I doubt that I will ever read another Patricia Cornwell novel. I used to gobble 'em up, but at some point (I think it was midway through Predator) what had once seemed exciting suddenly seemed sick and icky.
I’d always gotten the impression that he felt he was exposing some kind of secret in everything he wrote. I hope I’m wrong, because he writes well.
I came in to say Patricia Cornwell too. “Oh you did NOT just kill him off!” ::flings book across room::
I’m behind on my Stephen King so I can’t say how he’s fared. I think the last I read was the Tom Gordon one, which I liked. It’s him who has changed though because he’s sober now right? I remember reading “Tommyknockers” when it came out and I’m like 
at the thing with the super heavy menstruation or whatever and how incoherent it was and thinking “how did this get published?! Who comes up with this?” Him admitting he was hammered the whole time he wrote that makes much sense to me now.
I haven’t read him in quite a while but one thing I loved about John Grisham was he was known for these taut legal thrillers (but sometimes hit & miss. “The Client” was horrible, only to be followed up by the delightful “The Rainmaker”.) Then one day when Oprah’s book club was in its heyday he at some point must’ve snorted and said “I got this.” and wrote “A Painted House” which was almost a parody of Oprah’s book club selections, while still being a well-written entertaining read. That’s talent.
I had a run of adoring Tom Robbins in hi school and college. My wife even got me a first edition of Skinny Legs And All. Not so much anymore. Perhaps my mistake was watching the movie of Cowgirls.
Stephen King - I still like most of his older stuff, but The Dark Half sucked, Insomnia and Needful Things took waaaay too long to get to the point, and after that I completely lost interest in reading anything else he wrote.
I’d say King changed, since I can still enjoy his earlier works up to and including It or so.
Dean Koontz - After a while I realized he was writing the same book over and over and lost interest. Intensity was his high point imo. This one is on me.
Dave Eddings - Read one series as a teen and liked it. Read another series and realized he was re-using dialogue and entire scenes. Went back and re-read some in my mid/late twenties and realized what an awful writer he was, really shallow and one dimensional characters.
Forgotten Realms (multiple authors) - Like the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, this was a pen and paper fantasy game with books written to go along with it. Again, something where I liked the colorful characters and interesting fantasy setting as a teen before I realized how crap most of the writing was. Douglas Niles in particular was pretty bad. NEVER liked Ed Greenwood though, he would easily sink to the bottom among the worst hacks.
Terry Brooks - One of the first fantasy series I ever read. I remember thinking at one point “If I read the phrase ‘red hair flying’ ONE more times, this book is going in the garbage”. Sure enough a few pages later it turned up, and into the rubbish bin it went. Sword of Shannara is a poor hack’s version of LOTR.
[nitpicky hijack]Forgotten Realms WAS AD&D - a specific setting for the AD&D ruleset. And D&D3.X. Not sure if there’s FR material for 4e or if there will be for Next.[/nitpicky hijack]
Yeah, I’ve got nothin’ new here:
Dean Koontz
Michael Crichton
John Grisham
Read any more than about three of each and you’ll may agree with me that all three of those guys just seem to keep writing the same shit over and over again.
I can’t figure out why Orson Scott Card is so awesome. I got Ender’s Game because I liked the Hunger Games and wanted to read something similar – I like dystopian novels. I couldn’t get past about page ten. I was so bored and so NOT drawn into the story, I can’t figure out why he’s so damn popular. I gave up on the whole dystopian novel kick and discovered Terry Pratchett. I think I’m on my 8th Pratchett novel and still loving it. My goal is to read every. last. stinkin’. one.
Oh, and Scott Adams. After I read that horrible “God’s Debris” piece of dreck, I unsubscribed to my Dilbert newsletter and banned Adams from my life. I had no idea he was a tinfoil hat wearing kook, but I am done with him now. Hateful freak.
I can’t believe it took so long for someone to mention Thomas Harris. His photo should be by this entry in the encyclopedia.
Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were fantastic. And then…wow, I don’t even want to think about Hannibal. What an absolute pile of crap.
Thank you for mentioning these! I read the first two and have been trying to remember the titles/author’s name so I could reread them. Didn’t know there were others…
I’s still good with King; Koontz, who never stops showing off his admittedly admirable vocabulary, gets old quick.
I am puzzled about what the heck has happened to Anne Tyler. Used to gobble her books up. The last 2 or 3–meh.
90 posts in and no mention of Harlan Ellison or JD Salinger?
