What are your literary “pet peeves”?
Oh, I’ve plenty. Urban fantasy should refer to something like The Lies of Locke Lamora, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lord of the Rings isn’t a trilogy (which is important because it creates structural expectations that it can’t hold up), and so on and so forth. But I think my biggest pet peeve is the privileging of “literary fiction” (a redundant phrase) over “genre fiction” (a meaningless phrase, as no piece of fiction can be without genre). I’ve even got a video rant on the subject, talking about how it isn’t used to delineate genre but rather used to privilege certain pieces of fiction.
Well said! Must see the video rant.
Here is my BTT http://edwardsgranddaugther.blogspot.com/2012/04/reviewing-how-to-live-and-not-die-as-i.html
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That is a very valid point!
Here is my BTT post!
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Verbage, I totally get it. Here’s my BTT
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Cathy @ Addicted to Books
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Forced parallel lines of dialogue, especially when used by different characters who don’t know the other line was spoken. Bugs the crap out of me because it’s forced.
Yurgh. Awful!
Aside from “literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” as well as the false dichotomy of “literature” and whatever they call “not literature,” I think the current phenomenon of making excessively long books is starting to drive me insane. There are so many books I’ve read that could’ve been fantastic were they not artificially inflated to an unwieldy, unnecessary length because of current market practises. Dan Simmons’ The Terror, for example, would’ve been excellent if it was about a third of the length, but as it is it’s bloated by redundant recaps of previous chapters and irrelevant descriptions.
Bloat is awful. What happened to economy of narrative?
A very good point! I’ll check out the video soon :3 I wrote a post about my own fiction pet peeves! Anyone got any Fanfiction Pet Peeves to share? Hope you will read and comment with your own! http://nynyonlinex.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/fiction-pet-peeves/
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