James Patterson. I liked his first few books in the Alex Cross series, and then it became ridiculous. The situations the hero found himself in were ludicrous. I think by the time his SO was kidnapped for a year or more and had a baby while gone I was done.
Herbert, Dune. I checked out after the first book. Misogynistic claptrap. A bunch of women waiting to be saved by the chosen male. Just ugh.
Patricia Cornwall. Kay Scarpetta. Similar to the James Patterson books, the heroine kept getting into more and more unbelievable situations. Everyone she knows is targeted by freaky serial killers or weird cabals sooner or later. The storylines were just stupid.
I’m another one still eagerly awaiting the next Dresden Files book. Yes, everything changed. No, it didn’t actually all go back to normal. But it still works. And the most recent book, Skin Game, was possibly the best of them so far.
Dune, I quit partway through the second book (I think that was Dune Messiah?). It’s been a while ago, but as I recall, I quit because it was just incredibly boring.
Similar for me. I’d gotten into Incarnations of Immortality in junior high, and And Eternity came out around when I finished high school. After reading that book, I was so fed up Anthony’s writing style, egotism and utter childish skeeviness that I never touched another of his books again (I’d also been reading some of the Apprentice Adept, Tarot, and Cluster series) and felt embarrassed about having liked them.
Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. The first 3 books were real mysteries with a supernatural backdrop. Anita had started with “I don’t date monsters, I kill them”. I was enjoying that, she might be attracted but monsters, no matter how pretty the packaging, were still monsters. I gave up after Obsidian Butterfly. There were no longer any attempt at mysteries and the MO of all the books seems to be find a bad guy and defeat him by having sex with him. If I want bad bondage, there is always Fifty Shades of Grey.
Anne McCaffrey and I"m Putting My Grandchildren Through College of Pern. After HarperHall it seemed every plot was unappreciated young person rebels against something but turns out to have the unique power that saves the day.
Loved S. M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, starting with Dies The Fire. Still love the first 3 books, and reread those every so often. The next 2 or 3 start to slide away from the initial premise (how does humanity cope when gunpowder or electricity no longer work?) more and more into mysticism/fantasy. I think I stopped reading the 6th book, maybe the 5th, and the series may be up to 8 books by now, maybe more, I dunno. Think I even bought one of the books and never read it.
Rainbow Six came after Executive Orders and while there is indeed an entire chapter long battle, the entire point of that series is counter-terrorists slowly and methodically planning and executing missions, so they wind up becoming interesting seeing just how much work is needed for even simple hostage rescue missions with just two to three terrorists.
The problem with any piece of Tom Clancy fiction after Clear and Present Danger is that they become full of sideplots or characters that don’t go anywhere and just inflate wordcount. Characters will show up, have massive multi-chapter arcs and then wind up getting killed out of nowhere and having all that build-up go to waste. Realistic? Yes, but makes the dozens (or even hundreds) of pages and entire chapters dedicated to them completely pointless. Rainbow Six was the last of the Jack Ryan series I read and that book easily could be cut-down 75% (and indeed it was for the abridged audiobook version) and you wouldn’t lose anything important to the story. I really enjoyed reading about what Team Rainbow was doing but everything else was pure filler especially when you see how it ends and how all of that stuff becomes completely meaningless. The final confrontation in the book has about three dozen named characters interwoven in but only about 4 of them actually matter. There’s literally a character who is hyped up for the entire book to be an amazing hunter and marksman and he uses neither skill in the final battle.
I listened to the audiobook version of Bear and the Dragon which came right after Rainbow Six, and it clocked in at 6 hours long compared to the unabridged 43 hour version. Despite being 1/7th of the length I found it told a thrilling and fast paced story that made complete sense with no loose ends. The unabridged version probably sets up dozens of plot lines that don’t go anywhere and thus don’t matter at the very end.
Not that I’d actively recommend them but I could find some value in the first three Xanth books when it was more world building and had some interesting concepts. But then, besides the underwear weirdness, it felt like just an excuse to cram puns into the books and increasingly less novel. In the hands of a more competent author maybe a world where each person has a unique magical talent and the ramifications of that (plus some of the other fantasy elements) could be good but Anthony isn’t that author.
