I’ll start: Ernest Hemingway.
I have a ton of respect for him, he influenced so many writers and the craft of writing, and he lived a fascinating life. But I just find his books to be so damned dry. I love simplicity but I just feel like there’s no voice or soul in any of his books. There’s experiences but I don’t feel any passion or something that moves my heart. I guess his topics just aren’t for me.
What about all of you?
Iirc this is in line with Nabokov’s thinking about Literature. I believe he strongly disliked allegory and moralism, and treated literature as an aesthetic art. In that sense, there is paradoxically a lot of meaning and even a thesis to his oeuvre. It sort of makes sense to me; moralism and allegory are communications with the world outside of literature, and in that sense are actually immersion breaking. Pure, distilled art can only exist in its own plain.