Big Named Authors That Disappointed You?

autumnleaf said:

I only read the first Divergent book and was never tempted to continue. Was put off by (a) the idea that "bravery" meant doing stupid stunts and getting tattoos and (b) having more than one defining trait made you super-special instead of just human.
The summary of the Chemical Garden world put me off. So men die at 25 and women at 20, but for some reason this leads to polygamy ( I would have imagined the opposite, since there are now more men than women).
I did like The Hunger Games and The Lunar Chronicles, so it's not like I'm totally allergic to teenage dystopias!

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I liked the first Divergent book and even read the bonus material so I can tell you why I liked it. Roth made a rule for herself when writing Divergent that Tris always had to be active instead of reactive. By book three that rule was out the window--yet another reason I despise it.

As for Chemical Garden, it just doesn't work. There are rules and ethics regarding genetic experimentation that would have nipped that in the bud. Namely, at present you can't do any genetic manipulation that will be passed on to the next generation. I can't imagine that changing in the future, at least not to the point that the entire human race has fatal genetic flaws because no one thought to do long-term tests before applying the changes. And I also enjoyed THG, so likewise I'm not allergic to dystopias. Just bad dystopias.

JetFueledCar said:

As for Chemical Garden, it just doesn't work. There are rules and ethics regarding genetic experimentation that would have nipped that in the bud. Namely, at present you can't do any genetic manipulation that will be passed on to the next generation. I can't imagine that changing in the future, at least not to the point that the entire human race has fatal genetic flaws because no one thought to do long-term tests before applying the changes.

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That also struck me as strange. I could probably accept that a minority of pioneers decided to try out genetic experimentation, maybe bypassing or repealing the laws. But as I understand the Chemical Garden scenario, all people under a certain age were doomed by the procedure that created them, which means that every would-be parent in the previous generation decided to undergo an expensive and experimental process. This includes large parts of the world that currently have little access to basic medical care. I'm assuming they would have to conceive by IVF, which is infinitely less fun as well as more expensive than sex. Nobody had any ethical or religious qualms about this? Nobody in all that time had an accidental pregnancy that they decided to bring to term? Nobody chose to take their chances with old-fashioned conception? Nothing about this scenario makes sense.

Well, here's a list for you.

Good one. I've got a lot (I guess, technically, not a lot, but enough).

Cassandra Clare - The Mortal Instruments
Writing style was rich, but characters were poorly thought out, cliche (<- i'm aware this is spelt wrong) and the plot was predictable. I hate that. I loved it at first, but the more I reread, the more I hated it.

Veronica Roth - The Divergent Series
Similar to Cassandra. However, I didn't like her writing style. There was so much telling and I hate that. The characters were cliche, the plotline was predictable. I loved it at first, but the more I reread, the more I hated it.

The Twilight Saga
Yes. I read these. I hate myself for it. The characters are annoying, and the plotline was predictable. It wasn't even written properly! I slap myself every time I have to look at those books collecting dust in my room. They need to go to Value Village...I can't even remember the author's name. That how much I loathe the books. I want to forget they exist.

Sarah J. Maas - Throne of Glass
I read the synopsis, and it sounded amazing. I mean the first line was so catchy, "In a world without magic, an assassin is summoned to the castle." I was excited to read it, and ready to dive into the world Maas created. And then I read it. What a disappointment. Forget "this book is about an assassin!" If she had changed it to "this book is about a princess" it wouldn't have changed anything! There was little conflict! All the main character did was read in her room all day and flirt with boys...and train somewhat. I was SO annoyed. It was the stupidest thing ever! And I got the first book for Christmas...at least I didn't waste money on it.

Lesley Livingstone - The Wondrous Strange Series'
The first book was good...at first. The second book was decent. The third was stupid. All she did was cry and run after the guy she loved. Nothing in that book was logical (well, almost nothing. Some stuff was neat.) and the characters made me want to rip paper...they were SO annoying! (seriously, why do we gradually get pulled towards annoying characters). The plot-line was predictable and I...I'm going to stop. I could go on all night about this.

Rachel Hartman - Seraphina
I read the first page and thought, "Thank you! Someone who can FINALLY write properly," and then I finished the book. It. Was. So. Boring! I seriously felt like there was no character development and the plot-line was so boring. I wanted to stab my eye with a fork.

James Dashner -The Maze Runner Series
I read the first chapter of the Maze Runner online. I have no desire to continue. The writing style is horrible and I have little desire to get sucked into the world. Enough said.