You mentioned the Incarnations series and while I dragged myself through that one to the end, it was the same thing: cool concept but Anthony ran out of gas on what to do with it the longer it went on and the more abstract the concepts became. “What would it be like to be Death?” was an easy one to answer, coming up with interpretations for Time, Fate, War, etc didn’t work as well. Nature should have been fairly easy but the stupid book didn’t even deal with Nature as an incarnation until the final chapter. Satan was just retreading the previous books from the other side and God was a complete mess. I haven’t read his other series but I strongly suspect they follow the same “Good concept, increasingly awful execution” formula.
The Wheel of Time world that RJJ built was very interesting (the stupid male/female dynamic, notwithstanding) I would have loved to see it in the hands of someone that didn’t think like a fifteen-year-old. Looking at the entire work, it seems to be “young people are awesome because they rage against the machine”
Dresden Files took me a few read throughs to see but Dresden is a complete Mary-Sue. He’s always talking up how powerful and scary the enemy is but he beats them all with his righteous anger and will.
You beat me to it. I feel like a complete sucker for even starting this series. It seemed like Hamilton completely ran out of ideas and just went straight to soft-porn bodice-ripping. I made it about five books into the series and then quit halfway through the next one I was reading. I was literally flipping several pages at a time to get past the sex scenes as quickly as I could. They contributed nothing to the story (which makes them OK to ignore) and were boring as all get out.
For me it was Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series. The first two books were excellent, the third introduced himself (more or less) as a character who would pontificate endlessly all as an excuse to not advance the plot. Slogged through to the end and it wasn’t worth the effort. I have zero interest in pursuing the remaining books.
There were two Riverworld story anthologies written by other authors – Tales of Riverworld and Quest for Riverworld – which came out in 1992 and 1993. the second is notable because its cover is a mirror image of the first one, with the image from the back cover of the first one on the cover of the second (and vice-versa). I thought they were both pretty good, with stories by Farmer, Harry Turtledove , Alan Steele, Mike Resnick, and others. There are also two short riverworld stories in the anthology Riverworld and other stories, and others, if you look for them. I like all the short stories, but I admit that the novels were getting thin by the end, and Gods of Riverworld really wasn’t worth it.
I gave up on A Song of Ice and Fire once it became blatantly clear that the book series will never see a conclusion. I actually own a copy of the most recent book that I still haven’t read yet and likely never will.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to give up on Terry Brooks. Like, 12 or 13 books deep into his main series. In my defence, I was a teenager. It wasn’t until I got into his fourth tetralogy that I realized that I had read this already. We had the new Druid, who’s mysterious and mistrusted by everybody despite having everybody’s best interests at heart. Our protagonist is a nobody who’s going to discover that he’s a descendant of the very first book’s protagonist and therefore has inherited magic powers from them. There was no doubt the latest member of the Leah family, wielding the magical Sword of Leah despite not knowing or believing that it’s magical. Their enemy would be some terrible magical force that’s co-opted the human’s government. There will be an Elf protagonist accompanied by a group of [del]redshirts[/del] Elven Hunters.
I didn’t even realize I had given up on The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever until I found out that Donaldson had written a second trilogy. Having finished Lord Foul’s Bane on the fumes of my stubborn completionism, I learned about this one and noped on out of there.
It became pretty apparent to me early on that George R.R. Martin either had no idea where “A Song of Fire And Ice” was going, or had no plans to ever arrive there.
Preach, Sister. Along with what Jack Batty said about the Alex Delaware series. Multiple degrees and musical talent and the ability to whip up meals that would make Gordon Ramsay drop to one knee. Coupled with multi-talented sidekicks who can fly helicopters and take on 4Chan single handedly.
And the super villians. the trusted co-worker for seven books turns into the monster…
When it becomes more like As the World Turns on steroids, I’d rather go re-read an Agatha Christie.