Books you won't read because of the writing style

[Dr.Rieux]

I thought the prose style of *Beloved * was so pretentious and annoying that it will keep me from reading anything more by Toni Morrison, at least for a while.

[wonky]

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

It’s not the footnotes I mind (loved Jonathan Strange, for example). It’s not the wandering nature of the nested storylines. It’s not the story itself.

It’s that I spend fifteen goddamn minutes of my life reading a three page list of names in teeny tiny font only to be told two pages later that the list was meaningless.

I hate you, Mark Z. Danielewski. Ptooie.
There’s a technique that lots of fantasy authors use that I pretty much hate. It’s the “I am an old old man and let me tell you the story of my life but before I begin let me give you this big hairy spoiler so that you can’t really enjoy the story. Ready?”

Bah.

[vivalostwages]

@Smeghead

Harry Turtledove. I keep hearing what a great, imaginative author he is…so much so that I’ve actually read TWO of his books, despite the first one being a steaming load of crap. I heard so much good about him that I was finally willing to accept that perhaps I’d picked up a flukily bad example of his work by accident. Nope. The second one was just as bad. Out of the thousands of books I’ve read in my life, there have been maybe a handful that I’ve had trouble finishing. I wanted to throw both of these out the window.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is about his style that’s so annoying. Let’s see if I can make up an example:

“I’d sure like to be at home cleaning the kitchen,” said soldier A, wryly.
Soldier B laughed at A’s joke, knowing that even though cleaning the kitchen is not a particularly enjoyable task, it would be far better than being stuck here in this war, where even the best day was far worse than a day spent cleaning the kitchen and also knowing that soldier A had a particular aversion to cleaning kitchens, which made his comment even more telling…

He thinks he’s a master of humor, apparently. He is constantly having his characters crack the feeblest of jokes, then other characters laugh uproariously during the next three paragraphs while he explains his incredibly feeble jokes in mind-numbing detail to us. And then he does it again. And again. And again. And then you shoot yourself in the brain.

Oh, dear God…I see what you mean.

And whoever remarked on the overuse of adjectives and adverbs: Amen. Koontz does this a lot, and I think James Patterson may do it too. Very lazy and very irritating.

[Catfood_Purrito]

@AuntiePam

Another is repetition of unusual or “fancy” words. New horror writers are especially guilty of this. One “preternatural” is plenty.

That word is the biggest reason why I cannot read Anne Rice. I swear, she uses it on every other page. I’ve ruined Anne Rice for more than one of her fans by pointing it out.

[AuntiePam]

@Mishell

That word is the biggest reason why I cannot read Anne Rice. I swear, she uses it on every other page. I’ve ruined Anne Rice for more than one of her fans by pointing it out.

I ruined J. K. Rowling for someone by pointing out her excessive use of adverbs in dialogue, especially in Order of the Phoenix. I felt bad, for about a minute. They’ll always have the movies though.

Steven Erikson is my new favorite writer. He has a couple of ticks. A couple of his characters say “nonetheless” way too much, and his characters never “walk”, they “stride”. But he’s so damn good, not reading him for those reasons would be like kicking Jude Law out of bed because he has a cowlick.