Big Named Authors That Disappointed You?

RedDragoness · May 31, 2016

JeanGenie said:
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.

Me, too. It's been, gosh, 16 or 17 years since I picked up "Guilty Pleasures" and fell in love with it. I still respect LKH for pretty much inventing the urban fantasy subgenre, and I've read a lot of quality UF in the past 16 years. But I stopped reading Anita Blake after "Narcissus in Chains" because I just couldn't anymore. Could. Not. The scenes that took up 100 pages of book but were meant to convey only a few minutes of real time...every single male character in love with Anita Blake...the repetitive writing (I swear she copy-pasted some passages from one book to another)...the nonsensical plots...the use of the word "cervix" in sex scenes. I was done.

JeanGenie · May 31, 2016

RedDragoness said:
Me, too. It's been, gosh, 16 or 17 years since I picked up "Guilty Pleasures" and fell in love with it. I still respect LKH for pretty much inventing the urban fantasy subgenre, and I've read a lot of quality UF in the past 16 years. But I stopped reading Anita Blake after "Narcissus in Chains" because I just couldn't anymore. Could. Not. The scenes that took up 100 pages of book but were meant to convey only a few minutes of real time...every single male character in love with Anita Blake...the repetitive writing (I swear she copy-pasted some passages from one book to another)...the nonsensical plots...the use of the word "cervix" in sex scenes. I was done.

Haha

In the end I couldn't discern one book from the other...think I fell off at about the same point. I think Charlaine Harris is better, if they can be compared...

JeanGenie · May 31, 2016

lianna williamson said:
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.

Yes! It was just so incredibly dry...

Tamarind · Jul 25, 2016

There are so many Big Name disappointments, sadly, but my most recent one was Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. I could tell from the start that it was not going to be one of my favorite books, but it was interesting, mainly because Carey's writing voice was pretty distinctive. So I was enjoying it in a low-key way, and I was rooting for Oscar and Lucinda, even though neither one was a particularly bright or winsome character, and then without warning Carey gave them THE WORST ENDING EVER. I'm talking G.R.R. Martin-level sadistic -- but in a narrative world where it felt even more out of place. I was so furious I hurled the book across the room and then picked it up and went into the living room where I could hurl it again at greater distance.

I suspect Carey thought his ending was somehow clever, was somehow appropriate to his odd characters, but really it was just out and out mean-spirited, and I have no idea how this got the Booker Prize.

kberdan · Aug 2, 2016

I know I'm in the minority here, but I just can't get into Tana French. In the Woods made my blood boil (it's not just that the narrator is unreliable... it's that his actions felt false--as if their function was only to move the plot forward, without any effort to stay true to the character or make him seem legitimate) but my friends were shocked by this. I gave it another go with Faithful Place and was let down again. Maybe I'm just picking the wrong Tana French books?

kberdan · Aug 2, 2016

lianna williamson said:
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.

Ah, I felt the same way! I just couldn't slog through it... so slow moving!

nossmf · Aug 3, 2016

I have been addicted to R.A. Salvatore since I started reading him over 20 years ago, especially anything relating to his dark elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden, but his recent works have fallen sharply off in quality, to the point where I actually did not buy the third book in a recent trilogy after being so severely disappointed in the first two.

Michael Wolfe · Aug 8, 2016

Maybe Don Delillo for me. I'd actually be interested in hearing from someone who likes his work, not because I want to make fun of you or anything, I just like to get new angles or ways of thinking about specific writers. Delillo is someone who interests me but I don't seem to connect with his novels very well.

gtbun · Aug 17, 2016

David Mitchell, in general. I was recommended him due to liking Murakami and surrealism, but he was just a bit naff. He can put a sentence together, and in reading Bone clocks there were points I enjoyed. But in general he's a bit underwhelming, and he degenerates into writing like a twelve year old when it comes to the more sci-fi aspects and the naming of different groups. It was all just a bit jarring.

Louis de Bernieres too was pretty disappointing. I read Captain Corelli's Mandolin and loved it, but when I read The partisan's daughter I was really disappointed with how the writing and story just didn't resemble the former at all.

MaeZe · Aug 17, 2016

James Patterson. I've only ever read one of his books (I think it was his, not some other guy he lent his name to but is was before I knew about him doing that). It was atrocious, some really cliché detective novel. I don't even recall the name of of now.

Cindyt · Aug 17, 2016

I loved his first few books, but the last one I read (can't remember the title) bored me out of my skull. Danielle Steel, and Stephen King.

MaeZe said:
James Patterson. I've only ever read one of his books (I think it was his, not some other guy he lent his name to but is was before I knew about him doing that). It was atrocious, some really cliché detective novel. I don't even recall the name of of now.

ASeiple · Aug 17, 2016

I love David Weber. A Weber book is usually a good read to me. I bought "Out of the Dark" without knowing anything about it. That's the only book of his I ever sold. It was that bad.

FussPutter · Aug 17, 2016

I enjoyed the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons. True, not for everyone. Then I bought another one he wrote. Took me like a year's worth of trips to the 'reading room' to finish it. The ending was disappointing. As in build up to the big knarly battle then the next chapter its over in a couple paragraphs. Slow to get going but interesting plot, just a bit tedious, then fizzled ending. Talk about a let me down.
David Weber's books I've usually enjoyed just haven't gone back to him for a while. Have to see whats new there. *sigh* To many books never enough time.

blacbird · Aug 17, 2016

Currently, Louis L'Amour. A friend recommended The Haunted Mesa, so I've begun it. I'm about halfway through, and will finish (I suppose), but to me it's a shallow, contrived, and poorly-edited mess of a story. The frustrating part is that the idea for it is really pretty good. But the main characters are both wooden and lacking in credibility, and it's full of useless repetition and bland exposition.

caw

writerfrenzy · Aug 3, 2018

Orson Scott Card springs to mind. I started reading Pathfinder but it was incredibly boring

DanielSTJ · Aug 9, 2018

George R. R. Martin.

