What would make you dislike a book?

[kelby_lake]

What things, whether they be how the story is written or even if the author has a beard, would put you off reading/finishing/liking a book?

[mortalterror]

Lots of reasons. I didn't like Don Quixote because I didn't find it funny.

I didn't like War and Peace because I thought it was too long, and the essays at the end interrupted the story.

I didn't like the Iliad because the warfare seemed repetitive.

I didn't like Remembrance of Things Past because Proust had enough substance for one book and he stretched it out over seven. The dude just would not get to the point.

I didn't like Ulysses because Joyce thinks being incomprehensible is the hallmark of genius.

I didn't like Oliver Twist because the characters were a bunch of two dimensional clichés.

I didn't like Pride and Prejudice because I found the characters shallow.

I didn't like Crime and Punishment because the characters lectured each other on philosophy instead of conversing like normal humans do.

There are a lot of others I've disliked because they were poorly written. But those are all of the best books I have an especial dislike of.

[SirRaustusBear]

I hate reading a book and coming upon a sentence that is simply poorly written, the kind of thing where I think I could have phrased something more eloquently. Fortunately most real literary writers don't have this problem and I've come across the worst examples of this when reading bad but somehow popular authors like Dan Brown. That man's sentence structure gives me nightmares.

In addition to that flat characters bother me. I cannot figure out why Jules Verne is popular beyond a simple, "hey this book's about going to the center of the earth, what a nifty idea." I've read a couple of his novels and both times I was like "are you kiddin me Jules, really, father of science fiction and you're giving me this crap. You can do better." His characters are extreme stereotypes who do not change at all throughout the books. Honestly his ideas seem to work better as just that, ideas, rather than fleshed out novels.

[islandclimber]

Poorly written books. I'm not going to waste my time with them when there are so many well written books to read or reread and so many good films to watch.

Poor characterization. Cardboard characters, with no depth.

A story that's completely "told" rather than told and "shown."

Agreed!!!!!

[islandclimber]

oh oh oh!!! and if there is a picture of the author on the book and he/she is better looking than me... well lawdy daw! I will not read your book gosh darn you good looking author! :p

and... and... hmm... other prejudices... if the book cover is any colour but black! no way, never, not going to happen!

if the author has a vowel in their name! their writing is then necessarily pure garbage and trash!!!! pshaw! Vowels! How silly!!!:D

[aeroport]

When an author feels he must constantly interrupt the narrative with lengthy discussions of completely unrelated and irrelevant topics - much like Hawthorne does with the Italian scenery in The Marble Faun. :sick: I'm dying here...

[Etienne]

Pretentiousness that doesn't deliver.

[mtpspur]

In addition to that flat characters bother me. I cannot figure out why Jules Verne is popular beyond a simple, "hey this book's about going to the center of the earth, what a nifty idea." I've read a couple of his novels and both times I was like "are you kiddin me Jules, really, father of science fiction and you're giving me this crap. You can do better." His characters are extreme stereotypes who do not change at all throughout the books. Honestly his ideas seem to work better as just that, ideas, rather than fleshed out novels.

Agree completely on Verne. I swear only Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days has any zip to it. In the 60s here were some reprints of some his more obscure titles and I couldn't believe they had been written by the same man. Carpathian Castle being the prime example.

[Eric Cioe]

If Annie Proulx's name is on the cover.

Seriously, I had such high hopes for her. She wrote a decent introduction to one of my favorite books, A River Runs through It, so I went out and picked up Close Range. Once I finished reading the first short story - The Half-Skinned Steer, which is what a lot of people consider the best recent short story - I wouldn't even put it on my bookshelf. Her stuff reads like a combination of cowboy cliches and the pretentiousness of a guy like Joyce without any of the talent.

[mortalterror]

In addition to that flat characters bother me. I cannot figure out why Jules Verne is popular beyond a simple, "hey this book's about going to the center of the earth, what a nifty idea." ...Honestly his ideas seem to work better as just that, ideas, rather than fleshed out novels.

I could not agree more. I said much the same thing to a friend of mine who reads science fiction to the exclusion of all else. His opinion was that science fiction writers today have the best ideas. I agreed, but only wished that somebody who wasn't a hack could take a swing at them. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with horror writing either, except perhaps the tradition of low artistic standards. I think someone with talent might come along in this very generation and change the way we think of these genres. At least I hope so. There is untapped potential there, a virtual gold mine not being explored by the so called serious authors of our era.

