Don't be shy. Let me hear it. It includes writers whose stories were good when they were younger but their latest are diabolical.
Absolute rubbish? I think that's harsh. I haven't read anything else by Nnedi Okorafor, but I thought her story Binti was pretty bad. It won a Hugo and I read Netflix picked it up for a series.
Orson Scott Card. I don't get it. His writing is abysmally bad. His stories are idiotic. He's got no talent whatsoever but people love him. Ender's Game and Children of the Mind were trash. I couldn't get through them.
That describes Stephen King then. I loved his work back in the 70s and 80s but like so many big name authors, the editors are afraid to tell him to stop writing crap.
Clive Cussler. A bunch of people told me how great he was, and they all said the same thing. "You've got to read Raise the Titanic! It's his best book." Well, I read it. And now that I've tried the "best," I'll skip the rest. Dumbest book I've ever read, by a long shot.
I do not understand the appeal of this book. (The Midnight Library) It was competent, but that's all. I wouldn't give it more than 2 stars out of 5. And yet it has a long list of famous reviewers fawning over it (NYTimes, Publisher's Weekly, Washington Post, etc.). Readers call it "life-changing." It made best-of lists for the year. I read it thinking it would be some sort of magical realism adventure, like Borges with more action, but it was bland. It said nothing that took me by surprise or made me think. It was vapid. The characters were hollow shells. The plot went unrealized. Wait! There was one thing I liked. Credit where credit is due . . . The MC cannot keep her cat from dying. She eventually realizes that it was always going to die, and in her original life she kept it living longer than any other life because it sincerely loved her. That was it! The cat emotions reached me. haha. It was the only punch that had any force and I feel sincerely stupid typing it out, because it's a cat. I guess I like cats. Anyway . . . imagine that you have the ability to step into any permutation of your life and experience a sort of parallel dimension where you can be anything. You can be rich or famous or super-artistic or a genius in your field or a high-action adventurer, and then there's the obvious babes/dudes at your beck and call (I needn't explain). You can undo any mistake and try alternate paths. You try one life, and then you can drift away and try another. How do you make that boring?! (Yes, it gets an infernal interrobang, because I just don't understand.) This was so . . . safe. It was like a beige wall, motel carpeting, a saltine cracker. It's nothing you would appreciate in any way. I can't believe that people actually like this. I feel as if I've lost touch with humanity. I see his other books have the same feel-good vibe. No thanks. I want intensity and daring. I've got other things to read.
Cormac McCarthy David Foster Wallace John Steinbeck Tom Clancy Michael Crichton Neil Gaiman Philip Pullman
This thread has been an emotional roller coaster. I so strongly disagree or agree with all the names here. Except the ones I haven't read. I'm also thinking about the inverse of the OP's question: writers that you think deserve to be much more famous than they are. I read Danzy Senna's Caucasia a while ago and couldn't for the life of me understand why I'd never heard of her. She seems to have done okay, publishing at a steady clip and won the Dos Passos prize in 2017, but I just wonder why eg Zadie Smith is like a household name and she isn't. I'm sure there's a high degree of subjectivity involved: maybe I'm just reading the wrong media outlets.
I hate it when you're supposed to 'love' or 'get' an author because...well...they're the darling of the literati or of the cool/hip/beat generation.
I literally just discarded this 2 of her books today because both hadnt been checked out in over 3 years
Thats how i feel about the classics... i was underwhelmed by Cthulhu and Great Gatsby when i read them in college.
Theodor Fontane. Effi Briest is considered to be some literary marvel and a pinnacle of German literature with six movies made from it but I never understood why. It's just plain boring and the writer's overdescribing everything. Like, I honestly can't think of any work that has as much words with as little content. Plot's literally "Woman gets wed young. Husband works a lot, woman is scared alone. Woman finds friend, woman cheats at husband. Husband duels the man to death after a divorce. Woman meets daughter years later, daughter is estranged. Woman dies of depression, but forgives man. Parents feel guilt for wedding woman young" (WOAH, IT GOES BACK TO THE BEGINNING). And that's through almost 300 pages. And there's literally an academic paper on the presence of dogs in the book - like, why? Okay, rant over. The other author I somewhat dislike is J.K. Rowling - not due to the recent controversies, but largely because I think she took Chekhov's gun too much to the heart. The movies kinda "save" on this a tiny bit because they cut parts of the story but even as a youngster reading it I always was like "OH WOW they are being taught X spell I wonder WHEN that will be impor- ah, yeah. Four chapters later and it saves Harry. Okay." This critique on Chekhov's gun is well-written.
