COMPLAINTS about BOOKS

why (looking at you specifically, FSG) do you insist on saying 'A Note About the Author'? after all you don't say 'A Note About Copyright Law' or 'A Note Involving the Title of This Book'

e-book stylists: i guess there's room for expression between the cover and the title page, but *then* comes the copyright and *then* comes the dedication. stop putting them at the end ffs

i shall let other posters weigh in on covers featuring yellow-lit buildings in the night

old-times digressive subset of answers (for reference and expansion):
https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&boardid=40&threadid=42731&bookmarkedmessageid=48

e.g. this was when i shd have bailed: "The clash between Pope George VII and Emperor Henry IV of England is a case in point"

ie this:
https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=1&boardid=40&threadid=42731

(it's not doing the thing but you can still click thru) (sorry mookieproof)

hi academic ebook publishers, pdfs are fucking useless, thanks for listening

Books can fall on your foot

Main one would be the incompetent, cheap binding from some paperback publishers. Looking at you Metheun, NHB. The only translations of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Trilogy are published by these guys, and the books fall apart instantly.

^otm

if a book is worth printing it is worth binding properly so it doesn't break its back on its first reading. if you're that cheapass about binding you may as well have printed it as a newspaper.

Deckled edges. I don't get it

If the contents of your book are nothing more complicated than ordinary prose text, don't print it in a non-conformist size (e.g. 8" x 8") that has no real justification aside from 'we just wanted to do something different'. They stick out like sore thumbs when shelved, especially when the spine extends beyond the outer edge of the shelf. It's pointlessly irritating.

It aggravates me when publishers put any substantial text (Preface, Foreword, Editor's note) before the Table of Contents. The Table of Contents should be the easiest thing in the book to find. Put it as close to the front as possible, imo.

(Granted, this is less of an annoyance for leisure reading than for work reading, when I have to quickly skim the pdf of a report and the ToC is 10 pages in.)

Bad quality paper and printing is so frustrating. I just bought a friend’s new hardback novel, published by Abacus, that looks like rice paper run through a dot matrix printer

Re mookieproof’s third complaint:

The ever-growing dark building/yellow light crime cover collection. pic.twitter.com/WLqTrE251a

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) September 15, 2023

That cheap slightly-glossed paper that’s so lightweight the print shows through but also makes the book weirdly heavy and is just awful to fucking read, aesthetically speaking
Academic texts do this a lot and should be yelled at for it

crooked pages, either cut wrong or printed wrong, drives me UP the wall

map reproductions in cheap printings where the image is sixth-hand from original and so blurry/small as to be completely useless

photo plates without captions
what is even the point

"Main one would be the incompetent, cheap binding from some paperback publishers"

omg i was reading this awesome article on Leon Forrest's novel Divine Days and they have a new reissue copy next door to my house (!!) at my friends bookstore (what are the odds?) and i took one look at it and knew that it would fall apart 1/4 of the way through. its a thousand pages long and its a trade paperback where you can lift the spine of the book and look through it! no way. i totally would have bought it. its looks like an awesome thing.

i suppose i could just tape it up and not care about the look of the thing.

When they print "This page intentionally left blank" on a page that is not, in fact, blank because it says "this page intentionally left blank" on it.

dedications that are like

to everyone who wanted to sleep a little longer when the alarm went off

do you really have no one in your life who has meant more to you than being twee as fuc

'A Note About the Author'

still better than 'Meet the Author' at least

author photos that are all like

https://i.imgur.com/UdyXjqN.jpeg

if you insist on a photo, just . . . try being normal maybe

Non-fiction books that don't have an index.

otm but tbf i hear that publishers now make authors pay for indexing themselves, and few non-fiction authors have the money to spare

old school complaint that must have been covered elsewhere -

• endnotes that don't reference the page number to which the notes refer (usually at the top eg pp50-53)
• acknowledgments generally (unless specific academic or other indebtedness - ie the book was clearly influenced by other books or research). Not 'here's a list of my mates who read it'
• the faber finds model of buying up classics into a print on demand and then issuing without any apparatus

Recently I've noticed while looking at reviews of fiction books that a lot of people complain that they "Had to keep a dictionary next to (them) while reading".
First off, these are not particularly dense or wordy books I would say.
Second of all, what's wrong with using and learning cool words?

^ another reason ebook are better (when i actually remember to use the dictionary). the kobo dictionary has impressed me a few times with just how obscure it goes.

