I love Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. They’re the books I would write for myself… the books I’ve been waiting to find.
But I HATE how she can’t keep track of details. The timelines shift and change, missing limbs change from side to side, houses rearrange themselves, characters who have been deported to another continent show up on the current one… she really needs a sharper set of readers. Like, me.
I love Jack McDevitt’s science fiction stories…
But he has an almost universal habit, in his books, of killing off a major character – always a very likeable character! – in a somewhat contrived fashion.
His intent is to show that the universe is dangerous, and to make the drama sharper. The reader can never take anything for granted.
But since he does it in every one of his books, it ends up looking artificial and being a plot device. Plot devices should not be that visible nor predictable!
(But, gosharooty, I love his work!)
There’s a couple of things that might fall under this thread’s category for me.
One, I hate when an author I like goes back and “fixes” an earlier work, removing the original from circulation. Often their early work was good, even if imperfect and not up to their later standards. Somtow Sucharitkul’s 4 book series early on in his career had an example of this. The fixed up versions lacked most of the spark the originals had.
Two, I hate when an author I like isn’t able to finish their plan. Whether because they planned too many books in the series, or the first one didn’t sell well, or they got writer’s block, I hate when there’s a sequel advertised or promised and it never appears. Daniel Keys Moran had a lot of these he wrote about and never wrote. Samuel Delany never wrote the sequel to Stars in my Pocket… I still want so much to read those books that don’t exist!
I wouldn’t worry too much about OSC’s stupid belief system (who is also my favorite author) since most of his books are worth reading from cover to cover.
Ender’s Shadow is my favorite novel in the Enderverse, esp. the “Red Thread of Fate” subplot involving Bean and Nikolai, though I haven’t read any Shadow sequels or anything beyond Xenocide. I’d also recommend the Alvin Maker series, Lost Boys and Songmaster, and his early historical fiction novel Saints which is an allegory of Joseph Smith but actually kind of reads like the backstory for Ender Wiggin himself. 
I can’t think of a second-favorite author except Stephen King, whose greatest fault is that he hasn’t been able to write anything worth shit since 1985 or so. Anne Rice has a fascinating style but is rather wordy (and, unlike the A.C. Clarke allegations, is a bit too obsessed with pedophilia for shock value); beyond that, I’d say the greatest fault of Rick Riordan (of the Percy Jackson series) is that he makes way too many pop culture references which no one will comprehend years down the road.
Edward Rutherfurd, author of massive, multi-generational historical novels that tell the story of a place as much as the people who inhabit that place (Sarum, The Forest, London, Russka and others), has a creepy way of describing young brides. And I mean very young, since women (girls, really) married so much younger hundreds of years ago.
He seems to enjoy describing, say, a thirteen-year-old girl’s body way too much.
I like David Weber’s books a lot. The Honor Harrington series, of course, but he’s written a lot of other series and singletons, and I like those too. He’s a great action writer, and also pretty good at giving the bad guy’s POV that justifies his actions, at least to himself. Not great at dialog, but nobody’s perfect.
But I often end up just skimming several pages at a time, because he insists on going into intricately detailed descriptions of spaceship architecture and weapons characteristics.
If I’m reading Hornblower (which is the basis for Harrington), then Forester’s descriptions of arcane shiphandling skills and Napoleonic era weaponry are fine, because that’s history, and it’s interesting, and might even be useful.
But Weber’s ships and weapons are fictional. They don’t exist. They never existed, and never will.
So yeah, include a few details to make things sound plausible. But don’t give pages and pages of detail about stuff you just made up.
Three years ago I asked a question about starting sentences with the word probably. Last year I read the Hunger Games Trilogy. Suzanne Collins does that all though the books. I’m not going to say I ‘love’ her, I zipped though the trilogy, but I’m not pacing outside of B&N waiting for whatever she does next to come out.
And as much as I ‘hate’ that, it was just a quirk, annoying yes, but didn’t stop me from reading it. I just thought it was funny when I saw it the first few times since I had even gone so far as to start a thread about it a few years earlier, but it did start to get annoying after a while.
I love John Irvings books, but I heard him on NPR and he sounded like an ass.
P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, was quite the piece of work. I read she adopted a baby boy, one of twins - but on the advice of an astrologer, decided to take just one of them :(. Neither boy turned out very well in life, though it may not have been entirely the fault of this unpleasant woman.
On Miéville, my view is that he’s not quite as clever as he thinks he is … or rather, he is that clever but he doesn’t need to point it out so much. I like him a lot, but sometimes when I read him, I feel like he’s that annoying guy at a party who pauses during his own anecdotes so his audience has a chance to admire how clever he is.
I’ve seen footage of him being interviewed at a writer’s conference, and he’s clearly ferociously smart, but in person he couldn’t have been more affable or engaging. I think his appearance counts against him; he looks like a bare-knuckle prize-fighter turned philosophy don, and his writing can be quite confrontational, so I think I was expecting him to be haughty and abrasive.
I love Mary Renault’s prose and insight into the human condition, but her depictions of female characters are, usually, somewhat cruel and damning. Olympias, Ariadne, Roxane, Eurydike, etc. are really not much more cruel or self-serving than Alexander, Theseus, Philip, etc., but are portrayed as though they are much, much more evil.
My issue is not so much with him as a person, but the narrative voice in his books. I’m glad to know he seems like a nice and pleasant fellow!
I hate that Terry Pratchett is dying. Damnit.
That didn’t happen, so you can like him again.
Even worse (in my opinion) is Larry Niven’s habit of writing a sequel that contradicts the original book because he changed his mind about something in the interim.
Out of curiosity, I’d be curious to learn if you hate Oliver Twist for the same reason I do. I’ve enjoyed most Dickens I’ve read, but OT just grates on me. Why? “Oh, my life is miserable!” “Oh, my life has become so much better! Everything is wonderful!” “Oh pooh, now my life is miserable again!” “Oh happy day, everything is beer and skittles!” “Alas, things suck again!” and so on and so on. I feel Dickens got a bit heavy-handed with his allegory.
This is what I hated about wossname, who wrote The Hunt for Red October. Not that he’s a favorite author or anything (if he was, I’d remember his name). But it was just so painful reading that book that I had to put it down halfway through and go read something else before coming back to it. I couldn’t stand the way he felt the need to describe the purpose of every single gauge and dial in that damned submarine. I grew up reading Asimov, who took the approach, “Here’s the tech. It works. Let’s get on with the damned story!”
For my entry: Tad Williams. I love everything the guy has written. I hate the way every “trilogy” he starts writing turns into four books. He writes the first two books, and then the third book expands to the point where his publisher has to say, “Whoa! This is too much for one book! We’ll have to split it up!” Though it’s arguable whether this is good or bad. His plots have so many intricate threads to them that need to be tied up (potentially bad), but he makes a point of tying them all (good). But that means that it takes way more words than he anticipated.
Another I forgot: John Grisham, author of The Firm and many other books, has the ability to write tense, gripping action scenes but has no clue how to actually resolve them satisfactorily.
I love Iain M. Banks. I hate that he overused “rapist” as a narrative shortcut for “bad man”