Kafka on the shore is really good. I think his shorter novels tend to be the best. Whenever he passes the 400 page Mark it usually gets very inconsistent.
Zadie Smith & Sally Rooney
Loved White teeth, have disliked NW and Swing time (still need to read on beauty and her latest)
LOVED normal people, disliked conversations with friends and strongly disliked bwway
Strongly agree with you on Rooney. I love normal people and have reread it at least three times. It’s a book that I understand why other people don’t like it, but I’m moved every time. I just can’t get through her other works
I’ve read both her other ones all the way through and they were like… fine? Nothing about them stuck with me, but normal people absolutely moved me. I still think about it years later.
I hate my experience of reading *Finnegans Wake*. Probably it has some super important place in literary history and critics' hearts, but I never enjoyed my attempts at reading it at all. Yet meanwhile, *Dubliners* is one of the most splendid collections of short stories ever for me: there were many times when I was wandering through the dimly lit streets of my hometown, where few passengers could be seen, and I immediately thought of Joyce and the melancholy, lonely town atmosphere he brilliantly described. Not a snowy night goes by that I don't think of his "the snow was general all over Ireland".
My first exposure to Joyce was Portrait of the Artist as a high schooler. I read it cover to cover in one sitting and loved it.
I majored in English Lit in undergrad and my next experience with Joyce was an entire semester in Lit 303 (or something) that was spent entirely on Ulysses.
An entire semester. On one book.
We would spend hours dissecting and discussing the symbolism and allegories in every chapter, endlessly interpreting and debating.
And I *hated* it.
It made the book feel like *work*. I didn't feel like I was *reading*, I felt like I was *researching.*
I think that if I had gotten to Ulysses on my own, I would have enjoyed it much more. Instead I was made to dissect it like a frog, and I think that's the wrong way to read Joyce.
I'm somewhat the inverse! I admire and appreciate Dubliners but don't particularly enjoy it whereas the Wake is among my all time favourite novels and a source of profound fascination for me
Yes agree! Love Fight Club, Choke, and Survivor. Quite liked Rant, Lullaby is interesting, but I thought Insivible Monsters was atrocious. Which ones do you like/dislike out of interest?
Dickens - ongoing battle between what I love (savage satire, social commentary, characterisation) and what I hate (mawkish sentamentalism).
Paul Auster - Music of Chance is a top-5 novel for me; everything else of his I've read I just haven't got into.
John Fowles- The Magus is my favourite book. Mantissa was a pile of unutterable nonsense.
I also love the Magus and read Mantissa recently; it's definitely my least favourite of his by a fair stretch. The French Lieutenant's Woman is great as well!
Yes, yes, yes! DICKENS! I had the displeasure and unfortunate experience of reading my first Dickens novel in ninth grade and it was *Great Expectations*. The nominal good elements in no way made up for how much I hated it and Pip and it turned me off from ever reading Dickens again. For a decade. I managed to get a bachelors in Literature and avoid him entirely. A decade later I discovered Nabokov’s *Lectures on Literature* series, his lectures from when he was a Lit professor at (primarily) Cornell. He’s one of my favorite writers and had taught *Bleak House* so I gave it a chance. Extraordinary. As are many of his other novels. It’s really a gamble. Kind of unbelievable that he can be so good or so bad (or both), but he wrote serially so I guess that explains at least some of it.
F*ck Pip.
Agree about Dickens and Auster. Really love the New York Trilogy from Auster. Worth a read if you haven't read it and like metafiction.
Haven't read any Fowles I don't think, so will check The Magus. Thanks for the suggestion 😁
I started the New York Trilogy a while ago, but put it down at some point and have never picked it up. It was getting strange. Maybe I'll pick it back up.
Yeah it's definitely strange! Very meta, which isn't for everyone, but I think it's brilliant. Also it's made up of three different stories so maybe if you can't get on with the first one you could try one of the other two.
Ernest Hemingway. I had to read Old Man and the Sea in sophomore year and I hated it. I had to read Farewell to Arms the next year and I loved it.
I could probably give the Old Man and the Sea another shot now that I'm an adult but...I don't want to.
Old man is Hemingway self-parody
Farewell was his attempt to satirize popular romances of the day. Oops. Accidentally wrote the best one
If you haven’t read the sun also rises and for whom the bell tolls check them out
Sun is the most purely distilled of his novels. Along with his short stories this is where he shined
Bell tolls is impressive in that he sustains the tight writing for 400+ pages.
Longer novels rarely hold up
I gave it another shot like two years ago when I was on a really long car ride and I did it in an audiobook and it was really really good. You’ll probably like it now.
Jennifer Egan
Candy House is great.
Manhattan Beach can’t decide what it wants to be. The writing is obviously great, but I couldn’t wait for that whole shipwreck sequence to end. And the gangster story line is compelling until it goes absolutely nowhere.
John Irving. Read *Garp* at 12 and adored it. He had a fine run from the 70s through the 90s, including *Garp-Hotel New Hampshire-Cider House Rules-Owen Meany*. I liked *A Son of the Circus* and *A Widow for One Year*. But, man, has he lost it in the 21st century. *Last Night in Twisted River* is the only novel since 2000 I reread. *The Fourth Hand* is simply terrible. I won't be reading the doorstop of his latest. We're through.
Completely agree. I devoured many of the books you mentioned when I was younger. Bought The Fourth Hand when it came out and couldn’t even remotely finish it. Simply awful.
*A Prayer for Owen Meaney* is what I always say when there's that question- "What book does everyone love that you hate?"
My gripes with it are that it seems to be Irving is saying "Here's Owen, love him, LOVE HIM!" and the narrator going on rants about Reagan (I hate Reagan too) without putting it in context.
Maybe I was a feckless early 20-something but I have no desire to revisit. I have some of the same irritation with *Garp* but liked it better.
The Fourth Hand wasn't memorable but it didn't have those tendencies. I guess maybe what annoyed me terribly was part of his spark but whatever it is about his style in those books still annoys me terribly.
I think his book I liked best was *A Widow for One Year.*
Irving was a favorite of mine until A Widow for One Year. Haven’t read anything since and got rid of everything except A Prayer for Owen Meany. That book made me bawl so hard.
Kazuo Ishiguro and Olga Tokarczuk
I think Ishiguro hit his peak pretty early in his career. His first three novels are already canonical and should be read by everyone. But his later novels have been pretty disappointing for me.
Books of Jacob Is damn near perfect. But I absolutely loathed Flights.(Still want to read her other books though)
Edit: Also Samuel Beckett. I have always thought his prose work is masterful but his dramas are just not for me at all. I am probably wrong, but his dramas just came to me as quite pretentious.
I agree about Ishiguro. For me, Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, are sublime, Nevrr Let Me Go is also great, but We Were Orphans is pretty bland and certainly not Nobel Prize winning author worthy!
Have only read one of each from Beckett (Murphy) and Tokarczuk (Drive your plow...) so will have to read more from them and see. Thanks very much 😁
Also, don't think you can be "wrong" as such about whether you feel his work is pretentious. I guess if it feels that way to you then it is!
When we were orphans was so bad that I couldn't bother to finish it. The Buried Giant started out good but by the end was a complete mess. Never let me is definitely good and one of the better ones.
And I said I could be wrong because I read Beckett's play translated in Bengali (unlike his prose which I read in English) and Bengali is notorious for having really bad translations of classical texts.
What did you think of Drive your Plow? From what I could gather it is very divisive among the fans.
Yes! The Secret History is an instant classics and one of my favorite books of all time. Both The Little Friend and The Goldfinch were meandering and needed an editor.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline - my favorite author of all time. ***Journey to the End of the Night*** has been my favorite novel since I was a teen. I have a lot of love for ***Death on Credit*** as well, but Castle to Castle is such a tedious snoozefest, him whinging and whining all the way through. It's quite a slog, even for his most ardent fans.
