All the untranslated Spanish in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Pages and pages of it, indecipherable to me. I read them anyway to see if there’s a word or two that might give me a clue. WTF? You write for a English-speaking audience, and you assume…what, exactly? Everyone is bilingual, with Spanish as a second language? We’ll all hire a translator? What?
I love his work, but this seems a ridiculous affectation.
This may not exactly fit the OPs request, but I mildly enjoy Dean Koontz as bathroom books because the story lines are absurd enough to keep my attention, but simple enough that you can pick one up wherever you left off and never be lost.
But for the love of Pete I can almost predict in every single book just when the “special” person and the golden retriever will show up. Every damn book we have a crippled little girl, or an autistic adult, or some damn thing and following right behind will be the fucking golden retriever.
Every once in a while he’ll get creative and have the dog show up first.
Personally, I could do without the inevitable asides in his comics about how awesome mescaline is.
I love Clive Cussler as an author of lightweight adventure novels, but hate the fact that he thinks the Apollo moon landings were hoaxed.
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Actually, I told a big fat lie. I don’t love Clive Cussler - I think he’s an awful hack - but I just want everyone to know that he’s an awful moon-landing-conspiracy-believing hack.
Sorry 'bout that.
I love him too, but…smucking. Also, I really don’t care for it when things get too bizarre (shit weasels, can tah, langoliers).
You’d really hate Umberto Ecco’s Name of the Rose, then. Blocks of untranslated Latin and, I think, Greek.
I hate when an author overuses a word. I just finished Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, and “maladroitly” must get used a dozen times. Clumsily? Poorly? Awkwardly? Shoddily?Carelessly? Haphazardly? I promise, there are other ways to describe someone tripping over their own feet.
I love Rick Atkinson’s military history novels, but he has a real love affair with the word “crepuscular.” That’s a word you want to use maybe once per book. He used it twice in the same paragraph in one of his WWII books.
At least once per book, GRR Martin seems to find the need to refer to a woman’s breasts as “dugs.” I get what he means by it, and fully recognize the brilliant short-hand illumination it provides into the personality of the character who says or thinks it; but it still makes me want to vomit every time.
Ah yeah, Stephen King.
In addition to the forementioned “can’t wrap the damn thing up at the end” problem, he gets these turns of phrases stuck in his head and, like a tongue that keeps going back to a broken tooth, he can’t leave them alone but has his characters keep repeating them. Smucking. Getting up to didoes. Deadfall.
And in a similar vein he can start off with a cute and compelling insight into how folks’ minds actually work, including the inelegant and silly and embarrassing things that run through them, but he’ll often write something that apparently amuses or impresses him (especially if it is a bit vulgar or obscene) and he elaborates on it and elaborates some more until he’s gone way over the top with it. His believable characters morph into cackling mugging Tourette’s syndrome sufferers, taking up the theme and blowing it into larger and larger proportions.
I love G.R.R Martin’s description of food and clothing - it places me into the story so heavily that sometimes I have to step away from it. I also love that he introduces new characters late in the books - isn’t life that way? Do we not see dreams snatched away from us from out of the blue? Do we not see ourselves saved in the last moment from time to time by a white knight? Life is so random! BUT, though I love it, I understand your hatred of it!
For instance, I love Stephen King, but I cannot help but feel when he is describing things or people that he wants you to be impressed with his breadth of knowledge. No, I don’t want to hear about the intricacies of a clock on the wall that has nothing to do with the plot and is in no way a literary device, but, hey you learned about clocks this week and you’re going to tell us about them.
That doesn’t annoy me, but Travis checking the safety on a revolver surely does. 
I speak (well, not so much anymore, but I still read) Spanish, so that doesn’t bother me. What does is the lack of punctuation. It makes for great dialog, but it also evokes the idea of dialog in parts of the story where it shouldn’t.
P.J. O’Rourke is quite funny and witty and his political views, though not mine, are at least defensible. But when he does defend or support them, there’s a numbing wall of disingenuousness, like he had to consciously turn off a chunk of his brain for the purpose.
I like Neal Stephenson as a writer just fine, but his pages on end of information dumps completely torpedo his narrative: a character/author avatar will just stop in the middle of whatever he’s doing and deliver a lecture on Sumerian mythology or information technology. Cryptonomicon read like a Clive Cussler novel with a box of tracts shackle-bolted on.
Roald Dahl was an incredibly gifted writer. Everything I’ve ever read about him suggests that in real life, he was a total douche.
I hate it when any number of my favorite authors keep mining the same vein, long after the gold has been exhausted. Let it go, dudes! If you can’t come up with anything new, try selling real estate. This applies to Niven, Stirling, Clancy and oh so many more.
I love Uncle Steve, too, but I wish he wouldn’t underscore the evil bastard character by writing him into an obligatory animal or child abuse scene.
I’ve got a lot of pleasure from Gabaldon’s works. I think the basic premise is grand; and find Claire and Jamie extremely sympathetic and interesting characters, and love the humour, and the lively dialogue. But – to a small extent, and roughly, on the same page as your complaint: the main-thread long novels especially, I find hellishly complicated. So many sub-plots, often involving a large array of subsidiary characters (and there’s a horde of characters even in the basic thread). So much dizzy-making zapping backwards and forwards in time, by sundry people. I tend to get lost with it all – and find that it makes the long novels, longer than I really want.
Have just discovered, and borrowed from the library, a collection of four recent-ish short stories by Gabaldon, concerning various characters from the “Outlander” universe. One story, set in the late 1770s, involves Jamie’s stepdaughter Joan MacKimmie, sister of Marsali – the existence of which girls, and the identity of their mother, I had completely forgotten; and I remain unclear on the ins-and-outs of the connection. I really don’t think I can be counted as a Gabaldon fan…
Am in no doubt that she has very many true fans, who lap up her every word, and have got unerringly mentally filed-away, who and what every one of the hundreds of characters, is. As said – I like the basic idea and much of the content; but a lot of the, to my taste, peripheral stuff, just feels wearisome. As regards Gabaldon’s “Outlander” universe, I get on better with the stand-alone novels and the short stories, than the “big doorstop” main-thread novels.
The impression is got that with talented artists of whatever kind, a larger proportion of them than is the case among the population at large, are “in their private and personal capacity”, very unsatisfactory people. To be expected, I suppose – often, different and all-consuming priorities.
I understand that Evelyn Waugh was right up there with Dahl. His novels are not to my taste; however, very many folk recognise them as literary masterpieces. It’s generally acknowledged, though, that in his personal life Waugh was probably one of the nastiest individuals who have ever lived.