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?
Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson.
Both are objectively fantastic at what they do, and I just lose interest inside of 50 pages on both.
I find Stephen King’s style to be weirdly jarring. He has quite a gentil, old-fashioned way of writing but when this clashes with violence, swearing or graphic sex, it just doesn’t fit. It pulls me out of the story.
Try 11/22/63. His writing style fits the story.
That was my 1st King book and I loved it. I’ve been staying away from his popular scary creepy books. He has many good books that are not horror.
I find Stephen King’s style to be weirdly jarring. He has quite a gentil, old-fashioned way of writing but when this clashes with violence, swearing or graphic sex, it just doesn’t fit. It pulls me out of the story.
Shirley Jackson. I want to like her stuff. I’ve read Haunting of Hill House twice, hoping I missed something the first time, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and I just didn’t get them. I’m a huge horror fan and I respect what she’s done for the genre and for women in the genre, but other than The Lottery, her writing just doesn’t do anything for me.
The Haunting of Hill House has one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve ever read. The rest…eh. Five years later and I’m still shocked by how little I cared for the book. Come to think of it, this might a case where the 60s film adaptation is vastly superior than the book.
The opening paragraph is amazing and super creepy. She’s clearly a great writer which is why it’s disappointing that her stuff doesn’t click with me. I agree, the movie is somehow much better even though the plot sticks very closely to the book.
The Haunting of Hill House has one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve ever read. The rest…eh. Five years later and I’m still shocked by how little I cared for the book. Come to think of it, this might a case where the 60s film adaptation is vastly superior than the book.
Yeah, as a fan of hers, I think she shouldn’t really be thought of as a horror writer. Even psychological thriller is a misattribution. Her novels usually feel like personal dramas that are a bit intense.
Gothic maybe. But not horror.
Yeah, as a fan of hers, I think she shouldn’t really be thought of as a horror writer. Even psychological thriller is a misattribution. Her novels usually feel like personal dramas that are a bit intense.
Gothic maybe. But not horror.
George R.R. Martin. I completely respect his intellect and abilities for writing but I don’t understand the hype with Game of Thrones. Too much x-rated content combined with sadness and killing
George R.R. Martin. I completely respect his intellect and abilities for writing but I don’t understand the hype with Game of Thrones. Too much x-rated content combined with sadness and killing
NK Jemison
Fifth Season is so beloved and I can see why, but something about her writing just doesn’t click with me.
Same here. I read the trilogy because of all of the awards, I kept waiting for it to hit me and it never did, but I could see why some people liked it.
I’ve read a fair bit of Alice Munro. I agree with everything her admirers say about her. I just don’t like reading her.
Same with Marilyne Robinson, which probably says more about me.
Honestly, it’s hard to read folks who were writing in the day and age of meeting word quotas. A lot of unnecessary text that makes it impossible to read through for me.
I’ve read a fair bit of Alice Munro. I agree with everything her admirers say about her. I just don’t like reading her.
Same with Marilyne Robinson, which probably says more about me.
Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson.
Both are objectively fantastic at what they do, and I just lose interest inside of 50 pages on both.
Honestly, it’s hard to read folks who were writing in the day and age of meeting word quotas. A lot of unnecessary text that makes it impossible to read through for me.
Shirley Jackson. I want to like her stuff. I’ve read Haunting of Hill House twice, hoping I missed something the first time, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and I just didn’t get them. I’m a huge horror fan and I respect what she’s done for the genre and for women in the genre, but other than The Lottery, her writing just doesn’t do anything for me.
Stephen King. He is obviously good at what he does, but I am just not into it.
Unpopular here, but JRR Tolkein - huge respect for him as a scholar and how he wrote a lot of that into to Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit, but I am just not into it.
Jane Austen
From what I’ve gleaned from Nabokov interviews and the one book I read by him, Lolita, as lyrical a writer he is there’s also something cold and insular about his writing, like he’s afraid of his work being taken to mean anything outside itself, if that makes any sense. It’s almost like he’s a mathematician, or a fabulist whose only interest is creating aesthetically pleasing worlds without any relation to ours. It’s my theory at least for why he wrote Lolita from such a warped perspective as the narrator’s, to distance the audience from accepting any point made by the narrator as true. Not that literature could ever be totally insular, since it’s always communicating something, but Nabokov seemed to warp that communication as much as possible, without adopting any of the conspicuous tactics of his postmodernist peers. I’m willing to read more books by him as well as secondary literature and see how this theory holds, but if it or something more refined than it bears out, I’ll feel my aloofness towards him is justified
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.
What I’m taking away from this post and comment section is “if you’re a writer, just tell the story you want to tell. Even amazing writers and storytellers have people who just can’t enjoy their stuff.”