Do not want...but why not?

I can't stand:

• inconsistent dialogue (the same character, speaking like an Errol Flynn movie one minute and then suddenly sounding like a teenage kid from the 80s, frex).
  
• too much capitalisation, as noted above. The logic of making an occupation a proper noun, for example, is completely lost on me. He's not the King's Armourer. He's the king's armourer. Or, if you want to get more precise, King Joe's armourer.
  
• over/misuse of gerund verb phrases (I suspect you're familiar with this one). "Looking both ways, Jennifer crossed the street." Jennifer's going to get dizzy, fall down, and get hit by a bus. It's more likely that Jennifer looked both ways before she crossed the street — unless Jennifer is destined to be the body in this story.
  
• made up languages with no internal consistency. This tells me an author is really keen to show us how very foreign and special their culture is: they have to pepper their speech and descriptions with italicised words (that makes them much more exotic!) which bear no linguistic similarity to one another. It's a bit like seeing a play translated from French done in French accents. If I'm reading about your faraway world, I'm positive the language they speak there is not the same as the one I speak here. What I am positive of is that they're fluent in it. Sure, name a ceremony or a god or places. Italicising them is a bit OTT, but whatever. What I don't want to see is a sentence that, outside the context of the book, is completely unintelligible. Example: "The drishnak is not for wenda." We can diagram that, but can we explicate it? ;) JRR Tolkein was a linguist. Are you? No? Then seriously, stick to a language in which you are fluent. I'm sure your characters are going to.
  
• As others have mentioned, gratewytüs mysspellynges forre grayte rennfayre-styl jüstysse. And what's this öbsessiön with ümläüts all about? Is that a sure sign somebody was a metalhead in high school, or what? ;)

Gosh. I hate lots of things, don't I? ;)

gratewytüs mysspellynges forre grayte rennfayre-styl jüstysse.

I LOVE YOU.

Point #4 is why the only languages I'll touch with a ten-foot pole are English, French, German... and Arabic. :-)

Talking ferrets/other cute fuzzies.

New, "clever" names for coffee.

Ap'os'tro'phes make Fantasy names exotic.

Stilted British curse words in regards to High Fantasy stories. Everyone saying "bloody" this or "flaming" that.

Couldn't agree more on names, dates, etc. taking place in worlds without the etymologies for them based in our own history. But, it is a slippery slope. You have to be able to call something by some kind of name. If you remove any frame of reference, you run the risk of totally alienating your readers. I usually just figure accounts of events in vastly different cultures/worlds are translations, and lose/gain a little in the process.

Salty blood.

See, "bloody" and "flaming" are totally natural to me; blood and fire are the kind of intense things people curse about just as naturally as sex or excrement, no ?

Anytime the phrase ''can't help'' is used in reference to any character, but especially the protagonist, I put the book down. People who can't help themselves (especially their libidos) are the death of plot.

All of the above. Well, mostly.

I can live with some science and tech being wrong, especially in older books (e.g. 'lasers' which stun), and definitely with things which are "generally believed" to be wrong (I've seen SF fans who refused to read anything with FTL travel, beacuse "nothing can travel faster than light", which knocks out some 90% of the plots in the genre). Similarly, I can live with potatoes and tomatos in a 'mediaeval' (or even 'medieval') setting.

Spelling and grammar are big ones for me, I proff-rede everything because of my limited language parser and "large chunk at once" reading style. Although I don't object too much to sentences starting with conjunctions. Exclamations marks not in dialogue tend to bug me (yes, Agatha Christie, who managed to get over ten of them in narration on the first partial page!), in dialogue I'll put up with more of them as long as they aren't together.

Lots of names starting with the same letter and around the same length (see limited parsing above). Especially names which don't indicate gender (as a lot of invented names). Names which are used cross-gender (yes, there is probably a boy named Sue but it will distract me every time I see it).

Back covers which give away the entire plot. I'm tolerant of back covers in most other ways, I mostly ignore them because I go by personal recommendation a lot more often than I pick up books randomly.

