Authors you used to like, but don't now.

[Scumpup]

Last night, I paged through The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, and Shibumi by Trevanian.
I read these years ago when they were new and I was young. I remember liking them very much and thinking Trevanian was A Great Author.
My opinion of Trevanian, now, would be that he is A Horse's Ass. His spoofing of the super spy genre is, at best, ham fisted. There didn't seem to be any love for the genre he spoofed.
Worse, though, is that for reasons I can't articulate, I come away from his work with a distinct feeling that he has nothing but contempt for his audience. What little is out there in the way of interviews and such reinforces that feeling.
Another pleasant youthful memory ruined by trying to revisit it...

[AuntiePam]

Awwww, I still like Trevanian. I think it's possible that his elitist persona could also be a spoof. I just read a quote from him, after someone asked if he was Robert Ludlum. He supposedly said he'd never heard of Ludlum, that he only read Proust.

I liked the Sanction novels, but liked Incident at Twenty Mile and Summer of Katya better, and I really liked the two books he wrote as Nicholas Seare, Rude Tales and Glorious and 1339 -- Or So.

I haven't given up on any authors, but recent disappointments from Dan Simmons (Black Hills), David L. Martin, Joe Lansdale, and Stephen King mean that I no longer buy their books in hardcover as soon as they come out.

[Sicks Ate]

Stephen King.

ETA: Piers Anthony.

[pancakes3]

Ayn Rand ::shudder::

[Sister Vigilante]

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It took me far too long to realize that you are writing the same story, over and over and over, just set in different time periods.

Jean M. Auel. Stop taking 40 pages to describe a rock. And the Mary Sue-ing is way over the top.

Laurel K. Hamilton. Enough with random orgasms and sex already and put a plot somewhere in there. And you've admitted your main character is a self insert.

Stephen King. Do you even know what you are doing anymore?

[MsWhatsit]

Originally Posted by Sicks Ate

Stephen King.

Because? (Not arguing with your choice; it's just more interesting to see people's rationale for these things.)

Mine would be Tom Clancy. When I was in high school I loved the Jack Ryan series, but 1) his later books kind of started to suck, and 2) even re-reading the Jack Ryan stuff these days doesn't really work for me. It all just seems kind of jingoistic and trite, I guess.

[hogarth]

Piers Anthony is way, way, way, way at the front of the list.

[JohnT]

Tom Clancy. It seems to me that he got a different ghost-writer after Executive Orders as his style seemingly completely changed.

Dan Simmons. Here's my thread on his recent novel, Flashback. I don't mind the politics, but the world-building completely and totally sucked.

Stephen King. I still buy his books in hardback, but it now depends upon the book.

[teela brown]

I know I've posted this once before in a similar thread in the past.

John Steinbeck. Once he seemed all realistic and gritty, but now the pages seem to reek of booze and misogyny to me.

Although I still love Tortilla Flat.

[Sicks Ate]

Originally Posted by MsWhatsit

Because? (Not arguing with your choice; it's just more interesting to see people's rationale for these things.)

Mine would be Tom Clancy. When I was in high school I loved the Jack Ryan series, but 1) his later books kind of started to suck, and 2) even re-reading the Jack Ryan stuff these days doesn't really work for me. It all just seems kind of jingoistic and trite, I guess.

I used to think that King was kind of clever. Not that his jokes were funny...about 95% of the things that he put in his books that I'm sure he thought were hilarious didn't even register on my funny scale.

But he had a nice way of being clever. Unfortnately, starting somewhere in the Dark Tower series or perhaps a bit before, it felt to me that he was writing for no other reason than to be clever.

And at that point, it quit being entertaining. Every book was King just throwing around what he thought were neat-o little ideas and characters, but they were actually just the musings of an uber-Stephen who had all the leeway he wanted to write whatever he wanted.

Originally Posted by teela brown

I know I've posted this once before in a similar thread in the past.

John Steinbeck. Once he seemed all realistic and gritty, but now the pages seem to reek of booze and misogyny to me.

Although I still love Tortilla Flat.

I love the smell of booze and misogyny in the morning...smells like....Saturday.

[Sailboat]

Orson Scott Card.

Early SF was pretty good, even philosophical (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead).

His public speaking was interesting too -- Secular Humanist Revival.

But now it's like he drank some especially bad Kool-Aid.

[Scupper]

John Varley, sadly. Some of my all-time favorite books are The Golden Globe and Steel Beach and I love the Gaia series, but Mammoth was dreadful and Red Thunder was some kind of weird YA novel with teenage characters who acted like 30- or 40-somethings in a vaguely creepy manner. Plus the book was dumb. I will likely get Slow Apocalypse, though, because I live in hope.