Neil Gaiman: When he first popped up in the late 80s, he showed limitless potential and a fresh new take on old ideas. The last thing of his I read–The Graveyard Book–showed desperate revisiting or all of those old ideas, again and again.
PJ O’Rourke was great when (A) he assumed his readers didn’t already agree with him and (B) recognized that “curmudgeonly” only functions with"funny." Not sure when this became a problem, but he hasn’t had a really good book since All the Trouble in the World. Wait: That was the last book to repackage his old Rolling Stone pieces, right? All the subsequent ones were from The Atlantic and Weekly Standard? I think I can pinpoint this after all…
I was very happy when she killed off a certain character. I was very unhappy when she brought that character back.
Loved the first few books, but eventually gave up on her…
It took ELEVEN YEARS after Silence of the Lambs for him to come up with Hannibal. We all had to wait for eleven years, and OMG the excitement when we heard there was a new book! … He had all that time to write, and that was what he came up with. :mad:
Yeah, Laurel K. Hamilton. I loved the first 8 books in the Anita Blake series, but then…then Anita started having sex. Lots of boring, repetitive sex. Writing bad erotic fanfic of your own characters is just weird.
And Stephen King. He hasn’t been the same since he got run over. Seriously, the last books he wrote before then are the last ones I truly enjoyed.
And let me add Amy Tan to the authors who write the same books over and over list. I read four books of hers. They were all the same basic story: fiercely independent Chinese-American daughter clashes with traditional Chinese mother who has a tragic secret in her past.
But then didn’t she bring him back at the end of… the next book? Protagonist turns a corner and there’s her soulmate just…what?..sitting on the stairs? And, no chemistry, just “Oh, I should’ve told you, I’m not dead.” (Not sure; I’ve tried to block it out)
I loved Cornwell’s early books, but then I started playing a game where I tried to identify the exact paragraph in the last chapter where her publisher called and said “It’s going to the printer this afternoon-- finish it up in the next hour!” And all the plot devices, all the loose ends BAM! wrapped up in twenty pages.
And I’m nodding my head a lot reading this thread. I, too, gave up on the first* Dark Tower* book, but slogged through the audiobook (thanks to Frank Muller’s reading), and later gave up on Mr. King… but tried and loved “11/22/63” (esp. the audiobook: narrator had a delightful hint of Maine accent).
But if an author finds a schtick that I like, and schticks with it, that’s ok with me. Dick Francis is the extreme example of that. Every single book is: plucky almost-middle-age guy whose career somehow intersects with horse racing is thrust into a mystery that he’s really not equipped for. And now his son is writing exactly the exact same exact book… it’s uncanny… but kind of fun.
This summer I reread 40 Dick Francis books. Sure they are all the same, but it’s a good same. The son’s books, however, lack the charm of the original books. He inserted misogyny disguised as chivalry to try and capture the feel of the older time period of the early books, I felt icky after reading one.
I find that I give up on most series after 4 or 5 books, it would probably be easier to list those I haven’t given up on.
I loved his juveniles, like “Have Space Suit Will Travel” and “Red Planet” when I was in elementary school, and he turned me into a lover of SF. I first read Stranger in 1969 or 1970, when I was 17 years, and it fit my personal time and societal time perfectly. I still love “By His Bootstraps”, “All you Zombies” and many other short stories from the classic period. But the works of his that I don’t care for at all were the latest, To Fear No Evil and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
Also agree with above posters on Janet Evanovitch – she should have quit after Plum book 6 – and Laurell Hamilton, who should also have quit after Anita Blake book 6. Never cared that much for King – even the earlier works fell apart by the endings, so I stopped following him early on, and I find Dan Brown unreadable. Though you could make a good drinking game out of his books – take a drink every time he starts a sentince with an adverb, and you’ll be plastered by the end of the first chapter.
May I suggest Robert Louis Stevenson? I gobbled up Treasure Island and Kidnapped when I was a kid, but now I no longer have patience with the dialect. I think that is more a flaw in myself than in him, however.
Most of the authors I’ve really loved, I’ve continued to enjoy. I’ll still reread Louisa May Alcott or L.M. Montgomery when I need a break from the modern world.
The Da Vinci Code includes in its introduction a page titled “Fact:”, which prattles on about the Priory of Sion, and then claims:
It’s rubbish of course - the Priory of Sion was a hoax, and many of the details he refers to are either incorrect or hoaxes.
Someone, can’t remember who, described her books as “Three generations of Chinese women argue in the kitchen.”
FWIW, her sixth novel, Saving Fish from Drowning, departs from this formula.