Famous authors you don't care for

Joyce Carol Oates

Dickens

Authoresses of facile cunting threads such as this one.

Triggered twats like R3.

Alliterative asswipes such as R4

Ernest Hemingway

Henry James

William Mcgonagall

Hermann Hesse

Author R5's lack of punctuation.

Republicans who use "triggered" as an insult like r4 (and his hero, Donald Trump, Jr)

R10 Idiot. I'm not even American and have nothing to do with your Trump.

R11 = pissed about being called out as a Trumpster

Faulkner

William Faulkner. I've been trying to get through "Light in August" for about 5 months now. I can barely make it through a chapter. Then I set it aside for a few weeks before I start another chapter.

Hitler, Ayn Rand, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida

I liked reading Hemming way when I was younger, but a few years ago I picked up both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and I couldn't get past the first few chapters of either one.

And they're relatively short novels.

Herman Melville. Dear God in Heaven. A teacher wanted us to read Billy Budd and after one chapter, which was a chore to get through, I BEGGED him to let me read something else.

I could not get into Don DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy -- probably blasphemous as they make most Top 20 lists of American novelists in the last one hundred years.

Melville

R13 and R14 are spot on. What does Faulkner have against punctuation???

That dyke Willa Cather.

I had a friend who was not a fan of Thomas Hardy: He uses too many words. If he had to describe a forest, he'd probably write about each tree there. I kind of agree with him.

R21, Willa Cather's writing is just so plain and pedestrian. I got about half-way through "My Antonia" before finally accepting that it was boring as fuck. I kept hoping something, anything, interesting would happen.

Stephen King

Nicholas Sparks. Awful.

Hemingway was gross and his prose was too dry.

Richard Ford. Corkscrew Maccartney < that was auto correct for Cormac McCarthy.

Proust. Get to the point!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Cien Anos de Mierda!

P. D. James. Too simplistic or something. Much prefer dear Agatha.

Jane Austen

The M of novelists: click click click

I like William S. Burroughs' life story more than anything he ever wrote.

Philip Roth.

R28 - the journey of and connections between sensations and thoughts/responses *IS* the point

R27, I agree about Cormac McCarthy. Overrated.

Jack Kerouac

Herman Melville...what a goddamn chore to get through his works

Ian McEwan...all the same stuff over and over

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Henry James and James Fenimore Cooper own this thread.

Closely followed by Jane Fucking Austen

R30 "P. D. James. Too simplistic or something. Much prefer dear Agatha."

Second that - the television series with Roy Marsden of the silky voice, piercing blue eyes, and massive shoulders was, for once, better than the books.

And I'll take Dorothy Sayres over James AND dear Agatha . . .

John Grisham,Salaman Rushdie,James Patterson to name a few . Most established authors become formulaic over time. I miss the excitement of waiting for a new novel by a favorite to come out.

I fully understand not liking Herman Melville for entertainment reading; I really do not understand begging your teacher not to read Herman Melville. That's the assignment. The teacher is not asking you to read for pleasure; the/she is asking you to read it to learn something specific.

It would be like saying to a trigonometry teacher, "I'm not all that interested in learning about the cosine function. Please teach me something else instead."

Had to read Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" for a class. Unreadable!

Miguel de Cervantes (It could be the translation) Ernest Hemingway (Boring) Stephen King (He really pissed me off in the Gunslinger) James "Fucking" Joyce (Just get on with it) Herman Melville (What the hell are you talking about)? William Faulkner (Take a grammar class)

r42, BITCH PLEASE! Get over yourself Mary. I bet you was an ass kissing teacher’s pet.

You guys are way too hard on Faulkner. He was writing stream of consciousness (quite brilliantly, I might add). The lack of punctuation is what made his writing so authentic to "the voices in your head."

[quote] I bet you [bold]was[/bold] an ass kissing teacher’s pet.

At least I learned grammar from that English teacher.

Oh, [italic]dear.[/italic]

All of them.

I'm convinced that some guy zipped back and forth between Zurich and Paris and pretended to be both James Joyce and Marcel Proust...

...and I hate him for it.

Jonathan Franzen. Smug little bitch. Prissy know it all who looks down on everyone. And his books are painfully dull for anyone who isn't fascinated by the lives of middle American suburbanites.