[Tamerlane]

Originally Posted by hogarth

Piers Anthony is way, way, way, way at the front of the list.

Same here. I was a regular consumer of his stuff as a teenager - the Cluster series, the first seven or so Xanth books, Ox-Orn-Omnivore and a few others whose titles escape me at the moment. At some point it was like hitting a light switch and I just stopped buying and reading them. He really became a repetitive, arrogant and sort of icky hack ( well, he was always pretty icky going back to his inclusion in Dangerous Visions, but it became more pervasive ).

[Jonathan Chance]

Originally Posted by MsWhatsit

Mine would be Tom Clancy. When I was in high school I loved the Jack Ryan series, but 1) his later books kind of started to suck, and 2) even re-reading the Jack Ryan stuff these days doesn't really work for me. It all just seems kind of jingoistic and trite, I guess.

Ding! When I read them as a younger man I thought they were fun, techno-thrillers. Now, as a more politically sophisticated fella I can see them for the simplistic propaganda they are. Subtlety, they name is NOT Tom Clancy.

[Yorikke]

Preston/Child. The Pendergast novels as a whole are great, but the new series (Gideon Crew) is outrageously bad.

[Thudlow Boink]

OP: Did you have in mind authors I don't like anymore because they changed, or because I changed, or both?

[CalMeacham]

I've been off and on with Stephen King. Right now I'm off him again. I've pretty much given up on Tom Clancy, and I haven't read anythi ng but old Piers Anthony in years.

[Scumpup]

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

OP: Did you have in mind authors I don't like anymore because they changed, or because I changed, or both?

Either. Both. The novels I mentioned were written 30+ years ago and the author is dead. I skimmed over them and found that I had changed.

[Sicks Ate]

Piers Anthony: I changed.

Stephen King: He changed.

[Ulfreida]

J.R.R.Tolkien.

As a youth I was as facile with LOTR as any evangelical preacher is with the bible. Chapter and verse. But lo! As an adult I find him unbearably longwinded and formal and his characters incredibly stilted. As for the poetry he sticks in all over the place, it's only good when directly cribbed from Norse.

[zoid]

Stephen King - After the awful Cell I finally gave up ion him altogether.
Dean Koontz wore off pretty quickly. Someone needs to tell him it IS possible to have a book without a special needs child and a golden retriever.

[Sigmagirl]

Patricia Cornwell can fall into a hole.

[Amateur Barbarian]

Clive Cussler. The earlier novels were hamfisted but fun; as the series went on its endless way the absurdities just piled up and piled up. I think the final straw was when he revealed that the long-haired hippy-dippy computer guru was REALLY a Young Republican all along, just wearing a disguise. Or when he had his hero fly around in a Moller AirCar (so, Clive, how much did Paul clip you for?)

But then, the cheese was always there. Fans will remember that Dirk Pitt - sorry, make that Dirk Pitt™ (seriously) - responded to the tender young thing who hadn't been laid in seven or eight years because of an abusive lover by... raping her. And she thanked him for it.

Cussler just got more and more full of himself, and it showed in every book. Enough, me finally says, and dumped my entire collection on the local UBS.

[septimus]

John le Carré. His first two novels were simple detective stories (though Smiley was in each) and outstanding. His early spy novels were also great. But at some point he decided to turn his books into sort of diatribes against Anglo-American imperialism rather than fun stories.

I'll still read the first chapter of his latest novels: his specialty is the vignette! Indeed Secret Pilgrim, a collection of shorts, might be my favorite of his books.

I loved Kurt Vonnegut circa 1970 but got tired of him ca 1973. But that's a long time ago; maybe I should try him again!

[Enright3]

Stephen King for me too. Sometimes it's his overly long description of things that aren't too related to the story; sometimes it's the tangents he goes on that don't have anything to do with the story, and finally he just seems boring now.

[Ethilrist]

Spider Robinson. He was great back when he was just getting started, but once he got some recognition and awards and GOH status, he decided he was the next incarnation of Robert Heinlein & John MacDonald rolled into one, and, really, he isn't.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Vernor Vinge. LOVED his early stuff, but Rainbow's End did not work for me, and I've had trouble getting into Children of the Sky.

I hope he can return to his earlier form.

[Feyrat]

Piers Anthony and Orson Scott Card because they're gross creepers.

Jean Auel because she forgot how to write after the first couple books, but refuses to stop writing.

