Think of an author you’ve read more than one book by. One of their books you loved, and one you hated. Maybe you read a couple of others without strong feelings either way, but let’s focus on the book (or two) you loved, and the one you hated.
Neil Gainman:
I hate Neverwhere. It is so incredibly boring that I stopped before the end, with no temptation to pick it up again.
American Gods, on the other hand, was one of the best books I read this year. What wonderful character development! Such an interesting plot! I wish he wrote more in this style, but I wasn’t impressed by Good Omens or Coraline either.
Diana Wynne Jones:
She wrote my (childhood) favorite science fiction book, Dogsbody. It’s like nothing I’d ever read, nor can I think of anything else remotely like now. The only stories that came close to being quite as good were Madeleine L’Engle.
But she also wrote the world’s most boring (non-indoctrinating) YA series, The Dalemark Quartet. The tortured prose, the endless description…If I had children, this is the sort of book I’d make them read as a punishment. “Okay, this is the deal. You can be grounded for a month, or you can read this book.”
Anita Shreve:
**The Weight of Water ** amazed me. How could a book that had worse paragraph-to-paragraph transitions that the average third grader’s essay (and keep in mind I evaluate kids’ writing for a living) have ever been published? There were so many times when the focus abruptly shifted century that you had to reread them to figure out what was going on.
If I’d have paid attention to the author’s name on the cover of Light On Snow, I would have left the book on the shelf. And I would have really missed out. It’s a beautiful book, and ten times as coherent as TWoW. Apparently some authors do eventually hook up with good proof-readers.
Catch-22. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Had its chuckle softly moments and its laugh-out-loud put-the-book-down moments. All around, a fun read. It currently occupies one of the prized places of honor on my bookshelves.
Like Gold. Is this the same author? The heaps of praise on the back cover not only compare favorably to Catch-22, but suggest that it surpasses it in humor. It doesn’t. It’s a steaming pile of liquified doggie doo. I kept reading it, hoping it would get better. It doesn’t. In fact, from now on I’m not calling it “Like Gold”, I’m calling it “Like a Steaming Pile of Liquified Doggie Doo”. It currently occupies one of the dubious places of dishonor underneath my bookshelves.
David Zindell fits the bill for me. I thought *Neverness *was probably the best fantasy/SF debut novel I’ve read. Brilliant world building, highly original and imaginative, good storytelling, decent writing. The type of book that says this guy is going to be the man in SF for the forseeable future. The books that came after where extremely disappointing; stuff like The Broken God and The Wild. He ploughed the same furrow of ideas, built a terrible sentimental sap of a main character and the energy went out of the whole series.
csharp, I found that Kindly Ones works much better read sequentially, with a little break between issues, rather than in one sitting, it being an exception to the general rule. After originally reading it in TPB, I got my hands on the singles and was much happier with it rereading those. There are some cliffhangers that work in that format and the pacing seems better (more dramatic) when you can’t just read the next page immediately. I still think it’s one of the weaker parts of Sandman, just not as much.
*The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress * is one of my favorite books of all time. Great characters, great plot, fascinating and moving and awe-inspiring at the same time. A masterpiece of story-telling.
*I Will Fear No Evil * can vanish from the face of Creation and I wouldn’t bat an eye. It would be hard to conceive of a more muddled, self-serving mess. Yes, the author was sick at the time he wrote it, and it got published without getting re-written. That’s no excuse. A total waste of pulp.
(Just as a side note, I would like to observe that my 7000th post was in Cafe Society, talking about Heinlein. Fitting somehow. Thanks to everybody who has tolerated my electronic verbage for so long. )
Stephenson. His early work? Loved it. Zodiac and Snow Crash? Could read them endlessly. Even liked Cryptonomicon, but… It was there he started to turn. The boy needs an editor, and he needs it badly. Crypto would take these long detours into the land of math and probability and computers that, while somewhat plot-important, didn’t need half-chapters devoted to them.
Then came the Baroque Cycle.
Read the first book, tried to read the second. Hoboy. It was no longer half-chapter detours into arcane mathematical subjects. It was now entire -chapters- about these subjects, punctuated with (I’m not exagerating) one line of dialogue between characters. Ouch.
I’ve read five of his works. Four of them have been within the Hyperion/Endymion series and they’re all fantastic.
I picked up Hollow Man after reading Hyperion specifically because I recognized the author. What a terrible book. Horrific! I hate stories where the main character just goes bouncing from situation to situation with no real cohesive plot to tie it together. It’s probably why I also hated the book Forest Gump.
I had to force myself to make it through this and almost gave up on Simmons as someone I’d read because of it. Thank God I didn’t, but it was a close one for awhile.
Tad Williams wrote Tailchaser’s Song?! I really liked that book as a teen. I read less than 50 pages of Otherland before giving up, so I suppose I could add them to my list too.
Love most of his stuff. The best one is A Widow for One Year, followed closely by* Cider House Rules*. HATED *Son of the Circus * and *The Fourth Hand. *
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