Ditto Goodkind’s books (everywhere they step, they violate some religious sect dogma) and the Wheel of Time series (too much talk and no action).
I thoroughly dug the Baroque Cycle, but couldn’t make it through Anathem. Librarian politics, yawn.
James Ellroys American Underworld series…in the middle of the Cold Six Thousand because it became so repetitious. American Tabloid was an adrenaline rush and a brilliant read. The last two not.
I liked the first Wheel Of Time book; was a little put off when the second took off on a tangent but bravely plowed through it; then started the third and gave up when I saw it was going to add even more sidequest, when the first two books already had enough unfinished business to last three or four novels.
Stuck with the Stephanie Plum novels into the early twenties, now don’t care anymore.
I gave up on The Sword of Truth Books because:
- Every book was the same: Richard solves a problem and in doing so makes a bigger problem for the next book.
and.
- The violence against women was getting too much to take.
Fuck Terry Goodkind and his Sword of Truth series, that is still the only series that I’ve read more than one book in and quit. I hate read The Wheel of Time and The Dresden Files, but at least both of them had something interesting besides the vomit-inducing Mary-Sue characters. Once Goodkind stopped stealing concepts from RJJ his true ineptness showed.
I was into Terry Goodkind for a while, then just got turned off after around 4-5 books or so. Since his books were all very thick brick-sized novels, we used to joke that he was building a house out of them and didn’t give a shit about the story or characters, as long as his house got built…
Another one was Terry Brooks. The first book was a rehash of Lord of the Rings, which upset me a little until I realized it was written in the mid-70’s and there wasn’t a big fantasy audience back then. I don’t remember what specifically turned me off Brooks writing, other than the fact that the phrase “red hair flying” was used approximately 200 times a book. I am not kidding either.
There were one or two other fantasy authors that I stopped reading back in the 80’s but I can’t remember their names. Some of the Forgotten Realms books seemed like utter dreck when I re-read them in my mid 20’s and I never went back after that…
Switching to horror, every Dean Koontz book seemed exactly the same. The hero was always a quiet type that had previously been some type of special forces soldier, and the heroine was always a shy, reclusive type girl traumatized by her past. Whom the hero always bought out of her shell. To me it’s about as formulatic as you can get.
I was unaware that that was even a thing. I foot-dragged my way though So Long… and then skipped Mostly Harmless entirely.
Like most people, I gave up on Dune at some point. I can’t even remember now how far I made it. I remember thinking Children of Dune was OK, and anything I read after that has blended together.
I gave up on John Sandford’s Prey series because for the last few years his books have gotten sloppy, containing errors in descriptions of guns and other things, his killing off of a central longtime and beloved character, and, given his increasingly liberal leanings, he began wimping out on the comeuppance the bad guys got in the end, which made them far less satisfying. He also began another series of books in which a supporting character in the Prey series is the main character, and this, in concert with the increasing sloppiness in the Prey series, led to speculation in reviews that Sandford was either employing other people to write parts of his books or just phoning it in. Four years or so ago I decided to stop buying his Prey novels (they come out annually) but then bought the latest one anyway. Since reading it I haven’t bought another.
I gave up after Children of Dune, figuring that the time periods had gotten absurdly long. Years after that I picked up and read God-emperor of Dune (I’d previously only read the excerpt in Playboy), but it didn’t inspire me to continue with the rest of the series. I still haven’t read the rest of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, let alone the sequels by his son.
Sapkowski’s The Witcher novels I’m about ready to give up on (3 or 4 books in). While there are occasional brilliant sections and sub-plots, there is no compelling overall story or character arcs. I’ve come to realize that Geralt of Rivia is just a medieval Jack Burton; thinks he’s the hero when he really is just an inconsequential witness to the actions and deeds of others.
I wouldn’t mind people going into a bit more depth as to why, unless it’s just didn’t like it. I’m curious since some books I like are above.
Wheel of Time - I really enjoyed up through book six and reread them four times enjoying it every time. Books seven through ten or eleven, though, felt like one book drawn out way too long. And when the big thing that used to happen per book finally happened at the end of those four or five books, it was something I had guessed from nearly page one, book one, and that disappointed me. I’m told Sanderson ended it well but don’t care.
GRRMartin - Only book I ever rage quit. Seven chapters into book one, and I don’t like his style. Further, I wanted some fantasy in my fantasy series. I understand that eventually it gets there but the parts I read (and parts of the TV show I read about) was more historical fiction than fantasy.
Salvatore’s Driz’zt - First six were good and I liked the philosophy but later books felt like the philosophy didn’t fit the plot of the books and his detail on sword fighting wasn’t interesting to me.
DND books - Being a DND geek, I read lots of these but dropped off at various times. (I did Salvatore separately since he had more free reign.) When I was younger (80s and 90s), and these were most of my fantasy, I enjoyed them and read them. Once I read more fantasy and urban fantasy, though, I found these not to be as good anymore. Probably more me. However, lots of authors in series (Harper series or the various trilogies of the 00s) would vary wildly in quality. When I felt that I had to force myself to read a series and didn’t like it, I knew I was done.
Sword of Truth - In part, I somehow thought this was a trilogy and so quit after book three. Thought it ended with lots of things unexplained but okay. Later, finding book six or so, I realized I was wrong and dived back into book four. Wow. Yeah, the misogyny got to be too much for me and I didn’t like the hero anymore.