[VunderBob]

Jean Auel
John Grisham
Robert Ludlum

Tom Clancy is still on my good side, but barely. His newer ghost-written stuff really suffers.

[Infovore]

Piers Anthony, for sure.

Stephen King went in a wave: I used to love him, then for awhile he was writing nothing but crap, and now I kind of love him again.

Scott Adams: Used to love "Dilbert" until I read his horrible misogynistic rants on his blogs. I still chuckle occasionally at a strip but I no longer buy his books.

He doesn't write much anymore, but I used to love Dave Barry but in his later stuff he became essentially a parody of himself. I'm glad he saw it was time to mostly hang it up.

[Santos L Halper]

Originally Posted by NitroPress

Clive Cussler.

That's who I was coming to say. I enjoyed his early books, but after the second or third time Cussler inserted himself into the story I'd had enough.

[Chefguy]

Tom Clancy, for sure.

James Lee Burke: I really liked most of his novels, but the most recent Dave Robicheaux book was pure crap, and I don't mean that in a good way. It was bad enough that I posted a review of it on Amazon.

Before reading 11/22/63, I would have responded with Stephen King, and I think a lot of people make it an automatic response nowadays. But that was a decent book and a good read.

[maggenpye]

A few that have already been mentioned - I changed for JRR Tolkein exactly the way Ulfreida described.

Quite a few where the author changed; Orson Scott Card (religion), Stephen King (drugs), etc

And a few where they didn't change enough, Piers Anthony seemed to write the same book over and over.

One that I don't think has been mentioned is Anne McCaffrey. I lost interest. Way before co-authors were being brought on board. Six Pern books were enough. The other series she wrote also suffered from multi-generational soap-opera-itis.

[Pai325]

Originally Posted by MsWhatsit

Because? (Not arguing with your choice; it's just more interesting to see people's rationale for these things.)

Mine would be Tom Clancy. When I was in high school I loved the Jack Ryan series, but 1) his later books kind of started to suck, and 2) even re-reading the Jack Ryan stuff these days doesn't really work for me. It all just seems kind of jingoistic and trite, I guess.

I have to agree. Also, once I see someone has taken on cowriters, I'm done.

[Bamboo Boy]

Douglas Coupland

I thought Gen X was brilliant, I adored Microserfs. I tried Generation Y this Summer on a flight and it kept me occupied and the time flew- but MAN was that annoying. All that non stop cleverness. All that wit.

[G0sp3l]

With great, great reluctance, I think I have to add Tad Williams.

Otherland is one of the greatest series I've read. But I keep trying Shadowmarch and I keep dropping it. Everything I read about it makes me think I should love it but I just can't get into it.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Originally Posted by G0sp3l

With great, great reluctance, I think I have to add Tad Williams.

Otherland is one of the greatest series I've read. But I keep trying Shadowmarch and I keep dropping it. Everything I read about it makes me think I should love it but I just can't get into it.

Try his new series, which began with his new book, Streets of Heaven.

I had more trouble with Otherland than any of his other series, but still liked it a lot.

[Zyada]

Piers Anthony - first it was a book that got published because he was popular (Mercycle). I stopped buying his books after that, but I held on to the ones I had already bought. Then I decided to re-read the Adept series, and at the dénouement of one of the books, he basically had the hero threaten to rape another character.

A couple of romance authors
Catherine Coulter - good writer, good plots, but after a couple of books I realized that she had a rape in ever single book. On screen so to speak.

Mary Balogh - another author who was good at plots, but after a few books, I found her style really weird and remote. Remote is bad in romances.

[GuanoLad]

David Eddings. After writing the same book five times in a row, it got a little tired.

[IvoryTowerDenizen]

Anne Rice. Don't like her new stuff and the old stuff wasn't nearly as engaging as I recalled.

[Dave Hartwick]

I suspected King would have a strong showing in this thread. I still like his stuff, even some fairly recent things, like the story "1408". I just don't like it as much as I once did.

Heinlein is similar, except I read everything of his I could find, including some really bad late stuff (even then, in the bloom of bored, solitary, fandom I never finished I Will Fear No Evil). I can still enjoy some of his books. Tropes he relied on now grate, like the one size fits all Midwest accents, the Old Man figure, and clumsy/suave flirting, even in some of his best work. I never had a problem with any of that when I was a teenage RAH fan.

There was a time when I found Jim Thompson, a pulp writer possibly best known for The Grifters, almost a compulsion. I lost a night's sleep reading his autobiography. On reflection, I'd like that sleep back. It's not that Thompson got worse, it's that I lost my appetite for pulp noir.

