Which famous writer do you think is absolute rubbish?

This is crazy, I just came back to this thread to ask why no one had said Shakespeare yet.

 

That's what I said.

 

I read the Goldfinch. Zero plot. Just some kid telling us a long, long anecdote about his life.

 

Janet Ivanovich, James Patterson. Though I think it may be more the genre I'm not a fan of.

 

Michael Crichton sucks and you cannot argue with me about that. His writing is awful and boring.

100 years of solitude is a weird book. I tried not to hate it, but I do.

There's probably more stuff, but I try to keep my self positive these days so I'll leave it at that.

 

This thread has been an emotional rollercoaster for me as well. I'm tempted to write down the authors I don't like, but I'm afraid everyone's gonna hate me for having these opinions

 

It’s ok. Threads that exist solely to bash things that one knows others in the forums will like are stupid to begin with.

 

Isn't it interesting that we have such strong reactions to whether or not someone else enjoys our favorite authors? In the course of a long ago conversation, I mentioned that I thoroughly disliked most of the Charles Dickens books I'd read. That slammed a nerve in a woman who thought he was the best thing since The Epic of Gilgamesh. She spent a good ten minutes telling me how personally insulted she felt by my dislike, that she felt attacked and dissed and all but emotionally obliterated by my statement. I mentally placed her on the Group W Bench and moved slowly away.

 

I'm never genuinely bothered when someone doesn't "enjoy" a favorite author of mine. I likely don't or wouldn't enjoy their favorites, so fair's fair. I often do, however, get annoyed when someone hints, or outright declares, that one of my favorite authors or books is "objectively" bad, with no room for debate, and that my admiration of them is merely evidence that I admire "trash."

And one doesn't need to look hard to find such takes.

 

Marquis De Sade. In my effort to get through a banned book list I nearly skipped him. I couldn't manage any of 120 days of Sodom - too disgustingly cruel. And Justine was full of emptiness. An anti-moral book with characters merely designed to be laughed at for their pain rather than to be empathized with. Why he gets republished while better writers rot in OOP, I'll never know.

Others I have issues with - Harold Robbins, V.C. Andrews, Jackie Collins, half of Judy Blumes books, James Patterson, Stephen King, Jack Ketchum. A lot of sex, violence, shock, and mundanity, held together with sometimes thin or pulpy, movie-to-novelization prose. And in Ketchum's case a grim lack of moral justice ( a modern day Sade), and in Blume's case she offers up boiled-out culture devoid of any real insight (and though I do like some of her novels, she is overrated.)
And though King designs many interesting characters I never get past thinking they are creations because they're too disparate to come together for any reason but a writer's whim.

 

This is a work from the Gothic genre era. There's quite a few of books like this, which were completely fashionable as the "trending" pulp fiction of the day. The Monk and Zofloya fall along the same lines, as well as a bunch of other completely horrific novels. There are debates on their purposes in the literary world and if they should be recognized, but essentially they were all part of a massive genre spike, culminating in the birth of the horror side of Gothic, which directly contrasts with the more metaphysical terror side. Sade is there because he's a huge influence of the day, much like other authors writing this expedited and often awful work. Gothic genre work has a few gems, Melmoth the Wanderer or The Mysteries of Udolpho, but largerly its all crap riding off the industrialization of the printing presses, allowing for more base works of Gothic fiction to reach a far wider readership. Thusly, we get monsters like Sade.

 

A lot of books from that era are. shall we say, "padded." I read The Monk and I honestly did enjoy the book. But there were a lot of scenes that were padded out and didn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the plot. I often wonder if it was the serial format that many books were released in that caused writers to pad them out in much the same way that writers of television shows today pad out their own content. Charles Dickens was the same way. In fact, he sometimes was paid per word, which was further incentive to pad out his plots. So, when people say that they don't like his works, I can hardly blame them.

Later on, when longer works could be published in novel form, we had more of the "Lean" story telling. Although longer works were published, they still needed to be mindful of a word count. And so a lot of the extra was cut out. Sometimes too much.

Now, with digital publishing, it's hard to say how the format of story telling will change. Are we going to retain the lean story telling or pad out?