Sookie Stackhouse - I might have read all but one? The last one I read felt like a wrap up and end such that I was surprised there was more and didn’t bother. My wife and I discussed this a lot and I thought the TV show had her attitude right but my wife thought it made her too stuck up. I tried to argue that the books, from Sookie’s perspective, are going to be biased toward herself but my wife didn’t like that.
Tom Clancy - I never read the various Ops series, where it was his in name only. I stopped reading his after Executive Orders because after a thirty page battle, it wasn’t interesting to me anymore. I think someone told me the next book had an even longer battle.
Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin series - The first five are this really good series that feels like it ends well on book five. I didn’t mind the next two or three for a bit more of Gin’s adventures. By book ten, though, it was all the same plot and I couldn’t tell if I had read it or not due to how similar it was. (Again, my wife disagreed.)
October Daye - Unlike Elemental Assassin, seven books into this series, and things aren’t headed to any conclusion. Things aren’t developing in the metaplot and the main character seems dragged into adventures instead of having them. That got old to me. (Another disagreement)
Dune - I couldn’t even get into book one. I didn’t like the teenager hero, again read it late enough that maybe I just couldn’t identify with the main character.
Grisham - I liked his books on law and the loop holes and some politicking in the laws. When he tried to do straight drama, though, it didn’t work for me.
Brown - I didn’t mind his non Robert Langdon books and liked the first two of RL but the third was annoying. I didn’t like the author and his attempt to make everyone thing it was real. Between those two things, I stopped.
I’m sure there are more but those were the ones that came to mind easily.
And there’s always a dog, usually a golden retriever. I can’t remember the titles of any of his books because they’re all the same.
Same, but I think I only made it through 2 books. I loved Lord of the Rings and Dragonlance, but Wheel of Time, while an interesting world, was too tedious.
I stopped the Thomas Covenant series after the rape.
Which meant you didn’t get very far at all into it, since I think that happens in the third or fourth chapter of the first book.
I read Thomas Covenant as a teenager, and loved the series. I tried to re-read it as an adult, maybe 20 years ago, and set it aside after making it through Lord Foul’s Bane – while Donaldson created an interesting world, Covenant is such an insufferable ass that I didn’t enjoy it. Plus, yeah, as an adult, the full impact of the rape hit me.
Similarly, I’d been a fan of David Eddings when I was younger. Maybe 10 years ago, I tried to re-read the Belgarion books, and I found them to be tedious. Eddings talked about writing those books “to explore certain theories about the fantasy genre,” but one of those tropes is “create a map, and then create reasons why the characters must visit every location on the map over the course of the book.”
But, more irritatingly, I discovered, upon re-reading, that one of Eddings’ devices is a large group of heroes who are all really smart, and a large group of villains who are all dumb as posts. And, he had to illustrate this by entire chapters of his books which were “strategy” meetings of the heroes, which amounted to the heroes congratulating themselves on how smart they were. 
For a bit of a twist, I gave up on some books after they became a series…I pretty regularly consumed the old Star Trek pocket books while growing up, but lost interest when they started doing less and less “stand alone” stories and more crossover/miniseries type deals…and I understand it’s gone full “shared universe” with a running continuity in recent years.
Fine and good, I guess, if that’s your thing—not mine, sadly. Aside from looking like an expensive habit to keep on top of, I wasn’t that impressed with the quality of the plots I was seeing—but I think I liked the spirit of the one-shots better. Or maybe it was the weirdness.
I actually quite liked that Dresden’s familiar world did get overturned, losing his twee apartment and car and cat and supports, except that I lost interest when Butcher promptly gave him them back, or at least close facsimiles, a book or so later.
Me too. He kept telling the same story over and over and over and over and…
I didn’t get that impression. Still waiting for the next one!
I didn’t become a real reader until fairly late in life. I read what I had to in high school, but I never really read for pleasure until after I graduated. At first, my mother was feeding me books I might like - she always had her nose in a book when I was growing up, but they were usually romance novels, or the big pop novel of the day. She thought I might like the Alex Delaware series of mysteries by Jonathan Kellerman. And they did pretty much hook me. I’d have to give them credit for turning me into an habitual reader. I remember being on a trip with my father and I made him find a book store so I could get a copy of the book I’d started but forgotten at home.
Anyhoo … over the years my tastes swung wildly. My favorite authors now run more along the Palahniuk, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski types. And I think it was probably a direct result of the polyannishness of Alex Delaware. Sure he was a child psychologist and all the cases he worked on were twisted little morality tales but the narrative got so tedious in just how perfect Alex is. He’s comes home to his house, which he designed himself, and cracks open a foreign beer I’ve never heard of, before wandering down to his Koi pond, stocked with 18th generation Japanese Imperial carp or some shit, while playing a completely impossible classical piece, on his $15,000 Martin guitar. I had to give up on it just on eye-roll strain alone. I found I was much more drawn to a protagonist who would stumble into his fourth floor walk up in the slums, take slug from a half-empty bottle of whiskey, before wandering down to the race track while whistling a tuneless melody though his missing teeth.
But I digress.
Alex Delaware is a snob is all I’m saying.