Dickens - when he was good he was great, but when he was bad it was essentially unreadable. I really can't stand his reliance on those ridiculous coincidences. Sometimes it didn't take you out of the story, like in ***Great Expectations***, but in other instances - like ***Bleak House*** for example, it's just maddening. I think a lot of it had to do with him being serialized and his books being stitched together. Loved ***Martin Chuzzlewit*** and ***Little Dorrit***, hated ***Bleak House***, but the very worst was ***American Notes***.
Henry James - His prose is excellent, and he's a stylist of the first order, but his plots are not all that dissimilar, and if you've read more than one of his books you've essentially read them all as he really doesn't show all that much growth and progression and development as a writer over the course of his career. I loved ***The Turn of the Screw*** and hated ***The American***. I think his prose can be electric sometimes, but he was terrible at writing about romantic relationships.
Jonathan Lethem - ***Motherless Brooklyn*** is a fantastic read. ***Amnesia Moon*** was nowhere near as good and he should be paying royalties to Philip K. Dick for it, but his short story collection, ***The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye*** was terrible. And I mean TERRIBLE.
Haruki Murakami. I thought the alternating narratives converging slowly over even and odd chapters was grat when he did it in ***Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World*** and ***Kafka on the Shore***, but by ***1Q84*** it was incredibly tedious and gimmicky. His insertion of the magical and mystical can still be powerful here and there - The ***Wind-Up Bird Chronicle*** is also fantastic, but his later work has larhely been lackluster, with ***Colorless Tsukuru*** being by far the worst of his I've read.
>Henry James - His prose is excellent, and he's a stylist of the first order, but his plots are not all that dissimilar, and if you've read more than one of his books you've essentially read them all as he really doesn't show all that much growth and progression and development as a writer over the course of his career.
I'd like to respectfully push back on this because James worked in quite a few literary modes, fiction and nonfiction: literary fiction, horror, gothic, historical drama, plays, literary criticism, drama criticism, travelogue. I'm not sure you've 'essentially read' his criticism, travel writing and ghost stories if you've read, say, *Washington Square*. In particular, James the travel writer is worth discovering.
I read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, when it first came out. I hated it. Everything about the book drove me crazy. Currently I’m reading The Secret History. What a difference… I’m riveted, love the characters, the setting, the story. It’s all so magnificent.
Don DeLillo, maybe my tastes changed but I loved White Noise, liked Mao II, and hated Cosmopolis and The Body Artist. Best thing about them is they are short.
I remember being like 17 in a bookstore and interested in DFW, and I saw that that story was only like two pages long and I was like, “cool, let’s just read this right here and get a feel for the collection,” and roughly two minutes later I was pretty disturbed in a Barnes and Noble lol.
“Little Expressionless Animals” and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” are phenomenal, but I’m not sure how many readers try his first collection.
I read the tiniest bit of infernal desires last year but got very busy and didn’t have time to actually get into it – I encourage you to try some of her other novels though because nights at the circus is the best thing I’ve ever read (and very Angela Carter imo) and I’ve heard very good things about wise children (next on my reading list)
I think this is the problem with Rushdie. If a mediocre writer cranked out *The Enchantress of Florence* or *The Ground Beneath Her Feet*, they would be celebrated as excellent novels. But coming from someone with the ability to write a superlatively great novel as transcendent as *Midnight's Children*, his lesser works are disappointing.
He's still one of my favourite writers, but I no longer set my expectations as high as I did after I finished *Midnight's Children* and *The Satanic Verses*.
I also am meh about Iain Banks straight and love Iain M. Banks even though I am not a reader of Scifiin general. I thought has was a stellar fantasy writer and merely a good weird normal world one.
Henry Miller. I love the Tropics novels and the first half of Black Spring gathers steam and explodes into one of the most beautiful narrative prose I've ever read, only to to rudely segue into an unrelated stream-of-consciousness piece that's long enough to be fatiguing to read. I like Avant Garde art and prose poetry, but it strikes me as a lazy way to pad out something billed as a "novel". I still think Miller and Anaïs Nin are two of the most important prose stylists of all time, but Miller's freewheeling whimsy comes at the price of a lack of discipline that occasionally grates on me.
Faulkner. Some of his diction and long sentences are terribly awkward and convoluted. Parts 1-3 and 5 of the Bear are some of the greatest writing i will ever encounter, part 4 is muddy and mostly ridiculously long-winded.
Rushdie for sure. I found Satanic Verses boring as hell, found Shalimar the Clown intriguing but painful, Victory City tedious, loved Quichotte. The other four or five I read I’ve pretty much forgotten, except for feeling they had hardly any female characters. The ones I liked the best were the memoirs. Joseph Anton was readable, enjoyable. But Knife was gorgeous. Romantic, lyrical, deep, thrilling, vulnerable, philosophical, funny…
Joan Didion writes very well but she has some ROUGH takes sometimes, also love Sylvia Plath like one of my favorite poets of all time her poems mean so much to me but the girl was racist (same with Virginia Woolf)
David Mitchell is one of my favorite authors. I cried while reading Cloud Atlas and still regularly reread it.
So I started Ghostwritten and was just a little disappointed to see he did the multiple protagonists related through a sci-fi mechanic thing in that one too. But it was still a good read and I enjoyed it.
Then I picked up the Bone Clocks, and wouldn't you know it, it has multiple protagonists related through a sci-fi mechanic. I don't think I even ended up finishing that one.
I love the way he writes and he has beautiful stories and characters, but Bone Clocks felt like just another variation on a theme.
Oh, also, Hemmingway. I adore his short stories and think they're peak examples of minimalist prose telling punchy, strong stories with so little description and dialog. I find his novels completely intolerable and boring for the exact same reason, haha.
Not read any Mitchell though he's been on my list to read for a while. I get you what you mean though, I feel some authors find a framework that worked in one novel and then try and replicate it in all of their work. Kazuo Ishiguro feels a bit like this sometimes.
I also totally get you about Hemingway and I used to think exactly the same thing. I have since changed my mind on some of his longer form work (For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of my favourite ever novels, and A Farewell to Arms I love too) but some of his novels like Across the River and Into the Trees was dull, I thought. I guess that really terse style of writing can feel like it's dragging a bit after 400 pages. Sort of what Faulkner was saying when he said "Hemingway's work has never sent anyone running to find a dictionary" (paraphrased).
Mitchell is my answer as well. I read him as he published, starting with Ghostwritten, which I thought fine; number9dream was great, which prompted the whole "Mitchell is an English Murukami" marketing; then Cloud Atlas, which was superlative. And he kept it going: "Black Swan Green" seems very autobiographical, about a little boy growing up in Thatcherite England, and then the absolutely amazing pageturner The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
Then a little cutely-designed book (more of a short story) came out called Slade House, which turned out to be about vampires. Disliked it bit it seemed to be a throwaway - Mitchell apparently wrote it all originally on Twitter. Hopefully he had got the vampires out of his system. Alas, he had not - next was The Bone Clocks, which I actually got signed from one of his reading tours. I got the strong whiff of series franchise from the book, which I hated. Haven't read anything new of his since.
But the streak from number9dream to thousand Augusts is *chef's kiss*
Agree about King. I read one of his more recent thriller type novels and it was atrocious. I feel like maybe he aims for quantity over quality.
Others have said Murakami too. Have got Kafka on the Shore but haven't read it yet so hope that's one of his better works 🤞
I think that King's problem is that he's bad at revising. He believes a little too strongly in every single intuition he gets and runs with them without ever saying "woah, wait, maybe that's not the best idea." The *Dark Tower* series has plenty of really good ideas, but the "Susannah's pregnancy" subplot runs through the last two-thirds of it and really goes nowhere. Earlier parts of the narrative build up aspects of that subplot only to let later parts of the series drop the ball on fulfilling the earlier promises. Surely the few narrative problems that the subplot actually solves could be solved in another way that doesn't have all of the downsides that this one does, as the author-character he writes into the later books of the series, named Stephen King, himself writes in his journal (something along the lines of "as a plot devic, pregnancy really sucks." He's right).
There's some good novels in his early and middle work, but man, there's a lot of doorstops that you wish he'd let sit in a drawer for five years before going back and re-writing.
Franzen and DFW. Franzen I began to like with Freedom and his essays. As for DFW I would never go back and read any of his novels but I love his short stories and essays.