Pronunciations in lists like yours don't bother me, I'm likely to ignore the list until I've finished the book (if a pronunciation is really important to the story the author should tell me /in/ the story, and give me a reason if it isn't an accepted or natural one: if you have a person named Featherstonehowe and it's important that he pronounces it Fanshaw (or that he doesn't), tell me!). The same with cast lists and genealogies and maps, I should be able to get enough information from the story without consulting references. (And R&R was good at that, I didn't feel any need to look at the pronunciation guide or a map.)

Andre Norton drives me crazy. I've never been able to figure it out, understand it or overcome it. Her cadence bugs the heck out of me, and that's as much as I know.

It took me forever to get through the Ring trilogy because Tolkien had the same effect.

Intentional misspellings of names, places or what-have-you is simple arrogance. Yes, I find that unacceptable. It does not make you look smart or intelligent. It makes you look like a spoiled teenager writing mash notes during Latin class. And then you want me to praise you for it like a yappy lap dog with a pink bow around your neck. (Yes, this attitude REALLY irks me.) Um.

I do not need another Celtic-based historical fantasy. There are some fantastic stories in many other cultures I never get to read about because the shelves are full of - you got it. But also, co-opting a culture to tell a story that has nothing to do with it originally, just needed different 'decoration' to appear new and shiny? That's just wrong.

Oh please, reconsider that vampire novel. Please. MUST it suck? Also (and I know I'm not making points here) MUST it be zombies? Consider that shelf space and what I'd like to see on it. Quit pushing my stuff off the shelf with 'just another brain drain.'

I can't tell you how many of the Wheel of Time books I read backwards because they took so bloody long to tell me what was going on. Is that page count REALLY necessary?

Myself, I'm inclined to read one of Jordan's subtexts, as a Vietnam veteran, as "you think going off to fight the good fight will be straightforward and simple and it bogs down in endless complexity and minutiae", so in those terms yes, the pagecount is making a point; not that that means anyone has to like it, and I've been not reading the more recent ones myself, with the intention of a single pass through all of them when the series is finished.

I hate onamatapoeic (I hope I got that write) spelling in dialogue, when someone has an accent :(

Most of mine have been covered - spelling, punctuation, plot coherency/consistency, doing your research (hey, NCIS, I'm looking at you and your non-map-reading skills!) -- but I also have an issue with heroines riding only the extremes of the "when it comes to men" spectrum. Either they're so wrapped up in not needing a man that they seemingly have no other personality, or they're so incapable of living their own lives that they need a "protector." It's one thing if a heroine who was tough and capable becomes so weak that she hides behind everyone else; that's something I might be persuaded into believing, if there's a viable reason for it (magic? battle scars?). There are women out there in Reality who can fall into either category, and I'm fully aware of that. Heck, as minor characters or heroines who come into their own, they can be readable. But there are a lot more women who hover around the middle ground, who can fight for themselves but won't say "no" to help (unless there's a reason for it, and hey, that drives plot!) and books with heroines like that are my preference.

I also take issue when the author flips between British and American spellings. Please pick one, for heaven's sake; you don't get to pick and choose so that they fight for honour in their armor.

Some authors also treat their readers as if they don't possess a bare minimum of intelligence; cut out the condescending description of what we already know to be a horse, and get on with the plot, please.

Oh, and overuse of an adjective, adverb, or slang-term. Not everyone can be dainty, not everyone should scoff menacingly, and for heaven's sake, if you're set on using foreign slang, use it in context and with purpose. Not just for S&Gs.

AngelVixen :-)
(edited for additional clarification)

I also take issue when the author flips between British and American spellings. Please pick one, for heaven's sake; you don't get to pick and choose so that they fight for honour in their armor.

You're not going to like my 22nd century Utopian SF novel where those two strands of English have reunited and the blending is intentionally uneven, then. (On the off-chance I ever get it published and a publisher ever lets me get away with it.)

Though if I read something like that and it was not visibly systematic, I would be inclined to credit it to lousy proofing.

