I’m another one who can’t get started on Huckleberry Finn because of the dialog. I wish there was a “sanitized” version written in regular speech to help me out - I’d love to actually read the entire book.
What really twists my nipples is when the author throws in terms or phrases in another language and doesn’t bother to give pronunciations. How do you pronounce sgian dubh? Can’t you just say “sock knife?” And how about the end of The Name of the Rose? I slogged through that whole damn book only to find the last phrase is in Latin!
There’s a knack to writing it that some authors have, others don’t. I’ve run across dialect that was so bad I refused to (or couldn’t) read it. However, in the hands of a good author, I like it. Cloud Atlas is an example of it done well, in my opinion. The genius of that section is that you don’t have to catch every word, you can just read and it kind of washes over you and makes sense eventually. Try too hard and you miss it, but just read it and it flows. Kind of like listening to dialog in a movie with strong accents - at first it confuses you, but then it clicks.
Oddly enough, the only part of Cloud Atlas I had trouble with was the Adam Ewing (1860s sailor) part. No idea why that one was hard for me as opposed to Sonmi or Zachry.
You want Scottish dialect? Robert Louis Stevenson wrote stories in it, and I’ve read works by more recent authors copying him. Utterly unitelligible (if you’re not Scottish) without a glossary.
Don’t believe me? Try reading Thrawn Janet:
I cannot stand it. Unless the author is from the same part of the world a me, his phonetic rendering of even a bog standard word will not be the same as mine for the same word. And if the author is doing his phonetic rendering of slang term that I don’t even know when it’s spelt properly I tend to lose interest pretty damn quick.
Huckleberry Finn and Wuthering Heights were both required reading for English literature when I was at school. A whole class of baffled kids in the back end of Ballymacnowhere in rural Ireland trying to decipher not only the decidedly foreign Huck from the Deep South of America, with his odd phrases, but also the equally foreign mumbly Joseph from the North East of England with his strange terminology.
I normally don’t like written-out dialect in novels, because I find it annoying and condescending (and often racist, especially when it’s done with black or Asian characters).
That said, though, I did quite like Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy, which was written entirely in very strange English. Not sure if you’d call it “dialect” per se, but it definitely took some getting used to.
Try reading Caribbean books written with Creole dialect. I had a book of Caribbean short stories once that was actually pretty good–except that two-thirds of the stories consisted of dialogue written in various Creoles. Not just from one island, either, from *many *islands. None of these countries speak the same Creole.
The used bookstore wouldn’t take that book. I ended up donating it to Goodwill.
Well, I loved Cloud Atlas and consider Huckleberry Finn a masterpiece, so maybe I’m not the best audience for this argument. 
I’d be sad if works of literature are “made easier to read” by rendering them in colloquial English. Part of their value as unique works would be lost. Sure, not everyone is going to like it, but not everyone has to like it. There is still plenty of stuff out there that can be enjoyed that is dialect-free.
Another form of this that I absolutely despise is when authors, usually in a Sci Fi setting, have characters that are using some form of text communication so they start abbreviating in ALL CAPS right there in the book. I can barely tolerate it when I get a text like that IRL - having to wade through it to receive plot points is infuriating.
Here’s an example from The Algebraist:
Yes, I can read it. No, I shouldn’t have to. The author can simply say they were coding secret texts to each other and continue normally. Why make me do heavy lifting?
Oddly, when the shape of the text itself is used as an important plot point, as in The Stars My Destination, I’m cool with it. But the example above just seems like nothing more than an annoyance.
Have you tried listening to an audio version?
A few touches, that’s all. Enough to get the idea across. Any more than that and you’re being condescending.
Besides, that’s only how the writer would spell those sounds. In other words, it might not work if the reader’s accent isn’t the same as the writer’s.
Yes, I hate it. In general, people write dialects very badly. I can’t read Sir Walter Scott any more because of all the “dinna fash yursel” and similar stuff.
It might sometimes be important to the plot to indicate that characters are speaking different dialects, such as to indicate cultural or class differences that are relevant. But I believe this can be done more subtly than Sir Walter and other writers have done.
Roddy
Oddly, the moles’ accent always sort of bugged me there, because I couldn’t figure out how the heck it was supposed to sound. A critical lack of exposure to the relevant English accent. When I went to a signing and saw Jacques do it live, it made perfect sense. Same for hearing it live on an audiobook.
Generally I find the writing-out of dialect/accent more irritating than not. It’s a case by case thing, though–I got used to it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and had no problems that I recall with Twain. On the other hand, the original Uncle Remus stories are basically unreadable unless translated.
When I first read Gone With The Wind at age 15, I had to skip over most of the slaves’ dialects. Even now, it’s very hard reading.
Iain Banks likes that for some reason. Don’t try reading Feersum Endjinn, a third of the book is like this…
I hate it. My beloved Dickens does it, and the entire middle third of Martin Chuzzlewit was torture because of it.
It’s especially bad when you just can’t imagine someone saying a word a particular way. Dickens loves to have his illiterate characters say “creetur” instead of creature. But how do you pronounce that? Who would pronounce it that way by hearing it instead of reading it? He’s probably going for some subtlety that’s beyond me, but still!
I re-read Huck Finn a couple of years ago, I believe. I know it was after I hit 50. I found it to be very uneven.
And the accents, for the most part, were a distraction for me. I live in Texas, and grew up here, so I’m used to hearing a Southern (more or less) accent. Now, I’m sure that pronunciation and usages have changed, but I feel that Twain was going overboard with the dialect. Yes, yes, I UNDERSTAND that Huck needed to be presented as an unschooled, nearly-feral child who was actually pretty smart, but trying to slog through the various accents led me to put the book aside many times, and I had to force myself to go back to the book. Same thing with some of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories…sometimes Sayers sets the story in the Highlands, or she has a Scot with a lot of dialog, and I just get frustrated with not understanding the words and how they’re pronounced and used.
I first read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I was in junior high or high school, and had no problem with grasping the speech mannerisms of the main character, and the general Loonie accent. I also had no problem grasping the slang of Stand on Zanzibar, to name another one.
I think that the difference is that in some stories, the author assumes that the reader is familiar with the accent and slang, and in other stories, the author is careful to put enough exposition into the story so that the reader can extrapolate the meaning without a dictionary.
Twain, Ambrose Bierce, or Bret Hartt actually were pretty popular in their time because of their ability to depict accents or dialects in their stories and books. It doesn’t wash today, Perhaps it says quite a bit about their time.
I was watching one of the *Shrek *movies, and thinking that while it’s pretty good for now, it’s probably not going to stand the test of time, because of all the pop culture references that will fade away with time.
The only thing I hate more than written dialect is poems or songs in prose.