Robert Jordan. I love his world building, I love some of his characters, and I love some of his plots. He also writes a lot of characters where I think, “I I don’t even care what happens to these people. Please let them die and put them out of my misery.”
Ian McEwan. The Child in Time is one of my favourite books. Amsterdam, Saturday, and Enduring Love are some of my favourites.
On Chesil Beach was kind of ass. And seriously, fuck Atonement. I don't think I've ever been more pissed off at a book. The ending was right, but I hate it soooooo much. I'm going to go take it off my shelves and throw it at the wall again. Fuck.
Margaret Atwood.
I loved The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel.
The heart goes last started off strong but ended oddly and Cut and Thirst is one of the worst Novellas I have ever read.
Dostoevsky: I really truly hated Notes From the Underground. But then he got better: Crime and Punishment is great, and The Idiot is probably my favorite novel. Then he got worse again with The Possessed / Devils. Haven't re-read Karamazov yet, it was quite a slog my first time around, which I couldn't admit then
Yeah I get that. Love Crime and Punishment, but Notes From Underground feels a bit essay-like. Nothing wrong with a philosophy essay but it annoys me a bit when writers of philosophical literature just write an essay in the guise of a flimsy novella/novel.
Notes From Underground got me into Dostoevsky, lol, but after reading Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, I found I couldn't reread Notes. I still recommend it to people who are new to him, though, it's short and really sets up the Russian self loathing themes that he's so good at.
Tim Winton. Very decorated Australian author whose book The Riders made me cranky and it stayed with me for years. As I have got older I have thought about it a lot and understand it so differently than when I read it as a young man. Reading it again now and I can see why I was cranky. Agony.
Tim Winton though is molto good.
Octavia E. Butler. I absolutely adored both Parable books, as well as the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, but I DNF’d Fledgling (interesting concept but too much preteen sex with a 30year old hairy man lol). I’ve still to read Kindred and Bloodchild, both of which I’m still excited for but also worried I’ll dislike them because I really like OEB.
For me that happened in the same book. I adored the first part of The Overstory by Richard Powers. Loved the intertwining of the trees and various peoples' lives. But I hated the second part when he basically goes on a hundreds-page political rant. I doubt I'll read another book by him.
_The Gold-Bug Variations_ is a great book. I haven’t read _The Overstory,_ but _Bewilderment_ was huge dud. Halfway through, all I could think about was DNFing it and rereading _Flowers for Algernon,_ instead.
Same. First half of the book made me jealous, just really good rich writing. Second half seemed like he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Better at writing those snapshots than tying the story together.
Larry McMurtry. I absolutely adored Lonesome Dove, and was so disappointed by the next in the series, Streets of Laredo. It was like two different authors wrote them. I’m reluctant to continue with the series. I also tried The Last Kind Words Saloon and couldn’t finish it.
John Banville.
I found _Doctor Copernicus_ and _Kepler_ endlessly fascinating; his narrative twists and self-conscious language felt driven and purposeful when married to a) the grounded historical realism, and b) the postmodern philosophy of science, that rooted each novel in some kind of reality.
Then I read _Ghosts_, and found it utterly, utterly vapid. I was worried, when I first picked up _Doctor Copernicus_, by a comparison to Nabokov, and I found that comparison initially groundless. But _Ghosts_ embodied the worst aspects of Nabokov's writing practice—soulless, purposeless narrative onanism, trickery and japes without any kind of thought behind it. The two scientific novels I've read of Banville's were true novels of ideas, and their narrative playfulness felt necessary, felt like part of Banville's fracturing of scientific–historical myths, of science's self-posturing as ahistorical and transcendental.
But _Ghosts_ just felt flat. There was narrative playfulness, but in the service, it feels to me, more of sending me towards other Banville novels than towards any new understanding of anything. I honestly felt cheated by the utter lack of engagement with anything resembling a world outside the novel itself.
This probably all sounds very old-fashioned, but I think it was a stunning disappointment to see a writer I encountered first in such a thoughtful and engaged mode turn, to put it bluntly, all shirt and no trousers.
John Le Carre. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is in my top five favorite novels, but a lot of his later work gets too polemic for my tastes. And it’s stances I mostly agree with, but the novels don’t aspire to do more than vehemently agree with my worldview, and I need more than that.
Joyce, in every sense.
I found his early work to be rather tiresome, and despite its clear ambition they didn't really work for me.
Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are, however, by turns exhilarating and dreadful. The chapter by chapter stylistic flourishes of Ulysses made it entirely possible to loathe one chapter and love the next. Finmegan's Wake, by contrast, is both jaw-droppingly brilliant and entirely unreadable.
Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits is one of my favorite books ever, but The Japanese Lover was so bad I had to stop after only a few chapters.
I really enjoyed David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, but I *passionately* *hate* The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
Edit: Jc Autumns really turned me off Mitchell, but should I try his other stuff?
What's funny is I've only read *Cloud Atlas* and *Thousand Autumns*, and I liked *Autumns* about a thousand times better than *Atlas.* So...not really?
Well I really like the book Choke, and Invisible Monsters, and Fight Club, but Chuck Palahniuk’s more recent work talks all rough and harsh and maybe even bigot-y. Maybe I’ve just changed, but it makes me confused.
Invisible Monsters is one of my favourite books. Survivor was my first exposure and I definitely liked it. Fight Club was fun too. I think Damned was the last book I read of his and I should have bailed out instead of finishing it. I was kind of done with him after that.
JK Rowling How one could write something so excellent and then go on and write some of the shittiest books I have ever seen is beyond me. Also, Stephen King dudes still got talent, but he should get back on coke and get off Twitter.
Victor Hugo. Les Miserables ranks in my top 5 books of all time. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is up there as well. Both novels are fantastic tales that captured my imagination and are beautifully written.
But mixed into these wonderful stories are aside chapters that drone on, providing depth I suppose, but do not advance the narrative. The perfect example of this is his description of the Paris sewer system in Les Miserables. But don't take my word for it, here's a quote...
"It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset, [Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of souvenirs. All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.
The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social philosophy there beholds a residuum.
The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor. All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. "
Imagine that going on for a lengthy chapter and you get the idea. Here is the chapter in its entirety...
http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/324/
But Les Miserables is so good, I slogged through even though I read these chapters with the purpose of getting through it in order to get back to the narrative. It was worth it for me personally.
Thomas Pynchon.
Honestly, I think he's abusive and disrespectful towards his readers. Half-page sentences... the most obscure pop references that you have to look up on dedicated wiki or the story won't make sense.. absurd plot twists and endings for his amusement only. But, sometimes it's all worth it (not always though!).
Interesting take on Goodis. I've read 3: Burglar, Blonde on the Street Corner, and Of Tender Sin, and found all three great, and very, very different from each other. Is it his early work, or his late work that doesn't resonate with you?
*Coraline* has gotta be one of my top ten books of all time and I’ve never been into anything else Neil Gaiman has written. Have tried multiple books of his and no luck. I just end up going back and reading *Coraline* again. If I hadn’t read *Coraline* I wouldn’t even think I liked him. It’s crazy.
Jack London and Stephen King.
Loved most of London's novels, honestly one of my favourite writers, but I really couldn't get into many of his short stories. Some felt like tedious, and at times, repetitive reads.
I both loved and hated Woolf in the same book!
Just finished Orlando, absolutely adored some sections of it, others seemed like she had no idea where she was going with the novel and was just filling pages with words.
Cormac McCarthy. I love his sparse prose, love blood meridien. He has really good work but more of than not I’m glad to finish the book I’m reading of his and move on.
I can’t really point to what it is specifically I don’t like however.
Christopher Paolini.
His first book was amazing, considering his age and writing experience. The consecutive books got progressively worse. I got to the last chapter of the third book and DNFd. Like, I seriously wondered how the same person could write all 3.
Stephen King and Jim Butcher.
I get frustrated with King repeating stories and being either too long winded or not detailed enough. But I love his work. Carrie is probably one of my favorite stories of all time.