Didn't get what all the fuss was about. I read the first three of his series and gave up.

Also Steig Larson. Didn't get what the big deal was about that series either.

DepressedbutnotDead · Aug 13, 2018

I recently tried out some Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. At first, I was simply stunned by the prose - absolutely elegant and magical. But then...wow does he break the show don't tell rule. His whole book is like one long explanation of a story rather than really diving into any particular scenes. It just goes on and on and I just couldn't take it - it was fantastically boring to me that style of storytelling. I also thought that the characters were more like caricatures than characters given the whimsical style. I understand it was a romance and the light nature of it was intentionally, but just not enjoyable.

HR Garcia · Aug 13, 2018

DepressedbutnotDead said:
I recently tried out some Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. At first, I was simply stunned by the prose - absolutely elegant and magical. But then...wow does he break the show don't tell rule. His whole book is like one long explanation of a story rather than really diving into any particular scenes. It just goes on and on and I just couldn't take it - it was fantastically boring to me that style of storytelling. I also thought that the characters were more like caricatures than characters given the whimsical style. I understand it was a romance and the light nature of it was intentionally, but just not enjoyable.

I agree, it was beautiful prose! I read it a while back and the only three things I remember are:

1) Beautiful Prose
2) There was a baby in a birdcage
3) Romance

HR Garcia · Aug 13, 2018

DanielSTJ said:
George R. R. Martin.

Didn't get what all the fuss was about. I read the first three of his series and gave up.

Also Steig Larson. Didn't get what the big deal was about that series either.

Nooooooooooo. George R.R. Martin is lengthy, and I needed an alphabetized character list to help me read it and remember everyone, but I :heart:

him.

Kjbartolotta · Aug 13, 2018

Wow, this thread is back and I love it. Had to read the whole 9+ years of it.

Personally, I enjoy weird horror in all its incarnations, but am a hearty not-liker of Lovecraft. Various reasons why, all self-demonstrating IMHO. But I think the bigger issue is that he takes up too much of the conversation (both pro and con), when he was just one man in a crowded field.

Lakey · Aug 13, 2018

I have had such a hard time with the Russians. In keeping with RYFW - even long-dead ones - I'll allow that it isn't them, it's me.

First it was Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, which should have ticked off every box for me but instead left me thoroughly underwhelmed. I couldn't understand his narrative choices - he skipped past some of the most important events - and I just found it dry and superficial (despite it being hailed for its depth of psychological insight). It seems to me that everything Anna Karenina supposedly did, George Eliot's Middlemarch did twice as well.

Next I tried Dostoevsky, The Idiot. I loved the first chapter, but after that it just went completely off the rails. Huge swaths of narrative summary for parts of the story that might actually have been interesting, and the rest of the time it was just people shouting incoherently at one another. I couldn't make a lick of sense out of any of it.

I've got Crime and Punishment, and I will read it, but after that I think I can say I gave the Russians a fair shot and learned what I could from them...

:e2coffee:

Siri Kirpal · Aug 13, 2018

Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

John Irving. Specifically The World According to Garp. I know a great many people love it, but it seemed like such a freak show, all quirks and no reality. I disliked it so much it put me off literary fiction (most of the time) for a couple of decades.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

jennontheisland · Aug 13, 2018

Jacqueline Carey was recommended to me so many times by entirely different people, but omg Kushiel's Dart had the most Mary Sue main character I've ever come across and I spent the last 2/3 of the book desperately hoping that the end would include her death.
Tanith Lee was also pretty disappointing; horridly florid prose that isn't entirely purple... I mean, I guess that's a sort of a talent, but holy hell I don't want to read anything by her ever again.
I'm honestly scared to read Octavia Butler because these 3 were often suggested to me together.

MaeZe · Aug 13, 2018

jennontheisland said:
...
I'm honestly scared to read Octavia Butler because these 3 were often suggested to me together.

Oh gawd, can't speak for those others but Butler is incredible, fantastic, one of the best authors I've read.

Maybe don't start with Wild Seed. I had a hard time getting through that one. But Lilith's Brood is one of the best sci-fi books of all time.

And Kindred, wow, historical fiction mixed with inexplicable time travel to show what slavery would be like if a black woman from modern times found herself in the slave era and Butler pulls it off perfectly.

Sometimes not every book a great author writes is great. After Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein rated as one of the best books I've read, I tried Rose Under Fire and didn't finish it.

O. Faulkner · Aug 19, 2018

Honestly I've found Anne McCaffrey's writing style to be very jarring and a bit of a chore to get through. While I really enjoy the concept of Pern, her prose is just too much of a chore to get through compared to others. Usually for authors like this, I find listening to the books in audio format is the best way to enjoy their stories.

Big Named Authors That Disappointed You?

RedDragoness

Not your mother's dragon

JeanGenie

Such a Greenie

JeanGenie

Such a Greenie

Tamarind

kberdan

kberdan

nossmf

Scribo ergo sum

Michael Wolfe

Jambo Bwana

gtbun

Professional Book Designer

MaeZe

Cindyt

Gettin wiggy wit it

ASeiple

Livin' la vida biblia

FussPutter

blacbird

writerfrenzy

DanielSTJ

The Wandering Bard

DepressedbutnotDead

HR Garcia

HR Garcia

Kjbartolotta

Potentially has/is dog

Lakey

professional dilettante

Siri Kirpal

Swan in Process

jennontheisland

the world is at my command

MaeZe

O. Faulkner