritty realism. Wading through mud and manure. Characters who are constantly on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion, but somehow manage to force themselves to fight another three-day battle or climb another mountain, and before they can get more than a smidgen of rest they're off again, still exhausted (Pyanfar Chanur, I'm looking at you). Stories where the protagonists track down the bad guy or solve the mystery, but nothing can be done about it because of politics or money. Stories where a happy ending is fairly bought and paid for, but never arrives. Stories, in short, that make me think of real life. And that's why. I don't need fiction to make me think about real life. I have real life for that.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I can understand that. I avoid books about academics for similar reasons.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Long technical descriptions of tech anything, or how it works, or why it works. And a certain type of science purveying, which I can't quite describe, in which the writer believes he is explicating an "idea" but it is really more of a "nifty concept" and not that damned interesting anyway.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I have to get the marquis to explain those bits, or I skim them. I do find heavy tech-y infodump annoying, though, as it can look like showing-off.

[maryosmanski.livejournal.com]

Battle scenes that go on for pages and pages, modern sports in a lot of detail, and sex scenes that are too specific and thus too lengthy.

If these occur too early in the story, I usually put the book down and just never come back to it. Later in the story, I will start flipping pages looking for the next scene which is something else and start reading from there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Things that holds the plot up can be very annoying.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Well, you know why you don't like ship fiction?

It's because you're a water writer. And ships engage with water and overcome it.

(</pop_psychology>)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Ha! My water swamps those silly ships.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

too much technical stuff that doesn't clearly connect to the plot. The bowyer bits in KJ Parker? really interesting. The plain descriptions in Patrick O'Brien? skim city. John Updike and his overblown modifiers. Most of John Irving, because his deaths and dismemberments as plot devices bore me. Books where the main characters are whiney white men who think the world owes them (I'm looking at YOU, Holden Caulfield)...

OTOH, naval battles? fab.

Oh, and anything that is implausible and you can tell the author doesn't realize it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, yes. Middle-aged white man wailing. The kind of thing up with which I will not put.

[chilperic.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the apology above: yes, Arthur Ransome and Patrick O'Brian are two of my favourite non-sff authors. And, yes, I probably forgive you for not liking them.... :-) Though I have to say my favourite Ransome is probably Pigeon Post, followed quickly by Winter Holiday -- and you will not know, because you haven't read them, but there is not a boat in either of them. Bu I do admit there is something of the romance of the sea in me (and obviously not in you): but perhaps that is actually the romance of exploration. That's more obvious in O'Brian, where, travelling as precursors of the Beagle, Stephen Maturin is constantly discovering new planets, so to speak, in remote parts of our own planet. I think I like O'Brian for some of the same reasons that I like science fiction. Ships, spaceships, they both take you to new places. The water bit is irrelevant.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. It's also the reason I like both hard SF (in the Campbellian sense) and classic detective stories - because both are puzzles.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Satirical comedic writing by and large does not work for me. I don't like The Onion, I don't like the early Discworld books, I don't like Bored of the Rings. Bizarrely, I love satirical comedic films--I will watch Police Squad and the Naked Gun movies happily for hours--but I bounce off it in text like a bouncing thing bouncing off something hard.

Also description. I don't visualize, and so pages of description do nothing for me. I cannot read Janny Wurts, although I thoroughly enjoyed the books she wrote with Raymond Feist (I could, however, tell what parts she wrote). I have never finished The Lord of the Rings because somewhere in the middle of THE TWO TOWERS after the ten thousandth loving description of the ten thousandth blade of grass as they ran or rode or whatever the hell they did through the plains of somewhere, I gave up and never, ever went back.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I don't mind the descriptions, unless they're about ships. Pardoy I can take or leave, but I do have a down on out and out caricature -- it's why I can't read Dickens.

[miintikwa.livejournal.com]

I am the same as you-- I don't find ship-tales all that compelling.

I also find sci-fi where they focus too much on the science and not enough on the fiction to be really difficult to read and get into. It's hard for me to dive into the story.

I think, for me, the thing that keeps me out of the story is the focus on stuff that feels like filler. I don't need to know the nitty gritty of how the chemist created the life-saving vaccine, or how the sails on a ship work-- it's enough if the author makes it clear that THEY know how it works. You know?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I know exactly what you mean!

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Explicit sex scenes. I don't want to watch my friends have sex in real life, I don't want to watch them in fiction.

When it's a first person narrative I find it difficult to believe they would write down/tell things in the level of detail we get.

In third person narratives I usually get the feeling that the author is trying to use the scene to titilate the reader, which breaks the conceit that these people are living their lives and I'm following along and observing from over their shoulder. I can think of exactly one sex scene that felt _necessary_ to a book, and it was stunningly _different_ from the ones I usually read ^H skim.

I have no objection to sex, even explicit sex, but I want to be able to choose when I consume it, and breakfast or on public transport are not appropriate times.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I tend to skim those, I admit.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I've thought of another one; systematic magic that is treated "as if it were science" by people who really don't know what real science is like, particularly when you can almost hear the dice rolling in the background for how much damage the fireballs do.

I have no objection to magic-as-utility if it's treated that way consistently (viz. Walter Jon Williams' very good Metropolitan and the truly excellent sequel City on Fire, and iirc there's an Ian McLeod that does this rather well too), but magic that feels like being on the cutting edge of real science, basically I have given up on finding and am pottering about with writing it myself.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I can see that one: I'm not partial to the dice-rolling kind myself.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

Multiple-volume giant epics with many characters and vast quantities of high-level political intrigue, vaguely imitative of the writers notion of some particular historical era or place.

I do not bounce off these so much as simply slide over them, in the manner of the sole of a foot meeting a lot of wet and soapy bathroom tile.

Had I ever had any sense that the writers of such works had actually engaged in political intrigue themselves or at least talked to someone who had, it might be different.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think I may have liked those when I was 12. Now, though, not so much.