Jim Butcher, I can't read the Dresden Files books, they are awful but I love listening to them as read by James Masters, he makes the terrible aspects of Butcher's writing less noticeable.
Jim butcher. I fell in love with the dresden series when I was younger but as I kept reading his stuff, his formula just stared to be too obvious and bugged me.
Stephen King seems to be the "winner" of this discussion. I agree that of the limited stuff of his I've read, some was good and some was absolutely God awful.
Stephen King. He tells a wonderful story over several hundred pages, and then it is almost like he gets bored and tries to wrap the whole thing up in the last 4 pages of the book... His early novels didn't have that issue.
Thrity Umrigar and Elif Shafak.
With Umrigar, pretty much any book she's written that is set in Mumbai has been great: Bombay Time, her memoir First Darling of the Morning, The World We Found, and The Space Between Us and its sequel.
The ones that aren't set in Mumbai tend to be set in invented towns in either the US or India, nebulous nowhere-spaces that feel nowhere near as real, which somehow carries over to the characters, the dialogue, and the plot. This would be The Story Hour, If Today Be Sweet (even though some flashback scenes are set in Mumbai), and The Weight of Heaven.
I haven't read Everybody's Son, Honor, or The Museum of Failures yet.
The first Shafak book I read was The Bastard of Istanbul, and holy shit, that was amazing. Wonderfully written characters, fascinating topic, just great overall. Then I read her earlier novel, The Gaze, which was incredibly weird, but definitely interesting. And then I read her (at the time most recent) novel The 40 Rules For Love and just HATED it. Too many perspectives, too much stretching of believeability, and the writing just wasn't good. But her next book, Honor, was pretty good. So was The Island of Missing Trees. The Architect's Apprentice was a bit of a slog, but it wasn't badly written, just maybe not my thing. Three Daughters of Eve wasn't my favorite ever, and it left me with a lot of unanswered questions but it was enjoyable. And there's a few others that I haven't read yet. So maybe 40 Rules was just a fluke?
Nick Cutter. I LOVE his writing, and want to read all of his books, but in every single book he writes the most pointless, fucked up animal cruelty and death scenes. I can't even bring myself to read him anymore.
Francine Prose. Reading Like a Writer was such an insightful book full of really nitty gritty literary analysis. I decided I had to read a book by her...and I chose Blue Angel, which is "You can't make jokes about this nowadays" the novelization 🙄
Faulkner, you can lose him in a heartbeat. He develops a history over the course of his novels that interlock and interact and he can drop you in the middle with language and style that can discombobulate your understanding.
David James Duncan. The Brothers K is one of the best books I've ever read in my life, but then he spent the next 30 years or so writing Sun House, which I couldn't even finish.
Marguerite Duras. *The Lover* is one of the most brilliant, challenging books I've ever read. *Abahn, Sabana, David* was just 110 pages of complete and utter nonsense, a real slog to get through, despite the fact that it was mostly dialogue.
Bill Bryson - he is an excellent writer and does his research. I get turned off when his cynicism and snark factor get to a ridiculous level, which does happen.
George Orwell. 1984 was written to make a point, and it is terrible writing. However, later in high school I had to read an essay by Orwell, and it turns out he is a really great writer when he wants to be!
Also (not a novelist, but a playwright): Bertolt Brecht. I HATE *Mother Courage* with the fiery passion of ten thousand suns, but I LOVE another of his plays, *Life of Galileo*, which, as it sounds is the story of Galileo's astronomical work and his persecution by the Inquisition.
Interesting to me no one I’ve seen has said Bukowski.
I adore a lot of his writing, but it can get pretty self-indulgent and gross sometimes. I get that’s part of the package, but there have been quite a few times I’ve read his recounting of relationships and said, “yeah, this guy sucks.”
Mark Twain. His work with Huck Finn seems simplistic and mildly contrived but his writing in Joan of Arc was absolutely riveting. Still one of my favorite books of all time.
John Grisham. Some of his earlier work was really good, but most of his newer stuff feels like he's just churning out books to fulfill contractual obligations.
Its manga but Fujimoto Tatsuki (chainsawman).
His writing for Fire Punch for example was all over the place, so sincere it hurts but also so irony poisoned and superficial in other places that it felt vapid. He's hammered out most of the self-conscious irony poisoning out of his newer works though but he can still get on my nerves sometimes 😂
Paul Auster (RIP): loved his early books (New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan) but his later stuff very hit or miss (Invisible for example)
Murakami. Some books are masterpieces others just very superficial and uninteresting.
Sometimes in the same book! The first half of 1Q84 is one of my favorite books ever. The second half is one of my least favorite books ever
Yes!! Reading the first half of 1Q84 in high school made me rediscover my love of writing, then I couldn’t even get through to finishing it😭
Interesting. Recently bought Kafka on the Shore but not read it yet so hoping that's one of the good ones 😅
Kafka on the shore is really good. I think his shorter novels tend to be the best. Whenever he passes the 400 page Mark it usually gets very inconsistent.
It is indeed one of the good ones, no worries!🤘
Definitely. Loved The Windup Bird Chronicle, but thought 1Q84 was insufferable.
Was about to say this. Some writers are just both good and bad at the same time. We like their work, however, some parts of it we end up hating.
I came here to say this ! 1Q84 comes to mind, it was very hard for me to finish it …
Facts, Kafka On The Shore was really good so I decided to read Norwegian Wood and that wasn’t so good…
Yep. Love a few (Kafka, Wind-Up Bird, Barn Burning), hate a few (Norwegian Wood, Hear the Wind Sing), like the rest pretty well.
I also find he gets really repetitive after a while. I definitely burnt out on him.
The loney man emptied his beer and thought about the womans ears
Zadie Smith & Sally Rooney Loved White teeth, have disliked NW and Swing time (still need to read on beauty and her latest) LOVED normal people, disliked conversations with friends and strongly disliked bwway
Strongly agree with you on Rooney. I love normal people and have reread it at least three times. It’s a book that I understand why other people don’t like it, but I’m moved every time. I just can’t get through her other works
I’ve read both her other ones all the way through and they were like… fine? Nothing about them stuck with me, but normal people absolutely moved me. I still think about it years later.
I’m actually reading On Beauty right now and it starts off a little clunky and self conscious, but is flowing wonderfully now!
I hate my experience of reading *Finnegans Wake*. Probably it has some super important place in literary history and critics' hearts, but I never enjoyed my attempts at reading it at all. Yet meanwhile, *Dubliners* is one of the most splendid collections of short stories ever for me: there were many times when I was wandering through the dimly lit streets of my hometown, where few passengers could be seen, and I immediately thought of Joyce and the melancholy, lonely town atmosphere he brilliantly described. Not a snowy night goes by that I don't think of his "the snow was general all over Ireland".
What did you think of *Ulysses* and *Portrait of the Artist*?
My first exposure to Joyce was Portrait of the Artist as a high schooler. I read it cover to cover in one sitting and loved it. I majored in English Lit in undergrad and my next experience with Joyce was an entire semester in Lit 303 (or something) that was spent entirely on Ulysses. An entire semester. On one book. We would spend hours dissecting and discussing the symbolism and allegories in every chapter, endlessly interpreting and debating. And I *hated* it. It made the book feel like *work*. I didn't feel like I was *reading*, I felt like I was *researching.* I think that if I had gotten to Ulysses on my own, I would have enjoyed it much more. Instead I was made to dissect it like a frog, and I think that's the wrong way to read Joyce.
I'm somewhat the inverse! I admire and appreciate Dubliners but don't particularly enjoy it whereas the Wake is among my all time favourite novels and a source of profound fascination for me
chuck palahniuk
Yes agree! Love Fight Club, Choke, and Survivor. Quite liked Rant, Lullaby is interesting, but I thought Insivible Monsters was atrocious. Which ones do you like/dislike out of interest?
which is the one in which they invent a masturbatory device for women so good that it almost destroys civilization? that one was ridiculous
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I agree. I feel like his early work was better.
Dickens - ongoing battle between what I love (savage satire, social commentary, characterisation) and what I hate (mawkish sentamentalism). Paul Auster - Music of Chance is a top-5 novel for me; everything else of his I've read I just haven't got into. John Fowles- The Magus is my favourite book. Mantissa was a pile of unutterable nonsense.