If there is a map in your book, it should ideally show every place name that appears in the text.

I would like an ebook of the first Earthsea novel that adds a little dashed line to the map as the book continues

"Ged, Sparrowhawk, Archmage of Roke, YOU ARE HERE"

i hate those jumped-up modern trade paperbacks with pretend dust-jacket flaps built into the cover

the tassel bookmark things on Library of America editions are annoying

it doesn't make me angry but it did used to make me kinda sad that so many sci-fi books i read obviously didn't have a proofreader. so many typos. like it wasn't worth the publisher's money to get it right. i've only really encountered this with SF.

yeah, tassels and paperback dust-jacket flaps, i mean anything that gets in the way of actually reading the book is so dumb! it would be cool if books included nice bookmarks with a picture of the book cover on them.

Typos on stuff from major publishers confounds me. I can’t be that good at spotting typos without even trying. Is proofreading/copyediting for long stretches so tedious that it’s impossible to avoid this?

texts peppered with endnote reference numbers don't read smoothly. I'm still not sure how to order my time checking them out. End of paragraph despite there possibly being a couple more. Or end of page. Each time one crops up breaks the flow in reading anyway.
& really doesn't help in a loo book.

otm i so agree stevo!

two guys got together to write a space opera. they didn't bother to hide the fact that they were two guys, but they chose to create a name -- JAMES S.A. COREY -- for the cover and stuff. and i hate them for it

- Prefaces that read like personal or academic essays, whose ideas and interpretation are quickly dated and controversial, that are full of spoilers, and that take up 20% of the text that follows. This is not your book, shut up.
- On that matter, books that are not clear where the text starts. I want to know if I'm reading the incipit or the first line of yet another introduction.
- Notes that assume an erudite tone, flaunt needless historical details or obscure references, offer judgement on the text, or assume the reader speaks fluent Ancient Greek and Latin.
- Stickers that are printed on the cover, superlative praise / bait, and other marketing devices.

i do hate spoiler intros so much! who reads them before they read the book? why can't they put them in the back?

to be honest, i hate endless book club stuff at the back of a book too. also filled with spoilers. i feel like the text is sometimes bigger too and sometimes i accidentally see stuff that i don't want to see. like who killed the butler!

especially intros in the front that quote huge chunks of the book. i hate that.

Sometimes I think about book covers and how they are constantly changing.

Is music the one form of packaged art where we get really precious about the original cover? Movies are repackaged with new covers fairly regularly, as are books. It seems like every time I perused paperback Stephen King books back in the day his entire works would be reissued with brand new covers, none as good as the originals. That first Pet Semetary cover was so good.

Yeah always wondered about that. It does happen with music occasionally but not often

wait, now i'm curious, does anyone read the long intro that explains every element of the book with liberal paragraph quoting before they read the book? uh, talking fiction of course.

no, hate them. i do read them after i've read the book and they're easy to skip and i can understand why putting them at the end would be a bit weird so it's somewhat an irrational hatred.

must books be described as 'cozy'?

most introductions should be afterwords

as skot said

i tend to read the introductions to classic fiction last if at all because yeah ffs spoilers, and sometimes among the spoilers there is useful context - the older and more foreign to me the origin of the book this can be v useful, but i don't want to know the plot points before i've read the book itself

The copy of Charles Webb's The Graduate I own has a summary of the entire plot on the blurb on the back, including the final scene.

I generally skip introductions that have been added on reissues of works of fiction.

Unless they are by the author.

frontmatter should be negative numerals ordered backward from "1". page zero should be denoted by "(*whoosh*)" printed at the bottom right of page -1 and the top left of page 1.

All books should start on page 1, not 3, 5, 7, or 19

probably correct, but the current system leads you to believe that you're well along into the book, which is encouraging

This is a good (i.e. bad) example of what I complained of above:

"You look awful"

I'm in the grassmarket. If Lydia is out looking for me, she'll never find me here. No-one will. I alone can see through the Glamour, just me and the Hidden Folk. It's probably dark out by now but I'm underground and away from the light.

But no-one is looking for me. I know that now.

"Thank you" I tell the vendor sarcastically.

Obviously it's clear enough on the page but I was reading it aloud to my daughter and she said "what?". I had to re-read it in a more sensible order.

it seems like an attempt at copying a cinematic technique, dropping into a new scene, which works onscreen since we can see what's occurring, but in books just feels like an effortful stylistic stretch, at best.

