Just for general amusement – and keeping in mind that it’s been a long time since I read these books so my memory may be hazy – here are a couple of examples of what I mean.
In Airport, there was a little old lady who was caught trying to board a flight without a ticket. She was brought before an airline official and expressed surprise, since she had always used her “system” to fly for free to visit her children. Hailey was expounding on the fact that back in the day before airport security, the airlines were notoriously lax about security in general, and the real “ticket” to get on a plane was not the ticket itself, but a boarding pass, which was often nothing more than a flight number scrawled on the ticket folder. Hailey had also learned that airlines were extremely reluctant to prosecute or do anything that garnered bad publicity, so in the novel, the airline official just rolled her eyes, sighed, let the old lady go, and then, IIRC, went and had sex with another airline official. This is all typical Hailey.
Another one I remember is that in Wheels, a newly developed car turned out to have serious vibration problems at a certain speed. The engineers developed a fix. Our Hero the automotive executive asked what the modification would cost. He was told something like “about ten dollars”. In the novel, the executive then had fits of hysterics about this incredible cost, and the book goes on at great length to explain how even a few cents in the manufacturing cost of a mass-production car makes a huge difference to the bottom line (still true today). I believe the executive then went off to have sex with someone.
Point is, IIRC, none of those things had anything much to do with the plot, such as it was.
The first few chapters are a little slow, I’ll give you that. But the book is exquisite, once you get into the rhythm.
When I was in school to become a teacher, my kid-lit class required every student to choose a week to do a read-aloud. Most students chose something like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus or Harold and the Purple Crayon.and it was all sweet and bland.
Then it was my turn. And for a couple days in advance I practiced the chapter The First Blow. And during class I stood and paced and read the book, pitching my voice high and wheedling for Long John Silver, and hoarse and quavering with indignation for Tom, and quiet after the birds exploded from the bush–then nearly barking out the sudden attack and brutal murder–
Holy shit. I held that class in the palm of my hand.
As someone that’s read many many dozens of chapter books aloud, take my word: read-alouds don’t get better than Treasure Island.
Oh, another writer that I’ve put down before because of writing: Brandon Sanderson. Some of his books are enjoyable schlock. But one of them started with this portentous History of Fantasyland, some Silmarrilion knockoff bullshit, in which the immortal wizards or whatever swear a mighty Oathpact to one another, and I just couldn’t even. I assume that after they Finishcompleted swearing their Oathpact, they all Leftwent to Supperdinner in a Groupbunch.
Dark Corners isn’t a good sample of Rendell’s real talent. It’s the last book she wrote before her death at age 85, and published posthumously, so possibly she didn’t edit as much as she could have, or she was losing her touch. I’ve read almost all of her books, including the Barbara Vines, and some are clunkers, but when she’s at the top of her game, she’s excellent.
And my answer to the OP: yes, there are books that I’ll just reject because the writing is really bad, but sometimes I’m willing to put up with some of it if there are redeeming features. I’ve read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and War and Peace several times, but for the rereads I’ve just skipped through the heavy parts and looked at the parts I enjoy.
Oh wow. VERY strongly. I haven’t read modern fiction, other than Murakami and McCall-Smith, for decades. Reading my way through a century of Nobel Prize winners–which I’ve doing for 20+ years now, and I’ve read maybe a third of them–has completely spoiled my tolerance for insigificant writing. Every time I pick up an Oprah book, or Pulitzer winner, or the book “everyone” is reading, I’m off it within a page or two. Even all the sincerest recommendations from people I respect, I just cant. Elmore Leonard is the closest to an exception I can think of.
One thing that takes me out of the story is pretentiousness. You have a character who’s supposed to be an ordinary teenage girl, or an uneducated working-class woman, and her perspective is full of high-flying literary metaphors - so you can’t believe it’s the character’s thoughts but that of a creative-writing major trying to impress her professor.
Arthur Hailey: I miss him. His books give you something you just don’t get nowadays: the excitement and drama arising naturally from the daily routine of characters doing their jobs competently, who:
aren’t law enforcement or private detectives
are not being stalked by a killer
have not had a loved one disappear mysteriously, and
who don’t obsess over their relationships to the exclusion of everything else.
