I had to take a break from an otherwise great fanfic when I noticed I’d started counting the number of quirking mouths (and/or eyebrows) in each chapter. I still feel a little tic (a quirk of an eyebrow, if you will) coming on when I see the expression. I would have said this is the kind of thing an editor saves you from, but having seen all the other examples in the thread, maybe not…
Not to me; I literally can’t put them down (which becomes something of a problem with a story that long!). On the other hand, Dune is the most sleep-inducing audiobook I’ve ever had the misfortune to force myself to finish, so maybe liking one suggests you won’t like the other?
I second skipping Tom Bombadil if you’re struggling; he seems to trip up a lot of people.
I tried listening to Lincoln in the Bardo, but had to give up, because I couldn’t keep track of all the different narrators. According to Wikipedia, there are 166 different characters in the book…
I’m sort of crawling through The Stand at the moment, and (TW) there’s a boy he absolutely cannot let enter the page without commenting on his “savage”/“slanted”/“Chinese” (sometimes one or two of these, sometimes all three) eyes, which makes me really uncomfortable. Same with all the descriptions of how fat one character is and how disgusting we’re obviously meant to find him because of that. As for repetition, well, I unfortunately got the version of the book that includes a bunch of stuff originally cut, which makes it clock in at some 1300 pages, which I find hard to believe is necessary.