I’m just about to give up on Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant / Rivers of London series. There are a number of reasons: the quality of his writing has gone down, he seems more interested in graphic novels - the latest of which, Black Mould, I felt was poorly written - and each new book introduces new recurring characters.
What made you give up on a series?
I gave up on Weber’s Honor Harrington series when I picked up one in a bookstore, and wasn’t sure if I’d read it yet, so I read the dust-jacket blurb, and still wasn’t sure. That was the point that I realized just how much the recent ones were dragging.
The David Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke. Highly entertaining in the early and middle going. Problem is, he writes these books in real time, i.e., the characters get older with each succeeding book. This would be okay, but eventually, he reaches a point where his leading characters have got to be in their mid-60s and he has them still being bad-asses, getting into bar fights and generally wreaking havoc. It just doesn’t work.
Agree on this series. I really enjoyed it, and now I don’t.
I have given up on all of his work. He shifted his writing from “showing” to “telling”, and I finally just gave up. In the last book of the “War God” series of his, there is a set up for a decisive battle. Weber is all about the battles, right? Nope. Turn the page, and the text is something like “there was a battle. it was hard. the good guys won.” I only read that book because I wanted to finish the storylines, but it was a major let down. I won’t read any more. I dropped the Honor books both because I thought his writing had become ridiculously sub-par AND because the storylines were just stalled out.
Other examples - Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse books. After a certain point, the actions of the characters didn’t match their supposed state of mind. Sookie “loved” character A, but she acted like she hated him. The storylines meandered. It just seemed like the author did not care. I stopped several books before the series did.
Stefanie Evanovich - One for the Money/Bounty Hunter series. Cute, humorous fluff. It worked fine for 7 or 8 books, and then it dragged. There’s only so long a love triangle and a silly heroine with a hamster for a pet can hold your interest. Let your characters evolve, authors.
George RR Martin - Game of Thrones. I started reading these books when I got a pre-release copy of the first one years and years ago. I stopped for two reasons: I thought that the author didn’t necessarily have a plan, he was just fucking with everyone because he could; and he was taking forever and might never finish. I did eventually start watching the TV show, but I would not be surprised if he never finishes.
JK Rowling - Harry Potter. I couldn’t roll with the change in tone as the series progressed. The editing also loosened up considerably as the books became more popular, but that’s not always a good thing. The series started as being about a plucky young lad who is fighting evil and learning the truth about himself. By the fourth book or so, everything is woe and angst, with a good dash of darkness. I just gave up.
Okay. I am a HUGE Stephen King fan, but I petered our at Wizards and Glass. I just lost interest. I am sure the rest of the series is good, I just found I wasn’t enjoying reading them as much as his other work.
I gave up on SK after Tommyknockers, which was just dreadful. It was also when he was addicted. I’ve come back around after a significant hiatus and really enjoyed 10/22/63.
Shame. I agree that Wizard and Glass was the weakest Dark Tower book(some people love it). The 5th-7th books pick things back up and are a lot better.
I’ve enjoyed most of Neal Stephenson’s books, but about halfway through The Baroque Cycle I realized I simply didn’t care what happened to these people any more.
Somewhere around the dozen mark in Piers Anthony’s Xanth series I realized none of these main characters were ever going to die, and thus the stories lost what little plot tension they had, and I stopped reading them.
I didn’t bother with the last Jean Auel book. She was a victim of I’m So Popular I Can Do Anything And They’ll Pay Me To Do It.
Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule started out okay, then it just got skeevy.
Lindsey Davis’s Falco series was entertaining for the first several books but it got repetitive and boring after awhile.
I read the Cat Who series as a teenager until it started feeling like each book was a clone of the last.
Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. I gave up after The White Dragon when she started dragging in stories in other time periods or less interesting characters from the first series. I just really couldn’t care so much about a bunch of new characters and there was a lot of repetition.