Another thing that might make me not like a book is me. I could just not be ready for it. When I first read Heart of Darkness, I was eighteen, and I hated it. The words did nothing for me. I tried again at twenty-two and loved it. This gives me hope that someday, I may be more receptive to the other books I've already admitted to not liking.

Then of course there is taste. I believe that all humans are genetically hardwired to like the same things. It's our culture and education, formal or otherwise, which determines so much of our receptivity to a given work of literature. I think that so called elitists are probably responding to the same things as their layman brothers except they require that the same material be much better written. For example, I'd say that before I started reading classics I was just as happy to read star trek pulp novels, as I am now to read Ernest Hemingway. However, while I've been educated to be receptive to high art, I've also been educated to be unreceptive to low art. The old things that brought me pleasure do so no longer. I think that the proper aim of literary study should be literary appreciation. It should not be exclusionary, and ideally, with study, our appreciation would not be narrowed to a preference for a specific type of book, but rather spread to encompass all types of literature.

[Mockingbird_z]

the last book i found out that i dont enjoy reading is Painted veil by Maugham (is a course of class reading).
i was pondering on why i dont like reading this book, perhaps its because I had a feeling that this is just a story, not reality or something. i wasnt interested in the conflict in the book (adultery and forgivness).
i believe its important when a writer can make you feel compassion to the characters, or any other feeling which means that for you the story becomes a reality.
in War and Peace I hated Amatol Kuragin because he ruined the relationships between Natasha and Andrey Bolkonskiy. even the secondary characters can evoke some feelings (be they negative).
in The Grapes of Wrath, throughout the book I felt that all these things happen to a real family, with real names, fears, passions.
so when a writer can make you feel its reality, it really did happen (what he is writing about) be it even SF books - then it is a talent.
if not - i cant force myself to read book up to the end.

[Sarasvati21]

Unless they relate it to me in a comical and original way, I dislike books that spend absurd amounts of time describing something quite minor.
Also, fictional stories in which the author's agenda is ill-disguised are annoying to me.
I find works by Charles Dickens in general very dull.
Character development that is either poorly executed or contradictory is also irritating.
Authors who don't plan well and discover that they're missing important parts of their story, and then make something up that completely doesn't follow the trend of their tale shouldn't even bother publishing.
Though I may not necessarily like some books, I feel I have an appreciation for them all the same, as even if they aren't to my liking, the author still invested time and energy into writing it.

[aabbcc]

The lack of originality in expression and handling the theme one writes about - in most cases the themes are just repeating over and over from classical antiquity on, with variations, but for me it is more about the way somebody handles it. Most people just cannot go beyond clicheised versions of the theme that are all around, cannot present it from the different angle, cannot mix their own with the heritage of the history.
I also dislike highly pretentious works, Dan-Brown-ish writing style (I agree with whoever brought him up as an example of terrible writing) and flat characters, and I especially dislike pseudo-philosophing (Coelho, anyone?).

My pet peeve, however, is not any of the above specifically, but when they are combined in what I call "writing by the scheme". There is literature as art, and there is literature as "writing by the scheme" (just like there are essays as art, and essays "written by the scheme"), and if I note I'm reading such a book (and it's hard not to note it), in most cases I stop reading it instantly.
Way too many people address literature nowadays as "profession" and from economic point of view rather than artistic one. When literature ceases to be art and becomes economy, and when I note tracks of "economic way of thinking" in writing (and that's precisely that - when you figure one writes by predictable scheme), I each time once more become deeply disappointed with it. Especially if you consider that bestsellers often tend to fall under that category.

Also, not that it matters so much to me who wrote the book, but from person's way of handling what they write about (far more than from the actual theme!), the way of expression, you can usually see the 'competence' of an author, just like anyone a bit careful can note from my posts that I'm barely 18, still in lycee, and don't know anything whatsoever. Well, that's what I dislike seeing in the books I read - that they were written by people who don't have "that something" of an educated, well-read person capable of expressing themselves and entertaining their ideas into not only legible, but high quality writing. Too many authors leave an impression that they don't read enough and don't know enough, which is what I don't like to see, or, worse, that they have absolutely nothing to say whatsoever. So they scribble, but don't really "write". Their works have neither quality neither weight of the work of art, and can barely be compared to "vocational" writing (again, by predictable schemes).

[Chester]

There has to be a character I relate to. I have to care about what happens to at least somebody in the book. If you don't give me that, I'm probably not going to finish your book.

[amalia1985]

I hate it when the authors use their works for propaganda purposes.

[chasestalling]

I don't like women writers. I don't ask me why, I just don't.