Okay, yeah, that IS bad - I thought your initial complaint was far too restrictive in storytelling, but I can see why you dislike that particular one. I will say, however, that it would be INCREDIBLY easy to fix it without changing the technique you're compaining about:

"You look awful," a vendor remarks.

I'm in the grassmarket. If Lydia is out looking for me, she'll never find me here. No-one will. I alone can see through the Glamour, just me and the Hidden Folk. It's probably dark out by now but I'm underground and away from the light.

But no-one is looking for me. I know that now.

"Thank you," I reply sarcastically.

Maybe not amazingly great literature still, but very few people would be confused or annoyed by what is happening. I think this is just bad writing/editing.

That is an improvement for sure and the book does show other signs of a lack of editing - a few typos, she loves to have people "exhale". I'm still not a fan of the technique in general but it's the ubiquity that really started to annoy me, some books doing it at the start of every chapter.

I'm in the grassmarket. If Lydia is out looking for me, she'll never find me here. No-one will. I alone can see through the Glamour, just me and the Hidden Folk. It's probably dark out by now but I'm underground and away from the light.

But no-one is looking for me. I know that now.

"You look awful," a vendor remarks.

"Thank you," I reply sarcastically.

YYYEEEEESSSSSSSSS

Shouldn't Grassmarket be capitalized as a proper noun - assuming its referring to the place in Edinburgh?

Maybe I mistyped but it's also a SECRET grassmarket under the Grassmarket where they actually sell grass (enchanted pieces of straw).

I see. I guess being hit with three significant but as yet undefined terms in the opening sentence - "grassmarket", "the Glamour" and "Hidden Folk" - is a tell-tale sign that one has started reading a fantasy novel.

^^^ or the Billy McKenzie story

The first little pig built his market out of grass

My problem is with "I tell the vendor sarcastically", because it's such horrible adverbing - and also "vendor", a horrible noun.

A stallholder said: “You look awful.”

"Thanks for sharing, mate."

I also don't get the continuity between "If Lydia is out looking for me, she'll never find me here. No-one will" and "But no-one is looking for me. I know that now."

I've read better, I've read worse.

One thing I really don’t like is when fiction writers try to describe great or brilliant art, but, because they can’t express that greatness/brilliance through narration, have to rely on describing people’s exaggerated reactions (eg. The opera singer begun her aria and everyone in the room began to slowly weep - I’m thinking of the novel Bel Canto here)

My complaint is that, a lot of times writers can’t think of, or describe, art that is as powerful or brilliant as it is in the story, so readers are just expected to take it’s profundity for granted, or else, it just strains credulity.

try Proust bruh

I don't like it when there's a story within the story within the story.

I recall Frankenstein does this, dithering around for the first several pages before getting to the ACTUAL story via a series of epistolaries and recollections within them.

I'm reading John Langan's 'The Fisherman', and after a few chapters of setting up our main character, we suddenly meet someone who recounts a great long story that was in turn told to him by another person about the experiences of yet another person who was involved with another character for whom it seems necessary to talk about her family history, including the stories of many of her family.

By the time I'd got that far into the matryoshka of enclosing stories, I had no idea who was narrating the story at all. And the thing is, this turducken of a plot doesn't even feel that necessary. He could have found a way to tell the story more directly

iirc Frankenstein goes about 5 or 6 levels deep at one point. i forget the details but he's eavesdropping on something and the person is reporting what someone else has said.

"It was a dark and stormy night and the Captain said to the mate, Tell us a story mate, and this is the story. It was a dark and stormy night......etc"

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa goes several levels deep.

Even as a kid I remember wondering about whatever happened to the merchant storyteller at the start of Disney's Aladin! He pops up, sings a politically incorrect song, starts telling the tale and we never hear from him again. At least in Coleridge's 'Rime Of The Ancient Mariner' he doesn't forget about the wedding guest at the end.

Nabisco has a great post somewhere here in the archives about the birth of the novel, taking Frankenstein as an example: the format wasn't codified yet, so there was often this use of a found letter or ancient document as a marker of pseudo-authenticity. And the longer you go on the more of these you need, thus the boxes within boxes of Frankenstein.

I kind of like that the start of Madame Bovary has a narrator just to create an in-group ("we") that Charles is not a part of, but they just disappear after the first chapter, the rest is standard omniscient impersonal narration.