I gave up on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series after about book four, when I realized how little was actually happening in each book.
I gave up on Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books after Ghost Story because he’d decided that the readers didn’t REALLY want to read the series he’d been writing so he was going to turn it into something completely different.
Oh, yeah, Xanth. I don’t think that the point when I stopped reading Xanth books had anything to do with what was going on in the books at the time, but that I had matured enough that I had enough taste to see how bad they’d always been. And for what it’s worth, he eventually made the plot armor thing official, to the point that one character’s quest is to become a Main Character so that she, too, can be immortal.
For me, as well. The writing was excellent, but I couldn’t deal with the content. In particular:
There was a plot element in which the villain had abducted a boy, and buried him up to his neck in the ground. He’d fed the boy for some time, and convinced him that he (the villain) was the boy’s savior, getting the boy to trust him. And, then, the villain killed the boy through some ritual that Goodkind described in graphic detail.
The graphic nature of that scene, in particular, as well as the general tone of the book, turned me off from continuing the series.
I couldn’t get into “A Song of Ice and Fire,” either. I got most of the way through “A Game of Thrones” (the first book in the series), and every character who had any redeeming qualities either died, or had truly horrid things happen to them. Not my style of fiction, and I set the book aside, never to return to it.
Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy.
The first book, Ancillary Justice, was original, interesting and fast-paced, and won the Hugo award in 2014.
With the second book, Ancillary Sword, I started skimming about halfway through, but got to the end, hoping for better. It was just so-so. Nowhere near the same quality as the first.
I started the third book, Ancillary Mercy, but couldn’t finish it. It was ridiculously, amateurishly bad, and just plain boring.
Going back a long way here. The Gor novels. The first four or five seemed decent enough sword-and-sandal sci-fi sagas. But after that the setting kind of became the plot.
There are two series I’m still committed to scanning with my eyes so I can discuss them, but am no longer enjoying: the Game of Thrones books and the Outlander books.
GRRM lost his way with the last two GoT books and the forthcoming two are bound to be sneakily-different rehashes of the TV show, so, meh. But because the first three were so good, I’ll do it.
Diana Gabaldon is just phoning it in with Outlander. There has been no sense of real danger or stakes in the last two books; you just know she isn’t going to do meaningful damage to anyone who matters, so what’s the point? It seems that with the last book, someone told her that, because the pub date was pushed back and it’s easy to spot where the hastily rewritten ending was grafted on. She can’t do compelling story anymore, so she’s going back to the comfy-cozy of books 4-6. Which is cool. I hope she pulls it off. But I’m not optimistic.
I never even finished the second Xanth book.
You may think this heresy, but I gave us on Patrick O’Brian after the third book. I’d tried to read them before, but couldn’t get into them. The movie Master and Commander seemed pretty good, so I decided to give it another go, but I felt like I was forcing myself.
I love me a good sea story. I’ve reread C.S. Forester’s so many times I’ve lost count. I like C. Northcote Parkinson and Alexander Kent and a host of other authors whose names I’ve forgotten, but O’Brian is too damned much work and too little payoff.
and I’ve only read the first Gor novel.
I’d really like to finally give up on this guy, and The Baroque Cycle should have been the final straw, but I get sucked into reading more eventually. And regret it bigly.
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As to the HHGTG goes, I tried starting to read Colfer’s continuation twice but gave up early both times. So I guess I’m done with that (and hopefully there’s no more books).
As far as Asimov’s Robot/Foundation/etc. books I stopped with the “original” early ones. And I’m glad I did.
I plowed my way thru the first of King’s Dark Tower, started the second and realized it was more of the same, and gave up. Almost the same with the rest of King - I read 11/22/63 and realized at the end that I just no longer care for his stuff.
I am too intimidated to even start the Wheel of Time.
Sue Grafton, with her alphabetical series about Kinsey Milholme, also lost its appeal thru endless repetition of the same gimmick.
Regards,
Shodan