Elizabeth George. Dumb American Anglophile with completely deluded views on British mores and culture. Condescending as well. I would be shocked if she even set foot in the UK at any point in the last 20 years. Probably watches a lot of Downton Abbey.

David Foster Wallace. Overrated word salad ramblings. I don't believe anyone has actually finished his books.

Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Carol NOPE.

Try one of Henry James' earlier novels. "The American" is good.

Love Joan Didion's essays, but could never get into her novels.

Ayn Rand

Truman Capote. Apart from the book Lee co-wrote, his output...was....very....slight.

Capote said he was envious of Tennessee Williams who actually enjoyed writing.

If I hadn't been required to read William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" for a college class, I would've thrown that damn book across the room and never picked it up again. God, I hated it. His other novels were a chore to get through as well.

I do like his short stories, though.

Any Rand

Nicholas Sparks

John Grisham

John Updike. I've tried reading the first "Rabbit" book three times, at three different times in life, starting at around age 25, and for the last time in my 60s, and I still just can't get past about 60 pages without putting it down and forgetting to come back to it.

Among the pre-1920s writers, I never enjoyed Jane Austen the way I think we were supposed to—the way Anna Quindlen does, let's say. But the movie versions have been somewhat entertaining. Same with Melville, Shakespeare, and Henry James. Language changes, and I'm more comfortable reading contemporary literature. I've loved a lot of Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and even two out of three Jonathan Franzen novels (though I had to come back to the one that made him so famous).

Anne Rice. By the time I started the Vampire novels, they were all out in paperback. I tossed the first one across the room and returned the other two. What [italic]were[/italic] all my friends raving about?

Keep your receipt!

E. Lynn Harris. His writing sucked. Sorry.

Ann Rand and L. Ron Hubbard walked into a bar...

Henry James-Literally takes a person 5 pages to walk through a door.

Hemingway- Flatness as far as the eye can see.,

Another for Willa Cather-My Antonia really is about nothing.

Patricia Highsmith. Basically because she was such a vile human being. It tempers my enthusiasm for her writing.

Another vote for Joyce Carol Oates.

R18 I tried to read Libra a few years ago. One of the most deeply depressing books I've ever read, I gave up after about 50 pages.

Shakespeare. I had a really difficult time with him in high school. I talked to my teacher about it and he assured me that this was a common thing. He explained to me that Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read. He was meant to be acted out on the stage with actors, costumes, props, sound affects, the whole works and simply reading him was missing out on a large amount of the Shakespeare experience. The ones I read, I hated and the ones I watched, I loved.

Ayn Rand is awful

I've read Don DeLillo. He is an acquired and repetitive taste. I enjoyed Libra because I read it at a certain stage of my life. But I didn't much enjoy White Noise (although I read it during the pandemic and it rang pretty true). I don't think he is overrated but is, as I mentioned earlier, repetitive. But that is true of all artists who are slotted into genres for marketing purposes. That said, I think he is a good and, more importantly, honest chronicler of America. To quote T.S.Eliot: We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Last week I saw a homeless person reading “The Fountainhead”.

Stephen King. Doesn’t know the meaning of “economy of words.”

The Fountainhead, both novel and film, are majorly insufferable.

Atlas Shrugged, and so did I.

R51 - "Portrait of a Lady" was the only one I could stand

But I will add that, in contrast, I loved James' short stories, which left an emotional imprint that his intolerable novels did not.

And I speak as someone who, for my sins, also read every word of "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove".

His novels actually come off better as films, which is something I rarely find. I'm usually either enraged or disappointed at novel to screen transfers.

Anthony Minghella - "The English Patient" was the biggest load of tripe. There was no "there" there for all the hoop-la around it and that equally bad film transfer.

Thomas Hardy "The Return of The Native" - endless wandering prose about The Heath.

Anthony Minghella was a film director, r73. Michael Ondaatje wrote “The English Patient.”

R75 - Of course! Stupid of me, thanks for the correction.

The assessment of the novel AND the film stand, though.

In defense of Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys is quite a good read.

As for Capote, In Cold Blood wasn't what I expected but his short stories are excellent.

That said, John Irving is my favorite living American author so take me with a grain of salt.

[quote]In defense of Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys is quite a good read.

Indeed. I liked that one a lot. I wondered if she'd stolen the plot from some dead Princetonian.