Misspelling of words specific to something the story deals with in great detail. For instance, in the otherwise engaging and entertaining "* Study" (where * is substituted for Poison, Magic, and Fire) trilogy, the author or her copyeditor consistently misspelled the protagonist's weapon of choice, a weapon used in Japanese staff fighting and correctly spelled "bo." The book spelled it "bow", and by the middle of the second book, I actually threw it across the room in frustration because it had thrown me out of fight scenes one time too many wondering why on earth she was swinging her bow and not shooting arrows with it.

See also the Regency in which a particularly clueless copyeditor "corrected" the expression "Coo!" to "Cool!" throughout.

I stopped reading one book when I came across the line "Roan was a roan." No. Just....no.


And there's a series of books that uses the word Wamphyre, or somesuch. I giggled my way through the first page, but then I had to put it aside because I wasn't retaining a single thing about the plot.

I kept picturing bloodsuckers with terrible eighties hair. They're not vampires, they're WHAMpires!

First, can we convince Kate to write down this list of back cover buzz words? Because this is HIGHLY relevant to my interests. I SHOULD like all the urban fantasy on the shelves right now, because urban fantasy done right hits my good buttons -- interesting characters having to deal with totally weird shit, and coping the best they can.

But there is SO much shit to slog through. It's intimidating. If I didn't know you I probably wouldn't have picked up Rosemary and Rue, I'm so turned off the genre right now. And that would be a damn shame for me, because I'd have missed an excellent book and a likely even better series.

My own buzz words:

"mate"
"destined"
"drawn to"
"bonded"
"mysterious"
"touch"
"joined"
"forever"
"burning"
"flame"
"desire"

Having main characters invent "the wheel", in a non-time travel book.

For example I can thing of three SF/F novels where a main character invents/discovers indigo pigment.

Mermyds? That would make me insane, not so much because of the pretension as because surely that would be pronounced "Mermid". Unless that's the point. In which case it would make me insane in a different way.

As for back covers I do try to avoid anything with the words, heartwarming, generational or saga on it.

I'm finding myself reading more as a proofreader ... on things that should have be worked over before getting printed. Guess you should share out your chainsaw and machete editing tendencies a bit more, hmm?

Also, what is it with YA books that assume the reader has the intellect of a ripe banana? One series out there had a pretty decent first book, but got pretty repetitive by the time number 3 or 4 rolled around. My impression: the lead character is a Mary Sue of the sort I don't put up with in fanfic - and certainly not in a book I'm paying trade paper or hardcover prices for the "privilege" of reading. I checked out a more recent book in that series from the library, and couldn't manage to get thru even 3 or 4 pages, before I started skipping ahead, then giving up entirely. Returned it without finishing, and was happy to have saved my money.

Everyone else has covered everything I have to say...

Except...

Am I the only one wondering what book it was?

Descriptions of clothing. If I get a lovingly detailed description of what a character is wearing every time she changes clothes, this is not a book for me. If each new character is introduced by what brands he or she is wearing, this is not a book for me. If even half of the outfits are described with two adjectives or more, I'm throwing the damn thing against a wall.

In my experience, that sort of loving detail to something that matters so little is to mask a gaping hole in writing ability, narrative, or character development. Sometimes all three.

Also, weak heroines drive me insane. I will read through all of a book where the main female character faints, swoons and squeals helplessly, in hopes she gets better. I will be very annoyed if she doesn't.

I'm afraid I get bothered by fencing/swordfighting that makes no sense (typically, that means using sword-fighting terms for fencing weapons; Holly Black using "rapier" for the female lead's fencing foil, but it can also involve stuff like Brust's over-reliance in the early Taltos books on an assumption that a fencing sabre is exactly like a rapier). Like any specialized field of study, it's best to either keep it simple or know what you're doing. (or don't worry about the complaints of those who actually -do- know what they're doing, as there won't be that many of them).

Words that don't fit the mileau also pull me out right quick -- Glen Cook's use of "plink" (repeatedly) in on of the early Dread Empire books got me on the edge of a knife. FPS players might talk about "plinking" at their foes (maybe). Seasoned mercenaries, not so much.