That’s not the sort of bad writing I mean, though. I might or might not give up on something for that reason – would depend on whether I was interested enough in the world building.
I mean the sort of thing in the OP’s example, or other versions in which the problem is the language itself – I remember, for example, giving up very early on something in which the author (I can’t remember who) kept using Long Obscure Words – and when I went and looked some of them up in a dictionary, it became clear that the author hadn’t bothered to do that, and clearly had no idea what they actually meant.
It was a great day in my life when I realized that there was nothing wrong with taking a book back to the library without having read it.
That’s true. But if the badness is bad enough, I’m unlikely to hang in there long enough to figure out whether there’s something else being done well.
– It doesn’t always make me stop reading, but it throws me out of the book and seriously decreases both my enjoyment of it and my trust in it when an author gets specific facts wrong; sometimes even if it’s a single thing that I recognize as wrong and a relatively trivial thing in the story as a whole. If I know they got that detail utterly wrong, then anything else they say, if I don’t otherwise know that it’s accurate, I can’t put any faith in.(Obviously this only applies in some contexts – if the oak trees in a fantasy keep their leaves all winter, I’m going to assume the author did that on purpose; or at least give them the benefit of the doubt about it.)
I was carefully raised to think that one must never burn books (because of historical – and come to think of it current – connotations) but that under extreme provocation it’s permissible to throw a book in the garbage.
I’ve thrown out maybe three books in my life. I won’t throw one out for bad writing, or for accidentally getting facts wrong. Only for utterly terrible content.
I want to thank you for that but it’s hard to type when you can’t stop laughing!
How strongly? Very very strongly. Even excellent writing can bore me or irritate me, if I don’t care for the premise, or the personality of the writer, or the protagonist. Poor writing I might read a couple paragraphs to make sure and then I’m out of there. I just can’t read junk any more. I used to be able to.
I’ve been tossed from several discussion fora for asking for better grammar and punctuation. Fine with me.
@commasense I don’t know what Poundstone et al had to say about Dark Corners so can’t address their complaints directly, and it’s been a few years since I read the book. All I remember about it is that it was unsettling but I didn’t think it was worth rereading, which I’ve done with many of her other books.
But looking at the first chapters on Google books, it looks like typical Rendell to me: a slow start, matter-of-fact, with hints of menace and creepiness and things gradually starting to go wrong before disaster strikes. It didn’t strike me as really bad writing at all, but I can see readers getting turned off by an opening that’s a bit flat and slow.
King is far from the only person to praise the book highly, which he may have done because he liked its creepiness and because he wasn’t bothered by what others saw as bad writing. There are enthusiastic reviews from the Boston Globe and Washington Post as well. The fact that Rendell had a great track record and that it was her last book may account for the reviews being more positive than they might have otherwise been.
I read Hardy Boys when I was in 5th and 6th grades, and I didn’t consider them a guilty pleasure. But I started them when I lived in Africa so I couldn’t be too picky. I never felt guilty about reading them.
I was too young to assess their quality, but I read about 35 of the 50’s - 60’s Nancy Drew books to my daughter, and I could see the scaffolding. All programmatic. Throw in a bad guy, a crime, a location, and out comes a book.
Danielle Steel’s writing is so bad, it makes my teeth hurt. Seriously. I suspect because I grind and grit my teeth at her prose.
Another thing that will make me throw a book into the thrift store bag is shitty foreshadowing. If an author thinks they are oh so cleverly hinting at something, and I guess it right off, and am proved right in the next chapter or two, book, meet thrift store pile.
ETA: I was bookless on a long flight and had noticed people reading “The Girl on the Train”, so I bought it on layover. What crap. Stuck on a flight, I threw it into the flight attendant’s trash bag with great prejudice, as we were landing.
He has good editors. He just doesn’t have to listen to them, so he often doesn’t.
For me, if I’m not enjoying a book, I put it down, and I’ll likely never pick it up again. There are a surprising (again, to me) number of people who steadfastly read every book they crack the cover on, even if they hate it. It’s like a point of honor with them.