I read Lord of the Flies in school. It was bloody awful, to me. It wasn't interesting, and I had absolutely no engagement with it, and it wasn't just because I was forced to read it. We also read To Kill A Mockingbird in school, and it was one of the best things I've ever read. So William Golding is on my list.
I read it as a child and then as an adult. It's not a kid's book by a long chalk. Too much description to the point of boredom.
Tenth grade English: Catriona approaches the teacher, shakes Lord of the Flies in his face, and says, "This is the dumbest book I've ever read, including The House at Pooh Corners, which was the dumbest book I ever read until now." Teacher (who is also the forensics coach) grins, asks why, Catriona expounds, and the next day discovers the coach has signed her up for the forensics team. Fifty-one years later, I still get regular emails from the gentleman.
I don't like Dickens but that's not because he's trash it's because I don't like Dickens. And oh yeah, Harry Turtledove is absolute fucking garbage. He ruined the greatest premise of all time with his alien invasion/WWII series, and the follow-up series was even worse. The plot for an entire three books hinged on the fact that ginger root is a powerfully addictive aphrodisiac for the aliens so all the alien ginger-junkies were permanently in heat and the males couldn't control themselves. There was a scene where Jewish partisans were raiding an alien outpost in Warsaw, and since some of the alien chicks had just taken ginger the guards couldn't help but start shagging them right there, leaving the outpost defenseless. It could have been written as comedy, but it was just krinj. To be fair, the social effects of a highly addictive, plentiful drug that causes the female of the species to go into permanent heat were well-explored, but that was kind of the whole problem.
I felt the same way about both of these selections. As a teenager, I was so fed up with having Fitzgerald shoved down my throat that I actually went on a tirade when I met his granddaughter at a party. She politely pointed out she didn’t write Gatsby and that I could take my emotional trauma elsewhere... As for Lovecraft, I enjoyed is his imagination, but after 3 or 4 stories, the structure just becomes too repetitive.
The Gold Finch is not a modern response to David Copperfield The Art of Fielding is not a modern response to Moby Dick These two books make me not want to reading anything written in the last fifty years.
This seems to be turning from famous authors you think are trash to famous books and authors you didn't like... there's a difference. I don't care a Dickens for Dickens but he isn't trash.
Steve King, and even he kinda admits it, so it must be true. E L James, yeah hard pass on bland and boring, along with poorly written everything. Granted from what I hear The Mister is worse than 50 Shades of Yawn. Lyra Parish does not know how to write people that act like people, can't follow continuity, and I question her concept of romance. Norman Boutin, Empress Theresa, need I say more. I'm sure if I bothered to read more self pubbed authors I'm sure my list would be a trillion fold longer. I know my writing is crap, but nobody reads it, so...
I tossed the damn thing out to sea and went to live on another part of the island where I declared Catriona Law and will throw coconuts at anyone carrying a conch who tries to invade my privacy.
Okay, please, please, please don't throw tomatoes at me... But I will say it: William Shakespeare. Let me make it clear: I love Shakespeare. But let's be honest: Shakespeare is a play write. He is not an author. So, his plays are meant to be enjoyed by being seen and performed, not read! And they are only as good as the theatre that is performing them. I was watching this performance on Netflix of King Lear with Ian McKellen. Ian McKellen was great. In fact, the whole cast was great... but the director was not. The way they did the blinding of the Earl of Glaucester, it was a big "meh." A horrific scene should not just get a meh. It's no wonder to me why the greatest lovers of his works are those of the theatre and not the high school student who was made to sit and listen to their half literate classmates tediously read through a play. And while a lot of his works are amazing and masterful pieces of art, a lot of them aren't. I do not care for his play Julius Caesar. I am wholly convinced he didn't actually like Romeo and Juliet as much as everyone else did. In fact, he makes fun of the basic premise of the story in other play A Midsummer's Night's Dream. And it's a weird parody, because it's sort of just in there. Right towards the end, after the entire central conflict is resolved in the form of a very lengthy scene that doesn't actually do anything to advance the plot... but we all love it anyway... And maybe that's just the frustration of literally everyone missing the point of the play. It wasn't a love story. It was a tragedy and a cautionary tale to parents that the harder they forbid, the more they intrigue. And usually that intrigue really does end in tragedy.
