Colour of Magic did it for me… don’t like any of his very early stuff, Mort’s OK but it only really gets going with Wyrd Sisters IMO.
Colour of Magic. I have yet to actually finish reading it.
What?!* Dark Side of the Sun* is his best ever!
I nominated Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It was such a huge step down from American Gods.
Either Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett or any of the “Krondor” books by Raymond Feist.
I’m so glad I didn’t read Color of Magic, or for that matter any of the Rincewind books, first when I started reading Terry Pratchett. Color of Magic and Light Fantastic don’t fit with the rest of the series, and the Rincewind novels (excepting The Last Hero, if that even counts as a Rincewind book) just don’t work for me the way the other books do.
(Even though “Guards! Guards” is well written, I’m glad I didn’t read it first when I started reading about Vimes. I think if I’d seen him as the drunk copper first, I would have a different view of him than I do having started with sober Vimes.)
bagga, Anansi Boys is so much better as an audio book. Lenny Henry does it, and his character voices and narrating style help get across a lot of things I felt the text failed to convey.
I would also list this one.
Although he’s not my favorite author I do quite enjoy most of his work, but if I had read Richard K. Morgan’s Market Forces first, I would prolly never have read anything by him ever again. It was like reading something he wrote when he was 19 and then stashed in a shoebox until contractual obligations made him haul it out again. Thankfully, I stumbled across a FE copy of Woken Furies first.
Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionovar Tapestry. It isn’t exactly bad, per se, it’s just a bit Too Much.
To be fair, King claims he doesn’t actually remember writing that book.
Thanks Leiko, I’ll definitely check out the audiobook.
I could not agree more: I was much enamoured of* Altered Carbon *when it came out and read most his other stuff. Then I went five years without reading anything by him, and decided to revisit him when I came across Market Forces as I was packing up to move house.
It was terrible - immature, like you say, full of forced machismo and bad dialogue, trying to tell us something about corporate culture that we’ve heard a thousand times before. I can’t be sure if it’s just that book or if I’ve matured as a reader, but I probably won’t read anything by him again. There’s too many great books I haven’t read and I daren’t revisit Altered Carbon in case my old enjoyment is replaced by embarassment.
ETA: Wikipedia confirms your suspicion:
The Color Of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Equal Rites. They weren’t written by Terry Pratchett. They were written by Pterry’s untalented younger brother, with the help of a less-than-infinate number of monkeys.
And, of course, people hear us Pratchett fans going on all the time, pick up Book #1, and put it down and on’t get what all the fuss is about. Grrrr.
I would say that for The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. And I am saying it’s bad.
Seconded.
I’ve read it three times and still have f’ing clue what’s going on at the end.
About forty years after Ray Bradbury wrote Dandelion Wine, one of my very favorite novels, he published a sequel, Farewell Summer. By then, he was somewhat lazily filling up pages with dialogue exchanges instead of the shimmering descriptive passages that made the first book so memorable. And his cutesy when not odd descriptions of the sexual thoughts of two characters show why this is an area he was wise to have left to other authors in the past.
I liked *Anansi Boys *a lot better than American Gods. If *American Gods *had been my first exposure to Gaiman, it probably would have been my last.
As for Pratchett, all Pratchett fans acknowledge that some of his books are better than others. None, however, agree on which ones are the worst (or the best).
I know he doesn’t; he was apparently doing waaaaaaaay too much coke at the time. But that doesn’t change the fact that, had I not known about the drug addiction, if Tommyknockers had been my first King book, it would have also been my last. I know he’s also said he regrets-to some degree-Pet Semetary (for the total lack of hope at the end) and Rage (written as Bachman, for its parallels to later school shootings). However, even if either of those novels had been my ‘first King experience’, it wouldn’t have stopped me from reading more.
I will also add to the thread: Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Loved the LOTR trilogy, but could not get into Silmarillion.
I nominate The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett. It’s not a bad book per se, it’s just that I have lost count of the number of people I’ve told to read Discworld novels because they’re great, and then they pick up Colour of Magic because it’s the first one, and I have to tell them, no, no, they get so much better, just try a different one and you’ll see.
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It’s not AWFUL, but I’m not sure I’d have read the whole thing if it hadn’t been for a class. It remains the only Austen novel I’ve never re-read.
Some people do love Mansfield Park, but I think anyone who was skeptical about Austen would feel their worst fears had been confirmed. Even Jane Austen’s mother thought Mansfield Park heroine Fanny Price was insipid, and I can well imagine many modern readers deciding to abandon the book once they get to the part where Fanny is horrified that her cousins want to amuse themselves by putting on a play!
To me the novel’s biggest redeeming feature is that it contains Austen’s dirtiest pun: “Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”
I also liked Anansi Boys better, and if I were to choose one of the two to recommend to someone as a first Gaiman novel, I’d go with Anansi Boys. It’s less likely to be confusing to a newcomer to Gaiman’s work and isn’t as dark. So unless I knew the person liked dark, complex novels I’d consider Anansi Boys a better introduction to Gaiman.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was the first and last Heinlein novel I ever read. I’ve heard several times over the years that it’s not a fan favorite and is a bad choice for one’s first Heinlein, which makes me feel better about how little I enjoyed it. I remember thinking “This is the guy everyone’s crazy about?” Although I probably would like almost anything else by Heinlein more, after reading Cat I’ve never cared enough to bother with his other books.
Whoops, should have read the thread more carefully before making my post! Same point I made, just more succinctly. 
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace. It took me three tries to get through it. It’s pretty much the definition of ‘blackly funny’… hysterical, if you’re in the right frame of mind for it, and may cause suicidal thoughts if you’re not.
I’ll certainly agree that The Cat who Walks through Walls and Number of the Beast are bad, but you don’t very often meet someone who says “Yeah, I tried to read that, but it sucked, so I gave up on Heinlein” (in fact, Lamia there is the first person I’ve ever heard that from). You do, however, often meet someone who says that about Stranger. So I thought a warning against Stranger would be more useful than against any of his stinkers.
I’ve been slogging my way through Richard Russo’s “Bridge of Sighs”, on and off, for probably close to three months now, and I seriously doubt I will ever finish it. If I hadn’t already read, and loved, “Straight Man” and “Empire Falls”, I’m not sure I would ever pick up another of his books.