 

Serialization was a hallmark of the subsequent popularized genre: Sensational Novel, which is where Dickens comes in. These mixed in the true crime and working class detective fictions with the brutality of the Gothic. Novels such as The Woman in White or Lady Audley's Secret headed the genre, serialized in the popular magazines for literature at the time. Dickens owned one of them. They did tend to lead on to endless narratives at times because the authors would constantly press forward with fifteen hundred word chapters per week, often leading nowhere in the long run. That's where some of teh million word narratives come in, like The Mysteries of London. They are interesting though.

The Gothic genre did some of this to with works like Varney the Vampire, but it wasn't quite as common. They were honestly like the r/creepypasta stories of the day. Interesting little bits of horror in chapbook or chapter form. Republishing abbreviated novels for extra cash flow from the working class.

Always follow the money.

Based on what I see in the copywriter sectors of writing, or the ghostwriters for that matter, I think the money grab from lowly writers is almost identical to what it always was. Digital publishing is just a new face to an old game.

 

Remember that as Shakespeare wrote the scene, it was supposed to happen off-stage. The audience was to react to the results of the blinding, not the method. Some things are better left to the imagination of the audiences.

I think you're right about Romeo and Juliet. As for Julius Caesar, people often miss the whole point of the play and fixate on "the noble Brutus." I didn't realize, until I read Isaac Asimov's masterful critique of Shakespeare, that Brutus was actually played like a violin by the conspirators, who capitalized on his vanity and stupidity to achieve their ends.

And Asimov's critique of R & J hits the nail squarely on the head. It's almost as if Shakespeare was given a story and told to write a play to it, and ended up writing a parody of the story.

I consider Asimov's treatise to be required reading for anybody attempting to understand Shakespeare in the context of the playwright's time.

 

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Dan Brown, the Pringle's potato chip of the publishing industry. You eat the whole can, and wonder afterwards whatever possessed you to do that.

 

Tbh, Dan Brown's writing is my personal guilty pleasure. It's painfully by-the-numbers, you can see most of the twists from a mile away and his characters are cardboard cutouts that only exist to move the story forward - but there's something "safe" about his style, IMO. It's kind of like eating at Mcdonalds - you know it's not healthy, you'll probably get hungry the moment you leave the restaurant and you've just paid for a meal that has fewer nutrients than the table you sat at. But there's something comforting about eating there since no matter what Mcdonalds you'll go to, the chicken nuggets there are always gonna be the same. Dan Brown is like that - his books are just entertaining enough to have fun reading and I'll always get what I paid for, no matter what fancy title his new novel has.

 

I guess this is in part 'define famous' but...

In the Genre of Warhammer 40k, fans will know of Gav Thorpe, so you could say he was famous, but I doubt many outside that genre will have heard of him, and they should praise the Emperor every day that this remains so, because he is A W F U L. IMO, he has no talent. I hate saying that because hes a successful author and im not, but I think he has limited story telling ability, if you could visualise his descriptive work it would be a picture drawn with crayons with rainbows and stick figures, and his character development, well, remember the Matt Damon puppet from Team America?? Plus he has a fetish for saying Rockcrete that makes me want to kill puppies.

One that fits in with the last part of your question though. Tom Clancy. I was a massive Tom Clancy fan after reading Red Storm Rising, and then we moved in to the Jack Ryan and John Clark books which were fantastic as well, to begin with. Then we got to Executive Orders and it was very meh. Tom had become very popular with the military and they allowed him on bases, ships, training facilities so he could write books about them and you could see a change in how much he became a ra ra cheerleader for the American Military in his books to the point where previously his description of battles had been highly praised, now they were just ridiculous and embarressing to anyone with a working brain cell.

Then he moved on to his prequel Jack Ryan books and this time it was ra ra cheerleading for America the country as he slagged off the cultures of every other country Jack Ryan ended up visiting. Even to the point of slagging off a country because it had two 'taps' on a sink and not a single 'faucet'. Im no lefty woke joke snowflake but even i could feel the racism coming off the pages and I read these 20 years ago. In fact, i never finished them. I tossed both the Bear and the Dragon and Red Rabbit. I know later on he started to use Ghostwriters for his work but I dont think he did on these books.


