Peter Jarius Frigate, the character stand in for the author Philip Jose Farmer.
Carolyn Hart’s Death on Demand mysteries. At first they were intriguing. After about 15 or so, they were so formulaic that all they needed was a pop music overlay of a chase montage with Shaggy and Scooby.
I just gave up on book 2 of J. A. Jance’s P. T. Beaumont. Savvy homicide detective thinks with his nether regions and falls into bed with damsel in distress without ever thinking about consequences. She’s either the bad guy or another victim, and he never saw it coming.
Ditto on Lillian Jackson Braun, and Diana Gabaldon
any of several pi/crime mystery series that seems to love keeping its main characters alone and miserable…
they reconnect with a friend or get married ect there usually raped and killed by the end of the book …
this was a thing in the 90s and 00s
I still enjoy the Dresden Files and I’m eagerly awaiting the next one, but I must admit I liked the series better when Dresden was a down-and-out supernatural PI instead of a knight of the Fae. The whole Faerie storyline kinda bores me. I much prefer the mage-in-a-mundane-world feel of the earlier books.
This. I too gave up on the Clan of the Cave Bear series. The first two or three were good, but the penultimate installment was so mediocre that reports of the awfulness of the final book kept me away.
I generally like Bernard Cornwell, and his Saxon Chronicles started well, but quickly became not just repetitive, but started show a murky tendency to dabble in fantasy. Picking up one of the later books in the series and genuinely being unable to remember if I’d already read it pretty much sealed the end of the series for me.
I really enjoyed the Death one, and I liked the Fate a lot (though a lot of that was because I was a horny 14-year-old. I’d probably pull a muscle cringing at it now) the Time, War weren’t nearly as good, and I thought I was done with it for good after the dull slog that was Nature. The Satan one actually got me interested again, perhaps because the beginning was set early enough that he was now writing a new story. But yeah, the God one was a complete mess.
Interestingly, I came across an ‘encyclopedia of Sci-Fi authors’ during the pre-internet era, and the entry for Anthony was basically “Comes up with good ideas, then beats them to death with endless sequels.”
Gave up on Harry Potter on the book after Prisoner of Azkaban. The editing had gone to hell and Rowlings was rambling on and on. I had lost any hope there would be a decent narrative arc to the series, and the author was still expecting the reader to take Quidditch seriously.
I’m glad I’m not the first to mention it, (I was half afraid of being crucified) but “Game of Thrones” … Ugh. I couldn’t make it through the second book. It seemed to be more a new style of literature than an actual series; I’m surprised that GRRM didn’t get the formula down to a single page each of introduce a character, make them interesting, kill them.
The other series that I actually read through three of four and gave up on was the Inheritance Cycle by Paolini. I just couldn’t handle how bleak it was, and slow to go anywhere.
I buy all my entertainment reading at thrift stores and garage sales. I give up on a series if I don’t find the next book in a reasonable amount of time (say two or three years).
By then I’ve moved on to other stories.
I just thought of another series – Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers books. I barely finished the first one, and tried reading the next and couldn’t do it. (yet I really liked the Riverworld series, to the point where I read them all, including the bad ones).
As with Riverworld, he includes a thinly-disguised version of himself, having his initials – Paul Janus Finnegan this time, instead of Peter Jairus Frigate.
This is who I was going to mention. Once Anita Blake became a monster and the books turned into a 15 year old Goth girl’s idea of porn it became unreadable.
I gave up on wheel of time somewhere around book 11, when I figured that the guy was just word-stuffing his way to another mansion or something. I actually thought it was kind of poetic when the guy got some terminal disease (I thought it was poetic at the time, but now I realize it was still awful).
I gave up on Terry Goodkind after book five, I think, when he just would not let the Randian objectivism die…it had become apparent but I kept hoping that it would fade away and become more like book 1.
I gave up on Dune after ChapterHouse. I think that was the last one written by Frank Herbert, the rest are sequels pumped out by his kid.
I finally gave up on Terry Brooks as well, when I realized the plots were all the same stuff in a different setting. In addition to what Rysto said above, there was always some mystical character who you never found out more about. I also read his “prequels” beginning with “Running with the Demon.”
Salvatore as well, with his Drizzt and his other series, with the magical gemstones, I just sort of ceased to care about the characters.
QFT. I leafed through whatever the latest one was at the bookstore not long ago and it appears she’s still waffling between the two men (and probably also blowing up cars in a comedy manner). At this point I think the two guys should dump her and just shack up together themselves.
I’ll also second (third, whatever) the “good concept beaten to death” thing for Anthony. Best not to start at all. I can’t remember where I stopped on Xanth (probably when it got to the “string together random puns readers sent in” stage - “Look, it’s a cat-ass-trophy! ha ha!”) but it was the Bio of a Space Tyrant series that cured me of reading his books, and in particular the pedophilia in the last book. Because freakin’ eww.
On another note: I gave up on Simon Hawke’s “Time Wars” series at about Book 7 as it had gone from “good concept” to “getting silly now”. Funnily enough I recently unboxed them and re-read them all, then picked up Books 8 and 9 secondhand very cheaply. They get sillier. Still, I’ve learned that it all gets wrapped up in Book 12 so if I can find cheap paperback copies of the last 3 I may grab them as well just to get some closure.
Robert Aspirin’s “Myth” series. I forget the title of the exact book, but I finally reached one where all the protagonist did was mope around through the entire book, and there literally wan’t any story or plot. I’ve seldom been so disappointed by an author.
ETA: I gave up on John Norman’s Gor series after four or five books. It started out pretty well as an heroic fantasy series modeled on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books, but it started getting darker and eventually just plain psychopathic. There just weren’t any characters I could empathize with any more.
And to me the series is one of the few where the books got better and stronger as the series progressed.
I’ve given up on Honor Harrington, but, then, so has the author. :dubious:
I gave up on the Gor books when they got repetitive, and stopped actually advancing the story arc I was interested in. And even for a late-teen male, there’s a point where fantasy sex scenes about S&M bondage of women stop being interesting.
(Side note: F&SF writing would be IMMEASURABLY better over the years if it wasn’t written primarily by nerds who never came to terms with their probably unrequited youthful desire for sex.)
I got tired of the Piers Anthony Incarnations series when the novels weren’t as interesting as the first one (with Death). But, then, I generally dislike Piers Anthony’s style; I’m much more into the Tolkien style of writing fantasy.
Huh. Interesting. You gave up before the one book in the series that I would expect might make people give up, which was book 5.
I actually like the Virgil Flowers books (the spin-off you mention) better than the later Prey books, so if he has found a ghost writer, I approve!
Not sure if it counts since I technically barely started but long before it became a TV show I made several attempts to start Song of Ice and Fire and stopped after about 50 or so pages. I just couldn’t keep track of who was who and found the story uninteresting. Now that I know all the characters from the show maybe I will pick it back up.