[believin]

I hardly ever fail to finish a book that I start, even if I don't like it. But there are very few books that I really dislike. Some I am not crazy about, but still don't really have a strong dislike for them.

For me, the trick is finding the book that fits my mood. I don't particularly like Dan Brown, for instance, and agree that he writes poorly, but... there are still times when reading a novel like that "fits" my mood. It usually means I want to sort of switch off the mind and relax, and so that sort of novel might fit.

Sticking to the Dan Brown example, I only read him because everyone was talking about him. I do usually try to keep up with whatever books are in the news, for whatever reason they might have made their way there. I think that popular culture (http://web.mac.com/shellybryant/Site/Blog/Entries/2007/11/22_Is_Popular_Culture_Worth_the_Time.html) is worth the time to peruse just because it is popular. I don't mean to say that it is a way to be part of the "in crowd" or anything, just that it is a good way to get some insight into what people around me are thinking about. Even if a book is poorly written, I'll read it if I think it helps me get a handle on what is going on in the minds of others.

On the rare occasions that I have truly disliked a book, I have found myself thinking about it for long periods of time after that, often revisiting it. Like someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, this revisiting (sometimes a reread years later) usually results in a new appreciation for the book that I missed the first time round. Perhaps sometimes the lack of appreciation on the first reading was more a result of it not matching what I was looking for at the particular time I read it.

[kelby_lake]

I don't like women writers. I don't ask me why, I just don't.

I don't either, really. They either write like women or badly like men, and I'm not sure which is worse.

Okay, here are the things that bug me::flare:
1)Overhyped book. If a book is talked about that much it will generally never live up to what it is said to be.
2) Agenda books. It's very nice of you to educate me on prejudice or famine or whatever, but I could just pick up a newspaper.
3) Books that aren't art. Writing ought to be an art form but nowadays we just let any old rubbish be published.
4) The majority of fantasy books. Because we live in a whizzy beautiful world, we don't really need to bother with a structure, we'll just shove a few dragons in and make the rest up as we go along.
5) Unnecessary swearing. I understand in some books that it has a point but nowadays a book isn't a book unless someone's sweared at least 100 times.
6) Long books. We don't write novels now, we write bricks.

[JBI]

Don't like women authors? are you crazy? Austen, Elliot, Dickinson, H.D., Munro, Shelly, Woolf, Mansfield, Porter, O'Conner, Oates, O'brien, Carter, Byatt, Moss, Plath (though she is over-rated), Dove, Hebert, etc. etc. etc. I would think, especially at contemporary times, the female contribution is far exceeding the male one in Western countries. I know in Canada the female contribution is vastly superior to the male one.

[mohakom]

i read sth and i extremely didn't like it the stuff writing above.......

[mortalterror]

6) Long books. We don't write novels now, we write bricks.

I have to agree. I can't stand most long novels. I get a couple of hundred pages in and I start thinking, "There's really no way that the author could have made this book shorter? Is every single word necessary?" It must take an incredible ego to write a book over a thousand pages long, to think that you have something that important to say. When I read a book like that, I get the feeling that the author doesn't value his reader's time, doesn't consider that they might have other things to do. When I read War and Peace the dude hadn't gotten to the point after 500 pages, and I still didn't know what the book was about. I kept thinking, I could read this, or I could be reading five good short books. In the amount of time it takes to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time, you could read The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

The names of every great novella, play, and short story I've ever read start going through my head. I think, "Dante's Divine Comedy didn't take this long. Do they think they are better than Dante? He managed to pack seven different layers of meaning into every word instead of writing a book seven times as long. Why couldn't these fellows show the same consideration, and just choose their diction better?"

Most long novels are long because the author's add filler. They stretch the substance of their stories. It's a basic plotting error. Sophocles, Boccaccio, or Balzac could have written most 1,000 page novels on the back of a postcard.

[Kent Edwins]

I absolutely love a good long fantasy or science fiction. I suppose that's a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Just as I absolutely love a good 60+ hour long RPG... ahem. Anyway, one thing that I can not stand:

"Formulatic" writing. I'm talking about, say, Narnia, where every chapter is the same amount of pages. Or any book were it seems that the writer follows the same format over and over again, or simply is just trying to reach a certain word count/page quota. "Reanimator" also comes to mind. However, for some reason I don't mind when this happens with poetry, such as Milton and Dante. I suppose there's a bit more of an artistic element to that.

However, in prose, I can't stand it. Formulatic writing in prose does nothing but turn a good plot into something hopelessly long, boring, and drawn out.