It may look like I'm just listing some favorites from when I was young that I've cooled on, but there are some others (Chandler, Seuss, and Hemingway come to mind) that haven't dimmed.

Ian Fleming comes to mind as well, partly because of the racism that I didn't fully notice when I first read the Bond books as a kid. I came to find the idea of Bond with his custom cigarettes and comic book antagonists more than a bit silly. That didn't help.

I'm still disappointed with what happened with cyberpunk. Gibson and Stephenson wrote a killer novel each and then books that could be politely described as "interesting". So maybe my problem (and it is my problem, not the writers, they did pretty damn well for themselves) is with passing interests in genres more than the flaws of authors.

[koeeoaddi]

Originally Posted by hrhomer

Preston/Child. The Pendergast novels as a whole are great, but the new series (Gideon Crew) is outrageously bad.

I wish they'd bag the 'mythology' in the Pendergast books and get back to some good old fashioned murder/monster potboilers (with or without him), like Still Life With Crows, Riptide and The Ice Limit.

I've also fallen out of love with Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George and (tragically) Peter Straub, whose most recent book was hilariously terrible (and I do mean Son of Rosemary, by Ira Levin-level awful).

[GESancMan]

Originally Posted by GuanoLad

David Eddings. After writing the same book five times in a row, it got a little tired.

This is who I came in to say. I loved The Belgariad when I was a teenager, and as the next five books came out I couldn't wait to get each one. I reread them about five years ago, and they were just childish and totally predictable.

[Lamia]

Ha, I started to quote everyone who said "Piers Anthony", but it turned out to be so many posts that it would have been ridiculous to include them all.

I was just recently trying to explain Piers Anthony to a friend who'd never heard of him, and said that many, many geeky folks went through a phase at around 12-15 years old where they read and loved Piers Anthony novels...but that most of us are pretty embarrassed about this now. I don't know how many times I've had the "Oh man, I used to love Piers Anthony too! God, what were we thinking?" conversation.

[jabiru]

Martina Cole. I liked her first few books but then her 'gritty London crime family matriarch' novels all seemed to be the same.

[Trick Rider]

Looks like I'm the first to mention Dan Brown. I really enjoyed The Da Vinci Code and have read everything but The Lost Symbol. I lost interest once I found out how outrageously inaccurate many of his "facts" were.

[Jenaroph]

Originally Posted by Enright3

Stephen King for me too. Sometimes it's his overly long description of things that aren't too related to the story; sometimes it's the tangents he goes on that don't have anything to do with the story, and finally he just seems boring now.

I'm on the second book of the Dark Tower series, borrowed from the library, because I never read it (it wasn't finished when I was on my big King kick when I was a teen). I have to say I may not read as far the third. It's really dreary so far.

Has he ever written a single book where he doesn't describe how some character's genitals are reacting in various situations? Egads, the man has a one track mind. I don't think that much about my OWN crotch, much less fictional ones.

[Nava]

Originally Posted by Dave Hartwick

Heinlein ... one size fits all Midwest accents...

I don't understand this one. You're saying that Heinlein writes everybody with the same accent and you dislike that? Or that he uses such an accent to "characterize"? I come from a literary tradition where most accents are barely hinted at, so the fact that in English most authors transcribe speech "phonetically" (according to their own notion of phonics, of course) took a long time to get used to - if someone's characters always speak the same way, it's fine with me.

[catnoe]

Ditto on Laurel Hamilton, Orson Card, and Stephen King.

I gave up on Anne Rice when she found God again. Nothing against finding God. But her Jesus books I didn't even bother with... her last couple of vampire books weren't up to par.

Lawrence Block (Scudder series) and James Lee Burke basically write the same story over and over just the names have been changed. I know when you are writing a character series the character will encounter similar events but it became boringly repetitive.

Paul Theroux - just lost interest.

Stephen Hunter - His Character of Bob Lee Swagger was getting a bit too old to pull off some of the things he did in the books. Now Bob Lee has found a son (the third generation of Swagger gunmen) he didn't know he had and the series can continue, may give it another try.

Julian May only wrote one series that I could read.

[Kamino Neko]

Yeah, another for Piers Anthony, here.

I enjoyed the Xanth books, the Incarnations of Immortality (except for the one about God), Mode, some of his standalones, and the first two Geodyssey books, then sort of fell away, when I was around 18.

Then I happened to see the fourth Geodyssey book in the book store (this was around 2001, so it'd been out for a bit apparently), and remembered I'd liked the earlier ones.

Couldn't get past the Aztec section.

'Eating a penis' should only be treated as seductive when it's not literal.