The only other famous writer I can think of is Wilbur Smith and all I can say about that is a very long time ago tried one of his books, didnt like it, tossed it, never gone near him again. Couldnt give you a reason why though.

 

I haven't read anything by him that thrilled me either. And I feel a little guilty putting that out there because, judging just from his interviews that I've seen, he's a cool/nice enough guy who is very passionate and knowledgeable about the 40k setting. Truthfully, I'm not ready to write him off just yet. I'll probably give Luthar: First of the Fallen a shot — mostly because I've yet to read anything worth remembering with the Dark Angels being front and center — and if that story doesn't work for me then I'll more than likely quit giving Gav chances.

 

100% agree with that, and i've spoken to him a couple of times at warhammer fest. Obviously hes been with warhammer for a very long time and you could say that his knowledge is practically second to none.

I will grant him this, he's improved. Since his first book, which I would put down as the second worse book i've ever read, he has improved. I've been 'forced' to read his works on occasion because Black Library have multiple writers wrking on series sauch as The Beast Arises so you have to read them even if you dont like them, and I will say that unlike the first book, those books didnt want to make me burn my eyes out with red hot pokers, but lets says they still made me feel like David Banner after being kicked in the nuts.

 

There are people out there like that though. I read the first book in a long-running sci-fi series and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't get through it because the writing was abjectly horrible. By the time the series got up to book 7 though, he wasn't half bad. He wasn't fantastic but he at least had learned how to write and his storytelling was, at least serviceable. So, between 2013, I think, and 2020, he'd gotten a whole lot better and if he keeps writing, maybe he'll really be a good writer someday. I wish him the best of luck. I just couldn't get through that first book for anything.

 

I was going to say that I love Orson Scott Card's books, but that I think he is a rubbish person. I read the first two books in the Ender series (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead) before I knew he was a bigot, and I really enjoyed them. After I learned about the writer as a person, I read the third book, Xenocide, and still really enjoyed it. I haven't obtained any more books in the series and have no immediate plans to do so.

My pick for rubbish famous writer has to be Herman Melville, but it's probably more of a criticism of myself than of the writer. I go on classics kicks here and there, and Moby Dick had been on my list for a while. Sounded like an interesting adventure, and it's so ubiquitous in literature. Must be worth it, right? Holy smokes was this a dull book, and for long stretches. When it was good, it was good, but the slogs in between felt like I was reading this for a high school project or something. But hey, I'm just a modern reader trying to get into a thick novel about whale hunting from 170 years ago, so what do I know? (Note - I have a lifelong interest in history in any time/place)

I typically do a bit of research before purchasing new books and rarely take risks, and as a result it's not often that I end up reading a bad book. Maybe I need to be more adventurous, but I find that the vast majority of books that I start, I finish, and I find the experience worthwhile.

 

My dad has this kind of reaction and I don't understand it. It's very annoying to try and explain to him why I dislike something he's convinced is a masterpiece. "Are you sure you read it?" (No, I read the Wish version of the story... Of course I read it!) or "You can't possibly dislike all his works." (Okay, am I supposed to spend more time reading something I dislike to make really sure I actually don't dislike it?)

It's really immature and shows an inability to look at something objectively, critically, and intellectually. I totally understand when people say they don't like something, but never even tried it like Green Eggs and Ham. But when someone did try it and didn't like it, you really don't have a right to say they should like it anyway.

 

...Now you're making me feel bad for recommending this book back when I worked at a bookstore. I did so only because they were popular. This is what I get for listening to numbers....

I will respect your opinion, but in my mind Richard III is an amazing read, so I do think he manages to pull it off sometimes. The Merchant of Venice, however? Hot garbage. I was shocked at how bad it was. Sure, the language was as nice as ever and the scene where that one lady was talking about her suitors was fun, but the plot is so disjointed and all over the place. None of the elements really work together. Shylock is such a cartoonish villain that it takes me right out of the plot. What makes it weirder is that I'm pretty sure that Shakespeare was to some degree trying to call out anti-Semitism, but then he goes right out and makes Shylock utterly brutal. It makes no sense. And that ending was out of nowhere and kind of tone deaf.

 

yeah i mean whatever. they were fine i guess.