Christopher Paolini - The Inheritance Cycle
First there was too little description, and then there was too much. He created an amazing world, but by Inheritance, it became a job to read that book so I stopped. I will try again in the future, hopefully

vicky271 said:

Sarah J. Maas - Throne of Glass
I read the synopsis, and it sounded amazing. I mean the first line was so catchy, "In a world without magic, an assassin is summoned to the castle." I was excited to read it, and ready to dive into the world Maas created. And then I read it. What a disappointment. Forget "this book is about an assassin!" If she had changed it to "this book is about a princess" it wouldn't have changed anything! There was little conflict! All the main character did was read in her room all day and flirt with boys...and train somewhat. I was SO annoyed. It was the stupidest thing ever! And I got the first book for Christmas...at least I didn't waste money on it.

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You forgot how the "world without magic" wasn't really without magic, and the bit where the top assassin in the land, after just narrowly passing a test about undetectable poisons and knowing that someone is picking off competitors for the role of King's Champion, gleefully devours a bag of candy that appears mysteriously in her bedroom from an unknown source. Could've been a much shorter book right there, if the author hadn't been on her side... Glad to know I wasn't the only one disappointed after the hype.

How could I forget all that? (LOOL) How silly of me
I guess I didn't see the point considering how ticked off I was when I finished it. I had such high hopes and then, SPLAT, they were killed by a princess who reads all day and eats candy. I mean, c'mon! I don't want to sit reading about someone who reads...because I should be the one doing the reading! *sigh* I was SO excited to read it.
I'm glad it's not just me. All the good books are overlooked by scholars, but the bad ones get all the attention. It's so silly.

vicky271 said:

Sarah J. Maas - Throne of Glass
I read the synopsis, and it sounded amazing. I mean the first line was so catchy, "In a world without magic, an assassin is summoned to the castle." I was excited to read it, and ready to dive into the world Maas created. And then I read it. What a disappointment. Forget "this book is about an assassin!" If she had changed it to "this book is about a princess" it wouldn't have changed anything! There was little conflict! All the main character did was read in her room all day and flirt with boys...and train somewhat. I was SO annoyed. It was the stupidest thing ever! And I got the first book for Christmas...at least I didn't waste money on it.

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Lol, I tried her out too. And it was so boring that I couldn't finish past chapter one. She really wasn't much of an assassin and the characters bored me.

But looking the style of stuff you're reading, let me recommend V.E. Schwab. Her books are pretty good and I'm currently reading A Darker Shade of Magic, which is great so far. She knows how to pull you in.

phantasy said:

Lol, I tried her out too. And it was so boring that I couldn't finish past chapter one. She really wasn't much of an assassin and the characters bored me.

But looking the style of stuff you're reading, let me recommend V.E. Schwab. Her books are pretty good and I'm currently reading A Darker Shade of Magic, which is great so far. She knows how to pull you in.

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I'll give her a look into. I'm not into magic (unfortunately) and when I do read about magic, I'm picky about the content

I'd like to add Lovecraft and anything Lovecraftian to the list. The man is wordy and a racist, and his style simply doesn't scare me. Existential horror never has, especially when there are so many horrors possible here on earth and far more shocking. So what if something lurks in the shadows and around the edges of perception? Unless it's whispering insane things into your ear and hurting the world around you, it's just a phantom.

This includes Clive Barker. Yes, I know his movies are creepy, far too creepy for me imo, but as novels the creepiness simply didn't translate. I tried to start two of his books, but I couldn't care about the characters or what was at stake.

Jean Marie Auel and the Earth's Children series. As such, the base concept for the story is interesting. She has an art for bringing her characters to life in a way I have seldom experienced. The plot was well construed at its base. But man, does she take long to tell the story. I think with one third of the words, it would have been at least as good. I made it to the beginning of the Mammoth Hunters, but then just lost the courage.

John Kennedy Toole. I had high expectations when I started reading A Confederacy of Dunces but I never hooked on. Except maybe the last chapters, where he runs of with the Minx.

Tom

What a fun thread.

Okay, so I was most disappointed by Paolini's Eragon series. They were boring. Very boring. Like four hundred pages for every fifty pages worth of plot. At first I just thought the movie was boring, but no, it came by that naturally.

Likewise, Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara was pretty dull. There was way too much thinking about decisions, and not enough deciding.

