Ron Charles, a book critic at The Washington Post, recently had a column called What Readers Hate Most in Books based on what readers told him. The responses ranged from dream sequences, to historical anachronism, to the the use of certain words, to the lack of quotation marks, to sexist tropes, to a character "who pinches the bridge of his nose to indicate frustration" (yes, really).
I very much related to the complaints about length:
Excessive length was a frequent complaint. Jean Murray says, “First books by best-selling authors are reasonable in length; then they start believing that every word they write is golden and shouldn’t be cut.” She notes that Elizabeth George’s first novel, “A Great Deliverance,” was 432 pages. Her most recent, “Something to Hide,” is more than 700.
Susan Moss suspects this is a misimpression of prestige. “Only J.M. Coetzee seems to think an important book can be under 300 pages.”
But it’s not just the books that are too long. Everything in them is too long, too. Readers complained about interminable prologues, introductions, expositions, chapters, explanations, descriptions, paragraphs, sentences, conversations, sex scenes, fistfights and italicized passages.
I find a lot of books to be too long. And too filled with exposition. I'll finish a book and think, that was ok but it would have been better if an editor had stood up to the author and said "It's too long."
Other readers dislike "gratuituously confusing timelines" which I'm not sure I completely understand. It could mean many things. Personally, I dislike the trend in books to have two (or three) different timelines and each timeline is covered in different chapters. I (perhaps erroneously) blame MFA programs on this because I (perhaps erroneously) have this idea that many people in MFA programs write a lot of short stories and I (perhaps erroneously) believe that they like to write chapters that are like little short stories. But with cliffhangers.
One thing that wasn't mentioned that drives me crazy is character dialog that doesn't sound like how people really talk. People don't talk in narrative. People don't use other people's full names over and over. People don't always talk in full sentences. I could go on. (And I often do.)
The floor is open for complaints.
