Recently, I picked up “Trespasses” by Louise Kennedy. I put it down after a few pages when I discovered that dialogue does not use quotation marks. Any conversation is simply inserted into the rest of the text with no indication. It was so unsettling. Without question, I couldn’t possibly continue a book so strangely formatted. It would have made it impossible for me to get fully engrossed without constantly noticing the choice. Got me wondering, what other books might have similarly strange formatting issues that made you unable to continue them?
by spaghettirhymes
26 Comments
I picked up a self published novel for free, and the author wrote everything in italics. It was a good premise, too. But I just couldn’t with the italics.
A lack of quotation marks is an acquired taste, for sure, but it works pretty well once you lock in on the style. Every work of Cormac McCarthy is done this way. *The Narrow Road to the Deep North* by Richard Flanagan is another stellar example.
What usually kicks me out of a book is the form factor–things like the binding or the font (anything san serif is automatically out), same for the long, narrow shape of modern mass-market books.
A Brief History of Seven Killings. Some sections were pages and pages of single paragraph stream of consciousness, I noped out after a couple of sections like that.
House of Leaves
I have never successfully read any book that gets cute with standard punctuation. Cannot do it. It makes me unreasonably infuriated.
Looking at you, Hemingway.
I loooove Trespasses. The quotation mark thing didn’t bother me, I think just because I’ve encountered that a lot in non American literature. But I run a book club at the library and had them read it. There were plenty of people who were bothered by the punctuation choices. Maybe try it as an audiobook.
Exact same thing happened to me. Can’t remember the name of the book, but it was about a woman who thinks she’s turning into a werewolf. No quotation marks. Hated it after two pages. Returned immediately to the library.
A much older series, but Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies is *so* annoying to read.
Nearly every paragraph is one giant run on sentence with commas & semicolons inserted every few words, seemingly at random.
I had to fight through “In the Quick” due to lack of quotation marks. I never knew if a statement was said aloud or thought only in their mind.
Same! It really bothers me. I’ve had this same book at about 40% finished for months because I am not motivated to look at this odd format
I recently tried to read a fan-translation of a novel, in which the fan translator put a space *before and after* every period. I only got about 1 paragraph in before I had to stop because my brain kept putting in big pauses between every sentance, which made it feel horribly choppy. Might not count because it wasn’t really a punished book, but still.
I did finish it, but House of Leaves was a chore to read because of constantly flipping back and forth between footnotes and the main body.
Not the main reason but one of the reasons I DNF’d The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary was because some of the dialogue was written like this:
<person’s name>: <what they said>
<other person’s name>: <words words words>
<person’s name>: … etc.
(of course without <> marks, but I hope you understand what I mean)
And they were talking face to face in that scene, if it was a chat or text messages, then I would’ve understood it.
I was reading it as an ebook so I don’t know if it was just the version I was reading or something.
The lack of quotation marks in dialogue also bothers me. I’ve read some books that did that, but I never got used to it.
For me, it’s dialogue without quotation marks. I “hear” it like characters are thinking to themselves and not talking.
Jodi Picolout has a couple where every chapter is from a different character and in a different font.
*Blindness* by José Saramago. I knew going in that it doesn’t have much variation in punctuation marks, mostly just commas to emphasize the horror of the blindness epidemic it’s about. It’s what drew me to the book but I could not get into the story while also trying to keep up with the flow of the words and piecing together visuals of what was happening. It’s been probably a decade since I tried it and it’s always in the back of my head for a potential revisit.
And then there’s *House of Leaves*, of course lol less about the formatting and more because I didn’t give a shit about 2/3 of the storylines, but the formatting didn’t help either (though again, it was the reason I picked it up in the first place)
I am a psychopath who only reads electronic. I remove all CSS and remove embedded fonts before I put it on my ereader. I read around 80-100 books a year and I like all my text to look identical. I don’t know why I am like this. I just have a much easier time reading this way.
Several times I’ve run into really awful formatting issues and OCR errors in e-Books that make it impossible or nearly impossible to continue. Sometimes the conversion process for older books (written before the word processor era) is just awful and no one pays attention to proofing the result. If it’s Project Gutenberg it’s forgivable, but I’ve seen this in paid e-books as well.
I can usually power through all sorts of pretentious authorial quirks, but some, like being allergic to paragraphs or pages and pages of impenetrable phonetic dialog will cause me to walk away.
The other thing that edges me toward the exit is an author who is just too damn rich and famous for their editors to rein in. Stephen King, in *On Writing* (HIGHLY recommended, even if you don’t like his books)*,* freely admits he churned out a lot of really awful, unfixable stuff in the depths of his addiction era, and his publishers just mostly stopped editing and kept shoveling to keep the gravy train running. For example, *Dreamcatcher* (the one with the creatures Tabitha King dubbed “shit weasels”.) should have been burned at midnight, scattered, and utterly forgotten.
I started to read an early Carl Sagan book, which was co-written with a Russian scientist. They includes a triangle pointing down to indicate when it was Sagan speaking in English, and a triangle pointing up when it was his Russian coauthor in translated Russian. Sometimes a triangle would appear mid-paragraph. I just couldn’t pick up the code. And it didn’t seem important who added which part of the story: they’re billed as coauthors, so just say “we.”
I felt this same way reading Bryan Washington’s “Memorial” – no quotation marks and the constants structural breaks were infuriating, it just seems like a way to occupy more space and reminds me of the students who think increasing the font size of punctuation in an essay is a crafty way to meet a length requirement – lazy. I finished the book, but promptly dropped it off at a Little Free Library.
I recently DNF’d a book with genuinely interesting subject matter because every single quote was broken up with the attribution in the middle, like:
“Not sure why,” the man said, “but it irked me to no end.”
Just put the attribution at the end of the sentence and stop trying to be cute.
Edit: I may also be neurotic.
Fools by Pat Cadigan. There’s a complicated interaction in the middle between 3 characters where for …. reasons … the only way to keep track of who’s who is by the font.
I bought an Pat Cadigan omnibus (part of the Gateway Collection, published by Hachette) which butchered not just the fonts big paragraph formatting.
I’d I hadn’t read the book before, it would have been literally impossible to finish.
Great novel, appalling publishing.
I didn’t DNF this book, but the formatting was hard to get used to. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I ended up liking it once I got used to the lack proper punctuation lol
Blood Meridian
I didn’t DNF, but that Cormoran Strike novel that was half screenshots from a video game chat room made me want to die. I think I heard that the formatting was extra bad on e-readers, which is how I read it.
(Looked it up: it was Ink Black Heart)
Parts of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray were like that and it was difficult and turned me off but I powered through. lol