I'm also disappointed with a biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn biography. It was less someone reporting about his life and more the author just giving his own commentary. It's a nonfiction! Just the facts, please! I don't want your opinons!

Orwell's 1984 might have been hyped up a bit too much before I read it. I enjoyed parts, but it didn't strike me the same way Animal Farm did. Love that first line, though.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I hate to say this, because I had such high hopes for the book. I watched the TV series and absolutely loved it, save for one or two episodes (and no, not the ones you'd think, actually). The book series has an incredibly loyal following, it's almost worship-like, and I think that was the biggest problem. When I heard how AMAZING the book was, how much better the book was than the show, etc., it just hyped it up too much for me, and the book was underwhelming as a result. I did like the characters, and Gabaldon's general attitude of "if you're gonna go there, go there," but I thought there was a lot of unnecessary, extraneous detail about things that didn't really matter to the plot. Oh, and speaking of the plot, what is the plot? I thought the story was about Claire finding her way back to the stones and the decision she ultimately had to make about whether to go through them or not. Then, when we got past that plot point, I thought to myself... wait, what? Now what? Obviously there was a lot more to come, but the main plot point changed dramatically halfway through the book, and by the end, it felt like Jamie was the main character more than Claire. Now, I really like Jamie as a character, but I almost feel like this story should have been told from two POVs. It just threw me off that a story that starts as a woman trapped in a different time ultimately ends with a man getting raped and the aftermath of that. Nothing against the content, I like dark stuff and what it can do for a character's development. It's just... the start and the end feel like two totally different stories!

Very mixed feelings on this book. Want to like it, but it just didn't hold me the way the TV series did. :/ Obviously the series has most of the same problems, since it's based on the book, but I dunno, it just kept me engaged better and didn't lose its sense of direction too much. Except for that one episode with the singing. Ugh.

Martin Amis. Can't stand his writing style. It doesn't help that he seems like a smug prick in real life. I did my best to get through London Fields, but it was all over when I came to a scene in which the main character is creeping on his best friend at the gym:

"Naked, Richard watched Gwyn, naked, vigorously toweling his humid bush."

I rarely give up on a book midway through. No regrets with this one, though.

One book that disappointed me was The Hunger Games. It could've been because I'm not much into that genre of books, but for me the writing couldn't hold my attention and felt boring to me. I didn't want to continue reading it when I had started it but promised a friend I would give it a try, worst book for me by far; if we're excluding the Twilight series that is.

Is there a "Favorite Author" forum around anywhere. Either there isn't one or my eyes fail me. Thanks!

billythrilly7th said:

Is there a "Favorite Author" forum around anywhere. Either there isn't one or my eyes fail me. Thanks!

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Try AW Bookclub

I have such a difficult time picking the right James Herbert books for me. Some, like Portent, Nobody True and Dark Places, are good fits for my reading tastes. But large swaths of info dump in ones like The Secret of Crickley Hall and The Survivor lose me.

I guess from among ones who are still alive, I had some issues with Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire, for instance the suspension of disbelief gets challenged pretty hardcore when I noticed Peeta and Gale are written pretty thinly in that second book with not much to do but be plot devices, but I've been pretty lucky outside of Herbert really.

vicky271 said:

The Twilight Saga
Yes. I read these. I hate myself for it. The characters are annoying, and the plotline was predictable. It wasn't even written properly! I slap myself every time I have to look at those books collecting dust in my room. They need to go to Value Village...I can't even remember the author's name. That how much I loathe the books. I want to forget they exist.

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Oh gosh, me, too. Even though I read all four books. I blame post-partum hormones, which is when I read them. I wanted something to read that would be easy to pick up and put down a lot of times a day because of the new baby, and I wanted something I wouldn't have to think too hard about or concentrate too hard on. So for those purposes, the saga was perfect.

For everything else it was terrible. It killed my self-esteem to see how successful these books got when they are so poorly written; they read like something a 14-year old wrote and no one ever edited it. I won't pretend like I was so above reading all four books, because clearly I wasn't, but I can't fangirl all over them, either. The writing was atrocious and the premise was too silly.

phantasy said:

I'd like to add Lovecraft and anything Lovecraftian to the list. The man is wordy and a racist, and his style simply doesn't scare me. Existential horror never has, especially when there are so many horrors possible here on earth and far more shocking. So what if something lurks in the shadows and around the edges of perception? Unless it's whispering insane things into your ear and hurting the world around you, it's just a phantom.

