Interestingly, the writing in the OP doesn’t really bother me. I found the first chapter online, and the sentence in context comes across as a dude who’s really shaken and talking to his dead wife. It’s a weird voice and kind of emo, but at least from the first chapter I’m willing to believe that it’s because the narrator is emo and also freaked out with grief.
But other authors have led to me putting the book down. Clive Cussler, Christ on a cracker.
I put down the book and think “Life’s too short, and there are too many well-written books out there.”
.
I came up with that battle cry in my idyllic senior year of college. I’d ditched my med school plans, so no late nights in the lab and no studying for MCATS, so my stress was 5% of what it had been.
And I moved out of a frat house into a beautiful victorian room in an nonagenarian’s house. Imagine ancient paintings and doilies everywhere and a high, antique four-poster bed, with a large bedside table with twenty books on it. I’d snuggle into bed early and decide which book to continue reading… ahhh…
Every few weeks I’d take a look at the books I hadn’t touched in a month and trade them out for different “books I’ve always wanted to try”.
It really depends on the book. There are books I skim just for the content or the broad ideas (both nonfiction and mediocre-to-bad novels are in this category.) There are other books that I wallow in for the very sentences themselves.
In the first category, the quality of the writing doesn’t matter much. In the second, the content itself hardly matters at all.
Oh, the Da Vinci Code. That’s what I came in for. I don’t think I made it through ten pages before I physically tossed it a few feet away. I then took a few more seconds to unroll my eyes. Wow. I’m not really a writing snob but. . .I read it a good fifteen years ago or more, but I think it actively offended me.
In this vein my experience with the fiction of Tom Wolfe:
“The Bonfire of the Vanities” was excellent. Interesting story and characters.
“A Man in Full” was pretty good, though the ending was lame.
“I am Charlotte Simmons” was readable, but the story was ridiculous from start to finish.
“Back to Blood” was utterly unreadable. I literally could not get past the first ten pages.
Funny you should mention Robert Louis Stevenson. A few years ago I bought a copy of “Treasure Island” to read to my grandkids, because what kid doesn’t like a pirate story? The sentence structure was frequently so twisty that I would have to stop in the middle of a sentence, read it to myself until I could parse it correctly, then continue reading out loud. I got frustrated trying to read the story, and the grandkids got frustrated listening to me try to read it. I think we stopped after about three chapters. Maybe that kind of writing was the standard back then, but it’s excruciating to try to read it today. (Much like James Fenimore Cooper.)
Recently I read Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, and while it was generally enjoyable and justifiably a classic, the writing style did take getting used to (and led to my skipping passages toward the end). Stevenson probably should have joined a Writers’ Anonymous group to fight his addiction to semicolons.
But I can tolerate odd 19th-century style a lot more readily than 21st century pretentious wordiness.
Clive Cussler is another good example in the vein of Dan Brown/ The Da Vinci Code. I’ve read a couple of Cussler’s books, including a nonfiction memoir of his own adventures searching for shipwrecks. (I’d actually recommend that one if you’re interested in the subject matter.) His novels are eye-rolly but kind of fun if you’re in the mood for that sort of thing. He and his fans don’t take themselves as seriously as the whole Da Vinci Code fandom back when it came out. But I will admit, I read that book on a trans-Atlantic flight back from my semester abroad in college and really enjoyed it. I often have trouble focusing on whatever thinky reading material I bring along on a flight. I’m just always so uncomfortable and restless in that tiny, noisy space. A good bad book like that–fast-paced, intricate but not too deep, suspenseful and not too subtle–is just what I need to be mentally elsewhere. Dean Koontz is another one I’d put in that category.
Yeah, me too. I hated, hated that book.
I finished it, though.
mmm
Stephenson’s writing has annoyed me to the point where I found Reamde to be unreamdeble.
A writer once paid me to use one of my photographs on her book cover. The book is so awful I won’t list it on my resume.
Depends on the bad writing. The example in the OP didn’t strike me as too bad, because a) it’s dialogue, and people in good books can still talk like pretentious twats, and b) I don’t have any context for judging how much worse the rest of it is. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is the worst book I ever forced myself to finish, but it had nothing to do with the prose, which was actually fine, just the plot, characters … you know, everything else.
Some older writers can commit various offenses against contemporary taste, but I can often read them anyway if they immerse me in the setting (for literary writers) or give me a good pulpy yarn (vintage pulp, especially detective stories and Westerns).
I’ve gotten less tolerant of bad writing as I get older. A few things that get a book immediately tossed:
When all the characters have perfect little Anglo-Saxon names (unless it’s a historical novel set in an Anglo-Saxon locale)
When the 3rd person narrator assesses women by their attractiveness
When the 3rd person narrator insists on telling us incredibly obvious things we already should have figured out by the characters’ speech and actions
I once burned a paperback that was poorly written. I didn’t get halfway through it. It was that bad.
I never got into the supermarket romances that school friends did at the time, but I had to review one for class. We each had a different crap book to review. Mine was a Harlequin Romance. It was hilariously bad. We made fun of it during lunch break and I got an A+ on my review.
I made it through the Da Vinci Code because it moved quickly but I admit that I struggled with it early on. For something that is printed, it grated on my ears.
I was warned about 50 Shades of Grey so all I did was open and read a random page in the bookstore. It was a nightmare. It went back on the shelf immediately.
If a book is well-written, I can find myself reviewing a well-turned sentence over and over because it is so pleasurable to my inner-ear.
Haven’t got time for the pain.
I haven’t got room for the pain…
Yep, coming in to this thread to mention that book. I cannot for the life of me remember how far I got through it before it just irritated me to no end and I put it down – probably about halfway through. I didn’t like the fast-paced structure and stupid puzzles some in this thread liked. I think I ended up reading a synopsis somewhere, just so I could have the pop cultural knowledge of it (which now I’ve completely forgotten, anyway), but Christ, was that book terrible and, I thought, forumulaic. I hated what I remember to be one chapter-ending cliffhanger after another. Maybe my memory of it is distorted, but I seem to recall thinking … ok, here we go, another damned cliff hanger to lead into the next chapter. I just don’t like writing like that. It feels cheap.
^^^
This.
I’m currently 20+ books into a series that started off with really abysmal writing, but the author got much better very quickly. Still has some issues, but so much better than the first book. What kept me reading was the crazy premise and quirky characters.
There’s been a couple non-fiction books i either struggled through or stopped reading entirely. They clearly need an editor - too much background before getting to the subject matter, promising to get to the point later, unfocused narrative then making the same point multiple times. The publisher either didn’t have the budget for robust editing, or the author was obstinate.
Two come to mind.
The Ark Before Noah by Irving Finkle. He’s infectiously enthusiastic about a fascinating subject, but by gods does he ramble aimlessly.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. Reading it is like watching a TV show that should have just been a single movie. I got a third of the way in and I’m still not sure what the thesis is supposed to be.
Oh yes, non-fiction. I have tremendous respect respect for much of the work of B. F. Skinner and had a great interest in reading his keystone Beyond Freedom and Dignity. That may have been the most difficult book I have gotten through – even more of a struggle than the Iliad. It was worth it, but the man just could not produce readable academic text.
The only way to “read” Cooper is through the lens of Mark Twain.