I also love the Magus and read Mantissa recently; it's definitely my least favourite of his by a fair stretch. The French Lieutenant's Woman is great as well!
Agreed. I love the ending(s).
Yes, yes, yes! DICKENS! I had the displeasure and unfortunate experience of reading my first Dickens novel in ninth grade and it was *Great Expectations*. The nominal good elements in no way made up for how much I hated it and Pip and it turned me off from ever reading Dickens again. For a decade. I managed to get a bachelors in Literature and avoid him entirely. A decade later I discovered Nabokov’s *Lectures on Literature* series, his lectures from when he was a Lit professor at (primarily) Cornell. He’s one of my favorite writers and had taught *Bleak House* so I gave it a chance. Extraordinary. As are many of his other novels. It’s really a gamble. Kind of unbelievable that he can be so good or so bad (or both), but he wrote serially so I guess that explains at least some of it. F*ck Pip.
Dickens' later novels are soooo much better than the early ones
Agree about Dickens and Auster. Really love the New York Trilogy from Auster. Worth a read if you haven't read it and like metafiction. Haven't read any Fowles I don't think, so will check The Magus. Thanks for the suggestion 😁
I started the New York Trilogy a while ago, but put it down at some point and have never picked it up. It was getting strange. Maybe I'll pick it back up.
Yeah it's definitely strange! Very meta, which isn't for everyone, but I think it's brilliant. Also it's made up of three different stories so maybe if you can't get on with the first one you could try one of the other two.
I literally came in here to write John Fowles’ name.
Auster is on my list
Ernest Hemingway. I had to read Old Man and the Sea in sophomore year and I hated it. I had to read Farewell to Arms the next year and I loved it. I could probably give the Old Man and the Sea another shot now that I'm an adult but...I don't want to.
I also loved a farewell to arms and disliked Old Man which I read after. Also loved the sun also rises and disliked for whom the bell tolls.
Old man is Hemingway self-parody Farewell was his attempt to satirize popular romances of the day. Oops. Accidentally wrote the best one If you haven’t read the sun also rises and for whom the bell tolls check them out Sun is the most purely distilled of his novels. Along with his short stories this is where he shined Bell tolls is impressive in that he sustains the tight writing for 400+ pages. Longer novels rarely hold up
I gave it another shot like two years ago when I was on a really long car ride and I did it in an audiobook and it was really really good. You’ll probably like it now.
I say re-read Old Man just based on how short it is/low commitment.
Jennifer Egan Candy House is great. Manhattan Beach can’t decide what it wants to be. The writing is obviously great, but I couldn’t wait for that whole shipwreck sequence to end. And the gangster story line is compelling until it goes absolutely nowhere.
John Irving. Read *Garp* at 12 and adored it. He had a fine run from the 70s through the 90s, including *Garp-Hotel New Hampshire-Cider House Rules-Owen Meany*. I liked *A Son of the Circus* and *A Widow for One Year*. But, man, has he lost it in the 21st century. *Last Night in Twisted River* is the only novel since 2000 I reread. *The Fourth Hand* is simply terrible. I won't be reading the doorstop of his latest. We're through.
Completely agree. I devoured many of the books you mentioned when I was younger. Bought The Fourth Hand when it came out and couldn’t even remotely finish it. Simply awful.
*A Prayer for Owen Meaney* is what I always say when there's that question- "What book does everyone love that you hate?" My gripes with it are that it seems to be Irving is saying "Here's Owen, love him, LOVE HIM!" and the narrator going on rants about Reagan (I hate Reagan too) without putting it in context. Maybe I was a feckless early 20-something but I have no desire to revisit. I have some of the same irritation with *Garp* but liked it better. The Fourth Hand wasn't memorable but it didn't have those tendencies. I guess maybe what annoyed me terribly was part of his spark but whatever it is about his style in those books still annoys me terribly. I think his book I liked best was *A Widow for One Year.*
Irving was a favorite of mine until A Widow for One Year. Haven’t read anything since and got rid of everything except A Prayer for Owen Meany. That book made me bawl so hard.
Kazuo Ishiguro and Olga Tokarczuk I think Ishiguro hit his peak pretty early in his career. His first three novels are already canonical and should be read by everyone. But his later novels have been pretty disappointing for me. Books of Jacob Is damn near perfect. But I absolutely loathed Flights.(Still want to read her other books though) Edit: Also Samuel Beckett. I have always thought his prose work is masterful but his dramas are just not for me at all. I am probably wrong, but his dramas just came to me as quite pretentious.
I agree about Ishiguro. For me, Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, are sublime, Nevrr Let Me Go is also great, but We Were Orphans is pretty bland and certainly not Nobel Prize winning author worthy! Have only read one of each from Beckett (Murphy) and Tokarczuk (Drive your plow...) so will have to read more from them and see. Thanks very much 😁 Also, don't think you can be "wrong" as such about whether you feel his work is pretentious. I guess if it feels that way to you then it is!
reading molloy is like reading the complete dissolution of language, i felt as though i was heading toward an abyss
When we were orphans was so bad that I couldn't bother to finish it. The Buried Giant started out good but by the end was a complete mess. Never let me is definitely good and one of the better ones. And I said I could be wrong because I read Beckett's play translated in Bengali (unlike his prose which I read in English) and Bengali is notorious for having really bad translations of classical texts. What did you think of Drive your Plow? From what I could gather it is very divisive among the fans.
His dramas rank among the greatest ever written in the last century! Agreed about ishiguro. Klara and the Sun was a dumb book.
Okay you’ve convinced me to try Olga Tokarczuk again. I loatheeedddd flights & felt meh about drive your plow.
Donna Tartt. The Secret History is one of my favourite novels, but the Goldfinch bored me beyond belief.
Ooh wasn't familiar with The Secret History but that looks really interesting. Going to buy that now. Thanks!
Absolutely agree. The Little Friend was also enjoyable but what The Goldfinch needed most was a good editor.
Oh man, hard disagree. Haven't read Secret History yet, but I LOVED Goldfinch.
Loved both
Yes! The Secret History is an instant classics and one of my favorite books of all time. Both The Little Friend and The Goldfinch were meandering and needed an editor.
Rushdie, Murakami, Neruda, Ghosh, Atwood
Just curious: Which books of Atwood didn’t you like?
Louis-Ferdinand Céline - my favorite author of all time. ***Journey to the End of the Night*** has been my favorite novel since I was a teen. I have a lot of love for ***Death on Credit*** as well, but Castle to Castle is such a tedious snoozefest, him whinging and whining all the way through. It's quite a slog, even for his most ardent fans. Dickens - when he was good he was great, but when he was bad it was essentially unreadable. I really can't stand his reliance on those ridiculous coincidences. Sometimes it didn't take you out of the story, like in ***Great Expectations***, but in other instances - like ***Bleak House*** for example, it's just maddening. I think a lot of it had to do with him being serialized and his books being stitched together. Loved ***Martin Chuzzlewit*** and ***Little Dorrit***, hated ***Bleak House***, but the very worst was ***American Notes***. Henry James - His prose is excellent, and he's a stylist of the first order, but his plots are not all that dissimilar, and if you've read more than one of his books you've essentially read them all as he really doesn't show all that much growth and progression and development as a writer over the course of his career. I loved ***The Turn of the Screw*** and hated ***The American***. I think his prose can be electric sometimes, but he was terrible at writing about romantic relationships. Jonathan Lethem - ***Motherless Brooklyn*** is a fantastic read. ***Amnesia Moon*** was nowhere near as good and he should be paying royalties to Philip K. Dick for it, but his short story collection, ***The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye*** was terrible. And I mean TERRIBLE. Haruki Murakami. I thought the alternating narratives converging slowly over even and odd chapters was grat when he did it in ***Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World*** and ***Kafka on the Shore***, but by ***1Q84*** it was incredibly tedious and gimmicky. His insertion of the magical and mystical can still be powerful here and there - The ***Wind-Up Bird Chronicle*** is also fantastic, but his later work has larhely been lackluster, with ***Colorless Tsukuru*** being by far the worst of his I've read.