This includes Clive Barker. Yes, I know his movies are creepy, far too creepy for me imo, but as novels the creepiness simply didn't translate. I tried to start two of his books, but I couldn't care about the characters or what was at stake.

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Me too, me too, me too. I just read my first Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness," and I was bored beyond belief. I did not find any of it even a little bit scary. Or disturbing. Or anything but boring and predictable. What a waste of my time. I have a collection of his short stories on my e-reader because I know he's a god in horror, but I'm not looking forward to reading any of them.

And Clive Barker, ugh. I read "The Hellbound Heart" because someone told me it was really scary, but it wasn't. The gore was pretty good, but the scares just fell flat.

Personally, I adore Lovecraft, and if I were to suggest any of those short stories to you, it would be Cool Air. I'm not going to get into that, but I will say Jules Verne was an author that, after finishing tales like The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells, I was absolutely jazzed to read. I cracked open the first one I ever thought of reading, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and immediately felt turned off by the sheer berth of technical description. The man is a genius, don't get me wrong. He simply writes to a more mechanically interested demographic than me. I don't read to build a nautilus, I read to dream about sailing in the Nautilus.

NordicWrath said:

Personally, I adore Lovecraft, and if I were to suggest any of those short stories to you, it would be Cool Air.

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I will give it a try. I'm not 100% sold on Lovecraft, but I'm not 100% off him yet, either. There has to be a reason why he's become such an icon of horror.

If I were going to pinpoint the reason, it would be the way he can articulate madness like no author I have ever seen. His characters are so subtly mad that they seem lucid as you or I. Every page creeps with that cold sanity of those behind the veil of our world. We dabble in the dark arts and attempt to contact them, but they only lie in wait and ready themselves for the final day of reckoning. The impossibility of their description, as Lovecraft writes of it, is the very catalyst of our fear. Their impermeability both pulls us toward desiring to know more and being repulsed by their forms. He knows exactly how to piece random effects and sensations together to create the perfect mood. Sorry to gush, but I am a huge weeb.

Everyone seems to adore Neil Gaiman. Yeah, don't care for his writing at all. Most say it was the book I chose to start with, but one book shouldn't be so horrible as to sour someone on a writer.

And I find that the bigger the writer gets, the less the editor seems to do, so bigger, more bloated, and less worthy books make it to the shelves. So I'm growing discontent with David Weber, since he strays all over the map with the more recent Honor Harrington books.

kaitie said:

Gosh this was so mine as well. Those books started out amazing and with such a great character, and I look at what she's done to them now...well, honestly I think she needs to KILL EVERYONE. That's about the only way she could redeem the series at this point. Well, maybe turning Anita back into a normal human being could work as well. Anyway, definitely was disappointed.

(...)

At the risk of getting smacked...Neil Gaiman. I loved American Gods. Good Omens is one of the funniest things ever. I was told the Graveyard Book was one of the best books out there, and while it was charming and cute, it just wasn't my cup of tea, I suppose. I think that's just disappointment because it was so hyped, however. All I heard from anyone was how great it was, and when you have such high expectations for something, it's easy to fall flat.

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Agreed. Neil Gaiman is one of my favourite writers, but the last novels haven't really done it for me.

Fell off the Anita Blake-series looong ago.

dirtsider said:

Robert Jordan's WOT - 99.9% of the female characters just annoyed me because they came across as selfish, overbearing tyrants. Correction: selfish, overbearing chauvanistic tyrants. It's like he never meet a real woman but used bad stereotypes. I felt sorry for the male characters when every they had to deal with the women. Every time Nivarian appeared on the page, the thought of "Your village called, their idiot is missing" would pop into my head and I knew she'd never get it.

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I agree tenfold. The female characters were the main reason I wanted to throw the books into a wall. Maybe that just confirms his stereotypes of hysteric women...

Ellaroni said:

Paulo Coelho.

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Agreed.

Also:

James: 50 shades of Grey. Never got through the first book, it was so boring.

Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell - didn't really get the hype.

Riley: Hothouse Flower. Like her "Seven Sisters"-book though.

JeanGenie said:

Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell - didn't really get the hype.

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Yesssss. I've read so many reviews from people who just puffy-heart-love this book, and I just could not see what they see in it. For me, the facts that the writing is period-appropriate and footnotes are cool didn't make up for the complete lack of anyone I cared about doing anything interesting.