“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon.
A book that had to be written under the influence (Better Living Through Modern Chemistry[sup]TM[/sup])… almost as impenetrable as “Finnegan’s Wake” by James Joyce. I gave up on Finnegan after only a few pages, but for some perverse reason actually finished “Gravity’s Rainbow”. How stupid is that? This is the book that led me to one of my life-rules, namely, never never read a book that is not plot driven
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I find it very annoying when writers misspell words to indicate a particular accent, especially if they keep doing this throughout a long book. 19th century writers are particularly prone to this, especially when describing cockney characters (Dickens novels and Kipling’s poetry come to mind). Some writers do the same with American “hillbilly” or foreign accents, and it’s just as irritating (though I must admit I love Li’l Abner).
(Sam Weller from Dickens Pickwick Papers. Great character, horrible accents.)
Whoosh! Wouldn’t the irony have been more effective had you used a run-on sentence as your complaint?
I agree wholeheartedly about Henry James. I’ve been forced to read The Turn of the Screw – it’s probably the most boring ghost story ever written. How do you make a ghost story boring?? Even worse was The Beast in the Jungle – story in which nothing happens, and the whole point of the story is that nothing happens. But it takes so damn long to not happen!
I also hate the writing style of Charles Fort, the author of books such as Lo! and The Book of the Damned. His cutesy style drives me insane.
Styles where people try to write using a familiar, colloquial venacular. Sometimes it gets too hard to read…I’ve tried a couple of times to get through The Color Purple, but couldn’t because of the language. Same with Trainspotting (only on a much larger scale- I literally couldn’t read that). I mean, I see how it’s novel and all that, but after awhile I tend to get tired of it, and just want to read a regular book, with nice prose and all that. 
No offense to those who enjoy those books.
Leon Uris - way too much geological introduction. All easy to skip, however.
Joyce Carol Oats - Nothing at all to like about that style.
James Joyce. James-freaking-Joyce. Joyce’s supposed “genius” in writing in the stream-of-consciousness way that made him famous (infamous, to high school English students) completely escapes my understanding. I wrote a critical essay on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man two years ago, comparing Joyce’s style to modern artists who draw a black line just slightly off-center on a white canvas. It means nothing to the creator, but those who view it feel like they’re probably going to be stupid if they admit to seeing no meaning to it, so they ascribe it its genius. If you’ve ever read Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, you might recall that Folly says something similar about people who use big words they don’t quite understand – everyone around them pretends to understand for fear of looking stupid, and you wind up with a big group of idiots. I never found Joyce’s style to be anything but disconcerting. That might be why I’m an ex-English major – if I’d stayed in that course of study, at my school, I’d’ve had to kiss Joyce’s saintly rear end at the daily devotions to dead English writers.