>Henry James - His prose is excellent, and he's a stylist of the first order, but his plots are not all that dissimilar, and if you've read more than one of his books you've essentially read them all as he really doesn't show all that much growth and progression and development as a writer over the course of his career. I'd like to respectfully push back on this because James worked in quite a few literary modes, fiction and nonfiction: literary fiction, horror, gothic, historical drama, plays, literary criticism, drama criticism, travelogue. I'm not sure you've 'essentially read' his criticism, travel writing and ghost stories if you've read, say, *Washington Square*. In particular, James the travel writer is worth discovering.
I read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, when it first came out. I hated it. Everything about the book drove me crazy. Currently I’m reading The Secret History. What a difference… I’m riveted, love the characters, the setting, the story. It’s all so magnificent.
Someone else on this post said the exact same thing about those two books!
Don DeLillo, maybe my tastes changed but I loved White Noise, liked Mao II, and hated Cosmopolis and The Body Artist. Best thing about them is they are short.
David Foster Wallace- I absolutely love his non-fiction but can’t stand his fiction.
Infinite Jest is great, but then a lot of his short stories are a miss. The only one I know of that people consistently like is Good Old Neon.
I loved “The Depressed Person”. That and Infinite Jest are what stick out for me.
Incantations of Burned Children is haunting
I remember being like 17 in a bookstore and interested in DFW, and I saw that that story was only like two pages long and I was like, “cool, let’s just read this right here and get a feel for the collection,” and roughly two minutes later I was pretty disturbed in a Barnes and Noble lol.
“Little Expressionless Animals” and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” are phenomenal, but I’m not sure how many readers try his first collection.
I’d also say DFW, but I loved Infinite Jest and his short stories/essays. What I did not love were Pale King and Broom of the System.
Makes sense. The Broom of the System is an undergrad honours thesis, and The Pale King is unfinished.
Same for me with Matt Haigh
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I still think about Infernal Desire Machines sometimes and I must have read that book 40 years ago.
ditto, i liked the bloody chamber and i struggled through nights at the circus
I read the tiniest bit of infernal desires last year but got very busy and didn’t have time to actually get into it – I encourage you to try some of her other novels though because nights at the circus is the best thing I’ve ever read (and very Angela Carter imo) and I’ve heard very good things about wise children (next on my reading list)
Rushdie. Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses are so, so good. I tried getting into his other fiction and they didn’t hit me nearly as hard.
I think this is the problem with Rushdie. If a mediocre writer cranked out *The Enchantress of Florence* or *The Ground Beneath Her Feet*, they would be celebrated as excellent novels. But coming from someone with the ability to write a superlatively great novel as transcendent as *Midnight's Children*, his lesser works are disappointing. He's still one of my favourite writers, but I no longer set my expectations as high as I did after I finished *Midnight's Children* and *The Satanic Verses*.
Seems a lot of people on this post agree with this view!
Iain Banks. Hated The Wasp Factory, LOVE Consider Phlebas. It’s literally epic.
I also am meh about Iain Banks straight and love Iain M. Banks even though I am not a reader of Scifiin general. I thought has was a stellar fantasy writer and merely a good weird normal world one.
Agreed. And I appreciate the use of stellar. 👏👏👏
Henry Miller. I love the Tropics novels and the first half of Black Spring gathers steam and explodes into one of the most beautiful narrative prose I've ever read, only to to rudely segue into an unrelated stream-of-consciousness piece that's long enough to be fatiguing to read. I like Avant Garde art and prose poetry, but it strikes me as a lazy way to pad out something billed as a "novel". I still think Miller and Anaïs Nin are two of the most important prose stylists of all time, but Miller's freewheeling whimsy comes at the price of a lack of discipline that occasionally grates on me.
Faulkner. Some of his diction and long sentences are terribly awkward and convoluted. Parts 1-3 and 5 of the Bear are some of the greatest writing i will ever encounter, part 4 is muddy and mostly ridiculously long-winded.
Hemingway, he's my favorite writer but he wrote some shitty books
Rushdie for sure. I found Satanic Verses boring as hell, found Shalimar the Clown intriguing but painful, Victory City tedious, loved Quichotte. The other four or five I read I’ve pretty much forgotten, except for feeling they had hardly any female characters. The ones I liked the best were the memoirs. Joseph Anton was readable, enjoyable. But Knife was gorgeous. Romantic, lyrical, deep, thrilling, vulnerable, philosophical, funny…
Vladamir Nabokov love some of his writing, but others are unbearable.
Joan Didion writes very well but she has some ROUGH takes sometimes, also love Sylvia Plath like one of my favorite poets of all time her poems mean so much to me but the girl was racist (same with Virginia Woolf)
I really enjoyed Play It as It Lays - is Slouching Towards Bethlehem the next thing to check out from her?
David Mitchell is one of my favorite authors. I cried while reading Cloud Atlas and still regularly reread it. So I started Ghostwritten and was just a little disappointed to see he did the multiple protagonists related through a sci-fi mechanic thing in that one too. But it was still a good read and I enjoyed it. Then I picked up the Bone Clocks, and wouldn't you know it, it has multiple protagonists related through a sci-fi mechanic. I don't think I even ended up finishing that one. I love the way he writes and he has beautiful stories and characters, but Bone Clocks felt like just another variation on a theme. Oh, also, Hemmingway. I adore his short stories and think they're peak examples of minimalist prose telling punchy, strong stories with so little description and dialog. I find his novels completely intolerable and boring for the exact same reason, haha.
Not read any Mitchell though he's been on my list to read for a while. I get you what you mean though, I feel some authors find a framework that worked in one novel and then try and replicate it in all of their work. Kazuo Ishiguro feels a bit like this sometimes. I also totally get you about Hemingway and I used to think exactly the same thing. I have since changed my mind on some of his longer form work (For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of my favourite ever novels, and A Farewell to Arms I love too) but some of his novels like Across the River and Into the Trees was dull, I thought. I guess that really terse style of writing can feel like it's dragging a bit after 400 pages. Sort of what Faulkner was saying when he said "Hemingway's work has never sent anyone running to find a dictionary" (paraphrased).
Mitchell is my answer as well. I read him as he published, starting with Ghostwritten, which I thought fine; number9dream was great, which prompted the whole "Mitchell is an English Murukami" marketing; then Cloud Atlas, which was superlative. And he kept it going: "Black Swan Green" seems very autobiographical, about a little boy growing up in Thatcherite England, and then the absolutely amazing pageturner The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Then a little cutely-designed book (more of a short story) came out called Slade House, which turned out to be about vampires. Disliked it bit it seemed to be a throwaway - Mitchell apparently wrote it all originally on Twitter. Hopefully he had got the vampires out of his system. Alas, he had not - next was The Bone Clocks, which I actually got signed from one of his reading tours. I got the strong whiff of series franchise from the book, which I hated. Haven't read anything new of his since. But the streak from number9dream to thousand Augusts is *chef's kiss*
Interesting! Bone Clocks is probably my favorite of his.
Steven King and Haruki Murakami
Agree about King. I read one of his more recent thriller type novels and it was atrocious. I feel like maybe he aims for quantity over quality. Others have said Murakami too. Have got Kafka on the Shore but haven't read it yet so hope that's one of his better works 🤞
I think that King's problem is that he's bad at revising. He believes a little too strongly in every single intuition he gets and runs with them without ever saying "woah, wait, maybe that's not the best idea." The *Dark Tower* series has plenty of really good ideas, but the "Susannah's pregnancy" subplot runs through the last two-thirds of it and really goes nowhere. Earlier parts of the narrative build up aspects of that subplot only to let later parts of the series drop the ball on fulfilling the earlier promises. Surely the few narrative problems that the subplot actually solves could be solved in another way that doesn't have all of the downsides that this one does, as the author-character he writes into the later books of the series, named Stephen King, himself writes in his journal (something along the lines of "as a plot devic, pregnancy really sucks." He's right). There's some good novels in his early and middle work, but man, there's a lot of doorstops that you wish he'd let sit in a drawer for five years before going back and re-writing.
