Anything shelved under “Teen Paranormal Romance.”
Not making that up. It’s an actual section at Barnes & Noble.
Senior year in high school, we had to read Wuthering Heights. It’s a damn good thing I had the Cliff Notes, or there’s no way I would have passed the test. Since that time, I’ve avoided everything written by any of the Bronte sisters or by Jane Austen–no more classic chick lit for me!
If my good friend reads this post, I apologize, but…
I know a bloke who refuses to read anything by John Varley, because Varley wrote “Titan” which sounds like “Triton” which was written by Samuel R. Delany, who wrote another book which my friend read and really hated.
How’s that for a remote sequence of allergic associations?
I’m kind of used to the cover art on books having not a whole terrible lot to do with the story, but The Sword of Shannara bugged me. In it, we meet a dark-haired human hero, a blond-haired human hero, and a dwarf, who find out that the three of them are destined to find The Sword of Shannara. They have a falling-out and go their separate ways, even though they know the world will be destroyed if they don’t find The Sword of Shannara.
What’s the cover art, you say? A dark-haired guy, a blond-haired guy, and a dwarf, standing in a doorway all “ooh, look at that, a glowing sword,” when the words The Sword of Shannara over their head.
Know what? I bet they get back together and go find it. Just a hunch. I wouldn’t know for sure, because as soon as they split up, I got tired of the bullshit.
I don’t mind reading about gangsters and crime (not surprising, considering my family) but I do object to how many authors portray gangsters/criminals as being glamorous and admirable. Very few gangsters and criminals have any redeeming qualities, except to the people who are their friends and family, or the people that they protect. Most gangsters and criminals are extremely unpleasant people who will not hesitate to do someone a bad turn, even if they don’t profit by it. IMO, pimps are particularly nasty and repulsive. A pimp gets his money from intimidating and beating up people…including his hos.
I have come across one likeable and humane fictional pimp – Chance Coulter, who appears in a few of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder thrillers. He treats kindly, his string of ladies; who are all volunteers for the life, and free to leave any time they want to. Granted, Chance is very unusual indeed; and in the course of the run of novels, he gets out of pimping and all criminal activity, and moves into the “legit” art-dealing and -showing world.
Drugs! I won’t watch shows on drugs, or watch movies with drug use as the central theme. Weeds and that meth show hold no interest to me, and I don’t even understand why other people like it. I don’t object to drug use as a normal part of the story, but when it’s the main focus I don’t care to watch it.
I also don’t really read mystery except for a very, very few pieces. I think 99% of the people who think they can write a good mystery, can’t.
I also avoid things that are insanely popular, and often end up watching them years after the hype has died down. Game of Thrones is a case in point. I won’t watch it probably for years, though I have nothing against it. I’m just tired of every Internet meme being about it.
I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because I was bored and there was nothing else to do and found it a tremendous slog. I found myself unable to connect with Harry as a character and the narrative was too unpolished (so much expository dialogue that interrupted the flow of the story! And then when there was opportunity to explain oneself properly, nobody bothers to!).
I hear that the later books are much improved, but I’m wary of picking it up again.
Good heavens, if you think Sorcerer’s Stone had too much expository dialogue dont ever pick up the later books. Pages and pages of teenage bullshit and drama. Now I kind of liked the series, though I did not love it, but each successive book was more and more padded, until the final book, where they spend half the book *camping[/i.
I love needlework, quilting, cooking and baking, gardening, and classic-style murder mysteries.
I WILL NOT READ any book in any murder-mystery series with a recurring plot theme involving needlework, quilting, cooking and baking, or gardening.
It’s just so obviously and shamelessly trying to ride the coattails of my hobby interests to pique my reading interest that I’m exasperated and bored with it before I even read the title. As soon as I glimpse a series logo for “Double Knit Murders” or “Someday Quilts Mystery” or “Fresh Baked Mystery” or anything of the sort, I make a puke face and put the book down.
ETA: Oh, and I also pre-emptively reject what I call “pink books”, i.e., the modern chick-lit genre that tends to have pink covers, drawings of shoes or cocktails on the cover, and/or name-dropped fashionable brand names on every other page.
I’ve read the “Double Knit Murders”, and making a puke face and putting the book down is indeed the correct reaction to it. I paid half a buck for it, and I overpaid. My only excuse for reading it is that I was on a trip, I hadn’t packed many dead tree books, and my nook turned out to be allergic to being X rayed. Or at least, the nook died after a trip through the X ray machine.
I have trudged through two Dan Brown novels; there will not be a third. I’m also preemptively boyccotting any future opporunities to pick up a Lawrence Saunders novel.
I have never read a Tom Clancy book, or anything by Ayn Rand, nor do I expecct to.
Stephen R. Donaldson will never again sit upon my bookshelf.
P. S. L. Ron Hubbard? Not a chance.
Sure. Virgil had to guide Dante through to the Ninth Circle so they could shut down the shield generators and make their escape.
I started reading a series of “cozy” mysteries that a friend recommended. Every time the main character said something, she didn’t “say” it or “exclaim” it…she “wailed”. After three pages of wailing I gave up. Another character in another series was always “munching” on a cookie or something. Perfectly acceptable word, but seeing it over and over drove me up the wall! Take a bite, chew, nibble or eat…stop munching!
Written-out dialects that force me to read in some sort of futuristic or heavily-accented English. I’m looking at you, Cloud Atlas.
It’s not. Don’t waste your time.
My allergy is to books that are blurbed as a “triumph of the human spirit”. Also books where the prose is described as “lyrical” or “poetic”. It usually means the author owns a thesaurus.
Searing, riveting, rollicking, stunning – usually aren’t.
Troubled marriages – especially if the people are upscale professionals living in NYC or LA – and divorced or widowed professionals searching for a new life. I can’t drum up any interest in the problems of the 1%.
Glossy photographic covers are a turnoff, especially if the photo is of a real person.
Novels called “Title: A Novel”. Was the author afraid we’d think “Zombies Destroy Manhattan” is nonfiction?
It was “a comedy of manners” when I was in my teens and early twenties. It was the fault of bad book blurbers. I think they tagged it all regardless based on the era. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart was not this. Still, didn’t stop the willy nilly. The phrase still makes me apprehensive of stuffy tea rooms knowing that book blurbers frequently lie or didn’t even read the book.
I’m aware that this a purely a matter of personal opinion, and that pettiness is a big part of it, but it’s doubly unfair to refuse to read it based on the critic quotes the publisher put on it. If you pick up a book, check the back for a description, and find only critical praise, it’s not fair to the story to refuse to read it, since the author doesn’t control that, and it’s not fair to the reading public to refuse to firebomb the publisher’s headquarters, since that kind of nonsense should’ve been strangled in the crib.
Content is a different matter. I am invariably annoyed when an author has a character spout the important part of a sentence in another language, then provides no translation or contextual clues to work out what was said. I’m not definitively going to abandon a book just because of it, but it’s playing Godzilla on my suspension bridge of disbelief, which is never a good thing.
I used to read Stephen King, but his dialogue is so wooden and unrealistic that I had to stop. Great writer of plot and action, but he writes like someone who has spend scant time listening to actual people talk. Kinda like Crichton.