You hear all sorts of good things about an author. S/he keeps coming up when discussions of the books you like are held. All your friends rave about the author. Then you finally get around to reading one of their books and it’s… well, eh. What was all the fuss about?
For me, it’s G.K Chesterton. A lot of the authors I really like, such as Gaiman and Borges and Wolfe, say they’re very influenced by this guy and I was looking to reading some of his books. After chewing my way through The Man Who Was Thursday and a couple of Father Brown collections, I have to just… err… emote: . Chesterton is a smug, preachy little conservative and his characters are likewise. How can such great authors gain inspiration from this?
Still, that’s just me. What authors do you hate to hate, because you wanted to like them?
Thomas Pynchon. It’s not that I think he’s a BAD writer. It’s just that I don’t LIKE his stuff. I can admire his work aesthetically and appreciate his intellect . . . but somehow that’s the problem. Everything he writes screams out, “This book was written by Thomas Pynchon! He is very smart, that Thomas Pynchon guy who wrote this book!”
In other words, the presence of the author is inescapable. This can work in short story form (ah, R. A. Lafferty!), but gets tedious when stretched to novel-length.
I think I am just not in sync with the majority opinion that he is one of the masters of English prose, and of the very novel form itself. He probably is, but I don’t think I can read another word of his. He is probably too subtle for me, and I can’t understand what he is getting at most of the time.
I have read Turn of the Screw four times, and I still don’t get what is going on – I still don’t understand what happens the the end of the story.
I have The Portrait of a Lady, and I still don’t understand what went on between the Lady and her husband that was so monstrous.
I have read The Ambassadors, but I still don’t get what exactly happened, and I’ll be damned if I understand why the main character of the novel left that juicy American woman in Paris to go home when he really had nothing to go home to.
I just can’t get started on The Golden Bowl.
It’s funny. Several excellent films have been made from James’s novels, but even after viewing them, I still can’t follow the novels. Several of his short pieces are gems, though.
Colin Dexter. I hoped the books would contain some element of the superb atmosphere and characterisation of the Inspector Morse television adaptations … but they don’t. All power to whoever saw the TV potential in some of most dull and pompous detective fiction I’ve ever read.
Totally ditto the Henry James; to me he’s one of the most obnoxiously pretentious and wordy authors to come along between Flaubert and Anne Rice.
James Michener- his works inspired some great movies and mini-series (Hawaii, Centennial, South Pacific), but he’s the rare case of the film being much better than the book. I’m convinced he couldn’t give directions to the nearest 7-11 without starting with a volcano explosion, his characters are never developed and seem to exist only to connect their underveloped ancestors to the underdeveloped descendants, and just when you start to find something remotely interesting he skips ahead 200 years.
Gore Vidal- I think he’s one of the greatest essayists of the 20th century (though not the 21st- his recent stuff is so much bitter old man “America is evil and the rest of the world is superior” crap from a faded provocateur), but his fiction, which won critical raves and public acceptance, is some of the most lifeless I’ve ever read. I’m convinced the man knows nothing about human emotion and that his hatred for Truman Capote is roughly akin to Salieri’s for Mozart in the play Amadeus.
Less classically and more currently, Lemony Snicket came heavily recommended. I read the first two books and couldn’t stand either one of them.
Hermann Melville- I think I might have come to like Moby Dick if it hadn’t been ruined for me by a lit professor who sees symbolism and depth in everything from the ISBN to the numerology of the page numbers.
David Sedaris. I know, I know–he’s made every one of my literate, funny friends scream with laughter. And he seems just the sort of author I’d like; sarcastic, satirical, intelligent. But…meh. Too affected.
I very much want to like Kurt Vonnegut. Everybody I know does. He spoke at my college graduation. And I can appreciate his books. I get it, you know. But I just don’t like them. There’s a quality in there that sits so wrong with me, some part of tone or reasoning that irritates me but that I can’t put my finger on.
[mini-rant]Of course, what drives me nuts is when I say “I don’t like X’s books”, and the person I’m telling this begins trying to explicate them. I DIDN’T SAY I DON’T FREAKING “GET” HIS BOOKS, I SAID I DON’T LIKE THEM![/mini-rant]
Neil Gaiman’s prose. I loved The Sandman, and Good Omens is one of my top 5 favorite books. And I briefly corresponded with him over e-mail several years ago, and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. And I like his ideas, and the amount of research he puts into his work. But Neverwhere did nothing for me. I bought one of his books of short stories, and it couldn’t even keep my attention span long enough to finish that. And I started American Gods; it wasn’t that I lost interest as much as I felt it was actually physically repelling me.
At this point I feel like I’m just buying the guy’s books to help support him and as a sign of support for that kind of book to get published. I’m not getting anything out of the transaction.
Chesterton is one of my favorite authors. Especially for “The Man Who Was Thursday.” I also liked “Good Omens”, which is dedicated to Chesterton, but it was boring at times and I wouldn’t want to read it again.
I just read “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” by Heinlein, and didn’t like it at all, despite wanting to like it.
Henry James for me too…I can’t make it past page five of Wings of the Dove without wanting to use my bookmark to gouge out my own eyes.
I hate Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I just can’t seem to idolize Tolkien as much as everyone else seems to. I like his plots, I like the characters, the conflict…but there’s something missing for me, and I can’t honestly say I like him.
. Chesterton is a smug, preachy little conservative and his characters are likewise. How can such great authors gain inspiration from this?