Lovecraft
I like how you don't even have to elaborate.
This is reddit dude
Franzen and DFW. Franzen I began to like with Freedom and his essays. As for DFW I would never go back and read any of his novels but I love his short stories and essays.
Milan Kundera
Robert Jordan. I love his world building, I love some of his characters, and I love some of his plots. He also writes a lot of characters where I think, “I I don’t even care what happens to these people. Please let them die and put them out of my misery.”
Ian McEwan. The Child in Time is one of my favourite books. Amsterdam, Saturday, and Enduring Love are some of my favourites. On Chesil Beach was kind of ass. And seriously, fuck Atonement. I don't think I've ever been more pissed off at a book. The ending was right, but I hate it soooooo much. I'm going to go take it off my shelves and throw it at the wall again. Fuck.
Mark Z Danielewski
stephen king. loved the stand and carrie. lost me with pet cemetary
Love Eoin Colfer for the Artemis Fowl books. Hate what he did to the Hitchhiker's Guide series.
Margaret Atwood. I loved The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel. The heart goes last started off strong but ended oddly and Cut and Thirst is one of the worst Novellas I have ever read.
Salman Rushdie. When he’s in form his words dance in the air, but he’s written the odd stinker.
Dostoevsky: I really truly hated Notes From the Underground. But then he got better: Crime and Punishment is great, and The Idiot is probably my favorite novel. Then he got worse again with The Possessed / Devils. Haven't re-read Karamazov yet, it was quite a slog my first time around, which I couldn't admit then
Yeah I get that. Love Crime and Punishment, but Notes From Underground feels a bit essay-like. Nothing wrong with a philosophy essay but it annoys me a bit when writers of philosophical literature just write an essay in the guise of a flimsy novella/novel.
Exactly! It reminds me of the cringey journal I kept when I first started writing more. I guess Dostoevsky needed the money
Love the Demons but could never get through The Idiot
Felt the same. The characters in Demons were fascinating and kept me engaged.
Same I spead read Demons and I hate the Idiot.
Are we the same person? Try House of the Dead if you haven't already!
Notes From Underground got me into Dostoevsky, lol, but after reading Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, I found I couldn't reread Notes. I still recommend it to people who are new to him, though, it's short and really sets up the Russian self loathing themes that he's so good at.
Houellebecq
Tim Winton. Very decorated Australian author whose book The Riders made me cranky and it stayed with me for years. As I have got older I have thought about it a lot and understand it so differently than when I read it as a young man. Reading it again now and I can see why I was cranky. Agony. Tim Winton though is molto good.
*Cloudstreet* was a lovely novel.
Octavia E. Butler. I absolutely adored both Parable books, as well as the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, but I DNF’d Fledgling (interesting concept but too much preteen sex with a 30year old hairy man lol). I’ve still to read Kindred and Bloodchild, both of which I’m still excited for but also worried I’ll dislike them because I really like OEB.
Kindred is amazing! Def give it a try (no weird sex things to be found lol)
Bloodchild is my favorite short story.
Kindred and Bloodchild are my favorites!
Bloodchild is freaky but good I think – I remember being captivated (in a bad but fascinating way) by the relationship between the boy and the alien
Umbero Eco. Loved Foucalt's Pendulum, found Island Of The Day Before self-indulgent hogwash. One of very few books I have been unable to finish.
What did you think of his most famous book, *The Name of the Rose*? Or his nonfiction?
For me that happened in the same book. I adored the first part of The Overstory by Richard Powers. Loved the intertwining of the trees and various peoples' lives. But I hated the second part when he basically goes on a hundreds-page political rant. I doubt I'll read another book by him.
_The Gold-Bug Variations_ is a great book. I haven’t read _The Overstory,_ but _Bewilderment_ was huge dud. Halfway through, all I could think about was DNFing it and rereading _Flowers for Algernon,_ instead.
I had this same experience with Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.
Interesting! I've definitely had that too where I've been loving a book for 200 pages, then the next 200 pages are insufferable. It's infuriating.
Same. First half of the book made me jealous, just really good rich writing. Second half seemed like he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Better at writing those snapshots than tying the story together.
Larry McMurtry. I absolutely adored Lonesome Dove, and was so disappointed by the next in the series, Streets of Laredo. It was like two different authors wrote them. I’m reluctant to continue with the series. I also tried The Last Kind Words Saloon and couldn’t finish it.
John Banville. I found _Doctor Copernicus_ and _Kepler_ endlessly fascinating; his narrative twists and self-conscious language felt driven and purposeful when married to a) the grounded historical realism, and b) the postmodern philosophy of science, that rooted each novel in some kind of reality. Then I read _Ghosts_, and found it utterly, utterly vapid. I was worried, when I first picked up _Doctor Copernicus_, by a comparison to Nabokov, and I found that comparison initially groundless. But _Ghosts_ embodied the worst aspects of Nabokov's writing practice—soulless, purposeless narrative onanism, trickery and japes without any kind of thought behind it. The two scientific novels I've read of Banville's were true novels of ideas, and their narrative playfulness felt necessary, felt like part of Banville's fracturing of scientific–historical myths, of science's self-posturing as ahistorical and transcendental. But _Ghosts_ just felt flat. There was narrative playfulness, but in the service, it feels to me, more of sending me towards other Banville novels than towards any new understanding of anything. I honestly felt cheated by the utter lack of engagement with anything resembling a world outside the novel itself. This probably all sounds very old-fashioned, but I think it was a stunning disappointment to see a writer I encountered first in such a thoughtful and engaged mode turn, to put it bluntly, all shirt and no trousers.
Stephen King! I LOVE some of his books but others just felt like words on a page.
Chuck Palahniuk Wally Lamb Christopher Moore
John Le Carre. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is in my top five favorite novels, but a lot of his later work gets too polemic for my tastes. And it’s stances I mostly agree with, but the novels don’t aspire to do more than vehemently agree with my worldview, and I need more than that.
Joyce, in every sense. I found his early work to be rather tiresome, and despite its clear ambition they didn't really work for me. Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are, however, by turns exhilarating and dreadful. The chapter by chapter stylistic flourishes of Ulysses made it entirely possible to loathe one chapter and love the next. Finmegan's Wake, by contrast, is both jaw-droppingly brilliant and entirely unreadable.
Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits is one of my favorite books ever, but The Japanese Lover was so bad I had to stop after only a few chapters. I really enjoyed David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, but I *passionately* *hate* The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Edit: Jc Autumns really turned me off Mitchell, but should I try his other stuff?
What's funny is I've only read *Cloud Atlas* and *Thousand Autumns*, and I liked *Autumns* about a thousand times better than *Atlas.* So...not really?
Well I really like the book Choke, and Invisible Monsters, and Fight Club, but Chuck Palahniuk’s more recent work talks all rough and harsh and maybe even bigot-y. Maybe I’ve just changed, but it makes me confused.
Invisible Monsters is one of my favourite books. Survivor was my first exposure and I definitely liked it. Fight Club was fun too. I think Damned was the last book I read of his and I should have bailed out instead of finishing it. I was kind of done with him after that.
JK Rowling How one could write something so excellent and then go on and write some of the shittiest books I have ever seen is beyond me. Also, Stephen King dudes still got talent, but he should get back on coke and get off Twitter.
Stephen King
Victor Hugo. Les Miserables ranks in my top 5 books of all time. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is up there as well. Both novels are fantastic tales that captured my imagination and are beautifully written. But mixed into these wonderful stories are aside chapters that drone on, providing depth I suppose, but do not advance the narrative. The perfect example of this is his description of the Paris sewer system in Les Miserables. But don't take my word for it, here's a quote... "It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset, [Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of souvenirs. All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without. The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social philosophy there beholds a residuum. The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor. All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. " Imagine that going on for a lengthy chapter and you get the idea. Here is the chapter in its entirety... http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/324/ But Les Miserables is so good, I slogged through even though I read these chapters with the purpose of getting through it in order to get back to the narrative. It was worth it for me personally.