^^ me too

I like all of these things

I think the Langan book is a pretty egregious example. He spends a good few chapters setting things up and getting us used to our main character. But the stories-within-stories-within-stories unfold at a blistering pace some four or five chapters in. Perhaps if I weren't listening to it as an audiobook it might be easier to follow, but we go about five layers deep and several generations back within what feels like just a few pages.
It's a well-written book overall, I just wonder if this narrative could have been framed less confusingly

I like all of these things

See also the beginning of The Time Machine.

Hell yeah frame-narrative tropes. And the pretense that the book you are holding was "discovered," epistolary novels, bring them on. Heart of Darkness.

Nabokov bows to those in genteel ways too, and follow-on postmodernist metafiction dutifully does so with a wink.

Nabisco/Daniel raise a good point that these flourished while the form was telling. Why is Laurence Sterne so weird? Because no one told him not to be.

So then in 1990whatever and fiction seemed like it was going to be a blast, with shackles removed, it rediscovered trickery from earlier centuries. Which I guess is a bit like pre-Code movies being wild.

Sorry I hasten to say the above is a half-awake vibes thing and not necessarily well-thought-out. I suspect someone will school me with counterexamples and say I have the chronology wrong.

Telling = gelling.

^awesome post, YMP. You post from the half-awake/half-dream state more often.

The film The Bride of Frankenstein has a little of this. I can only imagine The Bride! will amp it up.

William James once (critically) said to Henry that his fiction was like a 'hall of mirrors' and that's precisely the quality I like in nested narratives and tales within tales - fiction reflecting on fiction.

the pretense that the book you are holding was "discovered,"

one of my favourite things in books and something is pretty much unique to book storytelling. The way that it makes you think about the author/narrator as a character in itself who has his own agenda. Anyway, I've been reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun lately and there are multiple levels of this where the author and editors are all also characters in the world of the book and you keep having to figure out what is made up and what they've kept secret and possibly what was redacted and why. Lots of fun.

Now reminded of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, not sure if that's been mentioned yet.

Such books are about reading in the way a P-Funk song is about The Funk.

Which is its own reward iirc

Frame narratives kick ass, one of my favourite things in fiction. Antiquarian discoveries, metafiction, epistolary mode, even a Greek Chorus probably counts. It all rules.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa goes several levels deep.

― ledge

Yep, such a banger. Film of it is also astounding.

Love both the book and the movie

That director's films are hard to see, so I went to everything I could manage at a Filmlinc festival the year before last.

The Saragossa Manuscript C/D?

There is also the more recent idea of slipstream, which the late Christopher Priest was a proponent and master of. In several of his books the different levels eventually loop back and intersect in a way that can't be untangled, maybe like a Möbius strip if not a Klein bottle or some other non-standard topology.

The Thousand and One Nights goes multi-layered at many points too. It's been way too long since I read The Manuscript at Saragossa but anyway this is a good thing if you don't love it other books are available etc

James + Blecchs, I think Calvino is highly relevant here, along with a bunch of pomo tricksters. Add Cortazar, Borges.

Ishmael Reed: "No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

When I was in college I may have beeen influenced unduly by Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction and Brian McHale's study of contemporary postmodernism, with a detour into the architecture of the time, where an incongruously big classical pediment seemed obligatory.

makes you think about the author/narrator as a character in itself who has his own agenda

I suspect that Nabokov hit the unreliable-narrator theme with a sledgehammer in Pale Fire partly because he thought that mass audiences misunderstood Lolita.

Been wondering if there is a good translation of 1001 Nighs people recommend.

the end is nigh

Richard Francis Burton the Victorian adventurer/explorer translated 1001 Nights. He may have been a little bit on the white supremacist imperialist side but it was an attempt at a straight translation and not for kids.

There's a recent Penguin one that's fairly solid, can't remember the translator's name offhand. First time I read it was a Victorian translation but not Burton who, when I've dipped in, is too florid even for me.

I mean the entire book is kind of an Orientalist pastiche in many ways so this does come with the territory

I have a Tales from the Thousand and One Nights in a Penguin Classics translated by N J Dawood, from the 50s originally, revised 1973. Dawood is p brutal abt Burton in his intro: "His excessive weakness for the archaic, his habit of coining words and phrases, and the unnatural idiom he affected, detract from the literary quality of his translation without in any way enhancing its fidelity to the original."