Herman Melville - Moby Dick, Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales are masterpieces… can’t say the same for many of his other works.
Thomas Pynchon. Honestly, I think he's abusive and disrespectful towards his readers. Half-page sentences... the most obscure pop references that you have to look up on dedicated wiki or the story won't make sense.. absurd plot twists and endings for his amusement only. But, sometimes it's all worth it (not always though!).
Interesting take on Goodis. I've read 3: Burglar, Blonde on the Street Corner, and Of Tender Sin, and found all three great, and very, very different from each other. Is it his early work, or his late work that doesn't resonate with you?
Ottessa Moshfegh. Loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation and haaaated Eileen
*Coraline* has gotta be one of my top ten books of all time and I’ve never been into anything else Neil Gaiman has written. Have tried multiple books of his and no luck. I just end up going back and reading *Coraline* again. If I hadn’t read *Coraline* I wouldn’t even think I liked him. It’s crazy.
Jack London and Stephen King. Loved most of London's novels, honestly one of my favourite writers, but I really couldn't get into many of his short stories. Some felt like tedious, and at times, repetitive reads.
Hemingway
Paul Auster
Steven King. So many good starts, but endings get forced
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway, trite and banal but Orlando, inventive and funny.
Yeah I really love The Waves by Woolf but some of her other works I found a bit dry.
I both loved and hated Woolf in the same book! Just finished Orlando, absolutely adored some sections of it, others seemed like she had no idea where she was going with the novel and was just filling pages with words.
Dostoevsky, genius writer, superstitious sentiments and hypermoralysing every action.
Ursula K LeGuin. Love most of her stuff. The Left Hand of Darkness is so fucking boring, though.
Cormac McCarthy. I love his sparse prose, love blood meridien. He has really good work but more of than not I’m glad to finish the book I’m reading of his and move on. I can’t really point to what it is specifically I don’t like however.
TC Boyle tbh
Christopher Paolini. His first book was amazing, considering his age and writing experience. The consecutive books got progressively worse. I got to the last chapter of the third book and DNFd. Like, I seriously wondered how the same person could write all 3.
Stephen King and Jim Butcher. I get frustrated with King repeating stories and being either too long winded or not detailed enough. But I love his work. Carrie is probably one of my favorite stories of all time. Jim Butcher, I can't read the Dresden Files books, they are awful but I love listening to them as read by James Masters, he makes the terrible aspects of Butcher's writing less noticeable.
Jim butcher. I fell in love with the dresden series when I was younger but as I kept reading his stuff, his formula just stared to be too obvious and bugged me.
Brandon Sanderson and Stephen King
Stephen King seems to be the "winner" of this discussion. I agree that of the limited stuff of his I've read, some was good and some was absolutely God awful.
David Mitchell
Gore Vidal
Stephen King. He tells a wonderful story over several hundred pages, and then it is almost like he gets bored and tries to wrap the whole thing up in the last 4 pages of the book... His early novels didn't have that issue.
Thrity Umrigar and Elif Shafak. With Umrigar, pretty much any book she's written that is set in Mumbai has been great: Bombay Time, her memoir First Darling of the Morning, The World We Found, and The Space Between Us and its sequel. The ones that aren't set in Mumbai tend to be set in invented towns in either the US or India, nebulous nowhere-spaces that feel nowhere near as real, which somehow carries over to the characters, the dialogue, and the plot. This would be The Story Hour, If Today Be Sweet (even though some flashback scenes are set in Mumbai), and The Weight of Heaven. I haven't read Everybody's Son, Honor, or The Museum of Failures yet. The first Shafak book I read was The Bastard of Istanbul, and holy shit, that was amazing. Wonderfully written characters, fascinating topic, just great overall. Then I read her earlier novel, The Gaze, which was incredibly weird, but definitely interesting. And then I read her (at the time most recent) novel The 40 Rules For Love and just HATED it. Too many perspectives, too much stretching of believeability, and the writing just wasn't good. But her next book, Honor, was pretty good. So was The Island of Missing Trees. The Architect's Apprentice was a bit of a slog, but it wasn't badly written, just maybe not my thing. Three Daughters of Eve wasn't my favorite ever, and it left me with a lot of unanswered questions but it was enjoyable. And there's a few others that I haven't read yet. So maybe 40 Rules was just a fluke?
Nick Cutter. I LOVE his writing, and want to read all of his books, but in every single book he writes the most pointless, fucked up animal cruelty and death scenes. I can't even bring myself to read him anymore.
Francine Prose. Reading Like a Writer was such an insightful book full of really nitty gritty literary analysis. I decided I had to read a book by her...and I chose Blue Angel, which is "You can't make jokes about this nowadays" the novelization 🙄
Faulkner, you can lose him in a heartbeat. He develops a history over the course of his novels that interlock and interact and he can drop you in the middle with language and style that can discombobulate your understanding.
David James Duncan. The Brothers K is one of the best books I've ever read in my life, but then he spent the next 30 years or so writing Sun House, which I couldn't even finish.
Marguerite Duras. *The Lover* is one of the most brilliant, challenging books I've ever read. *Abahn, Sabana, David* was just 110 pages of complete and utter nonsense, a real slog to get through, despite the fact that it was mostly dialogue.
Irvine Welsh. Loved Trainspotting, Skag Boys, and Crime, among others. Filth and Porno I couldn’t sell fast enough after reading. Filth especially.
Olga Tokarczuk! "Flights" genuinely changed my outlook on literature, but "Books of Jacob" genuinely was so bad
Paul Tremblay. Head Full of Ghosts is a great horror novel, Paulbearers Club was a giant turd
Arundhati Roy perhaps
Douglas Reeman and Alexander Kent being the same person always blows my mind.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I LOVE her writing in The NY Times magazine but did not like Fleishman Is In Trouble.
Mishima, Houellebecq.
Bill Bryson - he is an excellent writer and does his research. I get turned off when his cynicism and snark factor get to a ridiculous level, which does happen.
George Orwell. 1984 was written to make a point, and it is terrible writing. However, later in high school I had to read an essay by Orwell, and it turns out he is a really great writer when he wants to be! Also (not a novelist, but a playwright): Bertolt Brecht. I HATE *Mother Courage* with the fiery passion of ten thousand suns, but I LOVE another of his plays, *Life of Galileo*, which, as it sounds is the story of Galileo's astronomical work and his persecution by the Inquisition.
Hunter S. Thompson. Either super compelling or very off putting.
Jane Austen Actually hated P&P Enjoyed lady Susan and Emma
Don't Stop the Carnival was pretty great but Youngblood Hawke REALLY pissed me off so I goutta say Herman Woulk.
Classic answer, but Murakami, Sputnik sweetheart is one of my all time favorites but I don't remember liking a single one of his short stories.
Ira Levin. Rosemary’s Baby is perfect, Sliver is half-assed.
Margret Atwood.
Steinbeck. Loved some of his books but some were so dark. The winter of my discontent I just couldn’t stand.
Interesting to me no one I’ve seen has said Bukowski. I adore a lot of his writing, but it can get pretty self-indulgent and gross sometimes. I get that’s part of the package, but there have been quite a few times I’ve read his recounting of relationships and said, “yeah, this guy sucks.”
Mark Twain. His work with Huck Finn seems simplistic and mildly contrived but his writing in Joan of Arc was absolutely riveting. Still one of my favorite books of all time.
Vonnegut is my favorite author and I really really struggled through Galapagos- didn’t enjoy at all
John Grisham. Some of his earlier work was really good, but most of his newer stuff feels like he's just churning out books to fulfill contractual obligations.
Its manga but Fujimoto Tatsuki (chainsawman). His writing for Fire Punch for example was all over the place, so sincere it hurts but also so irony poisoned and superficial in other places that it felt vapid. He's hammered out most of the self-conscious irony poisoning out of his newer works though but he can still get on my nerves sometimes 😂
Chuck Palahniuk 😂 sometimes his writing is so fun and hilarious and insightful then other times I'm like honestly what the hell am I reading
Paul Auster (RIP): loved his early books (New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan) but his later stuff very hit or miss (Invisible for example)
Kafka honestly