Authors I’ve given up on

I gave up on LeGuin in 1990 after suffering her work for a year while I wrote my dissertation on her work (among others). Wonderful stage sets. Shame about the cardboard cut outs.

My three:
David Weber, whose Honour Harrington series was ripping stuff, until about book five when it turned into endless admiring glances of Honor’s square jaw.
David Eddings: I know, too easy, but I liked them as a kid until he made us wait two years for the final book of the Mallorean and then had the great denoument rest on a *choice* between good and evil. My, let me see, I can choose the nice boy to be god, or the evil emperor… which shall it be?
Neal Stephenson: I’m sorry, but just because you write it long hand, doesn’t mean every word is necessary. In this case I found myself thinking that the bibliography looked more interesting than the novel.

Although I lurk rather than post, I wanted to add:

As far as Le Guin is concerned, a few of her recent books are charming, particularly Changing Planes and The Birthday of the World. It’s not that they’re less heavy-handed–she’s always heavy-handed, right from go–but they are heavy-handed about slightly more subtle things and the details of the stories have, often, considerable charm.

I’ve given up on Doris Lessing, to my considerable sorrow. I kept reading her books as long as I could, even as she went from left-wing critic of the left to right-wing..right-wing what? It’s not that she has displayed any real enthusiasm for Thatcherism, or even for New Labor. She just passionately, passionately hates anyone who has any sort of theory-based left politics. And her weird statements in interviews about how in the US feminists run the show and the poor men don’t have any rights anymore..! Her books are full of spite and despair, and she is roused to rage by anyone who objects to either.

Orson Scott Card

I really appreciated the Ender trilogy. I didn’t even mind the transparent Mormon mythology inserted into the series. But between his cash-in sequels and his stumping for the US Military, I just don’t think there’s anything more he can offer.

David Foster Wallace, without a doubt. Although can you give up on something you never believed in? He’s a very talented writer, but complacency, and a seeming boredom with the act of writing, have made him even less enjoyable to read than ever before. I hope for his sake he encounters some kind of meaning beyond that.

Then again, it seems that Foster Wallace isn’t the only one; I’m pretty disgusted with the new American convention of style over substance…it seems so puerile, perhaps influenced by Generation X’s television addiction. Blagh.

Then I read this quite vicious and deranged essay
Didn’t Spider Robinson write a version of that story years ago, only it was… well, not deranged, and good?

Brendan yes Amis. And McEwan’s “Saturday” is readable but…
It’s poetic, and he’s completely in control of his material, but the narrative stance, or posture, has this self-limited quality, the ambiguous loyalties of people who’ve been more than amply rewarded by a system they know is corrupt and past redemption but to which they have committed the well-being of their children.
There’s a kind of parallel in it to the distaste/fascination with the English prole/thug underworld that Amis exhibited in “The Information”.
Doris Lessing’s “The Grandmothers” can kick ass on both Amis and McEwan before breakfast.
And maybe, to be fair, Le Guin’s recent work should be evaluated by the standards of literature written for adolescents.

Amis’ Money is a bad script for a de Palma film. At least Night Train was a weak rip off of Homicide the book.

Henry James. Does he count? Cause I’ve really given him up for good.

“As for Card, can I just say this–he always sucked. Always. I cannot understand the reverence people feel for Ender’s Game.”

False. Get to a library, kb, and check out Maps in a Mirror, or any of his other short story collections. Read his stuff from the 70s and early 80s. Tight, scary, smart, ambiguous, brilliant stuff. As for Ender’s Game…eh. As a short story, it was a kick in the gut; as a novel, you could already see at that date his obsessions taking over his imagination. Occasionally he’s been able to fight it–I think Speaker for the Dead, as disconcerting as some of its themes are, remains excellent science fiction–but I gave up on his novels long ago. (My wife says his straight-up religious fiction isn’t bad, though; perhaps because he no longer has to sneak it in.)

Who have I given up on? John Irving. The first novel of his I read was The Cider House Rules, and it got into my head and challenged my thinking as few novels have. I went back and read all the classics: The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany. That latter one is, I think, his fullest, finest work. If you look over Irving’s early ourvre, you see the same tropes and themes over and over–bears, motorcycles, the Vietnam War, suicide, Vienna, ghosts, unfaithful parents, writers and writing block, possible incest, etc.–in ever varying arrangements; I think Prayer put most of them together into as forceful a tale as possible, and after I read it, I was convinced Irving was done with all that, and would need to find some new topic. Which is what I think he did in his next novel, A Son of the Circus, which is probably my favorite Irving book, even if it’s not his best. But then, ever since that weird story about an Indian serial killer and identity confusion, he for some reason decided to go right back to all his old stuff. I’ve picked up a couple of his more recent books, but I find I can’t handle his lurid plots and screwed-up characters (writers who get their hands bitten off by tigers, etc.) any longer; I feel as though he’s already done all that can be done with that sort of material, and is now just repeating himself. (To be fair, I think the critical consensus about Irving is the same as mine, only they think he ran out of new ideas a lot earlier than I do.)

Sorry to keep piling on Simmons, but his novel Darwin’s Blade is literally just a thin detective thriller in which the plot consists of Darwin Award stories strung together.

As for authors I’ve given up on, Neal Stephenson leaps to mind. I struggled through Cryptonomicon to the very end, including the horrible technical passages on codebreaking that reminded me of the tedious Enigma segment that dulled the otherwise delightful Jigsaw IF game. After that experience, the only way I’d continue through his recent books is if I’m physically restrained and my eyes forced open. Life’s just too short. Literally.

I’ve given up on everybody. Surely there’s no point in grownups continuing to read fiction. Time is short, there’s too much real stuff we still don’t understand but need to, Richard Dawkins is a better writer than any novelist; and if you’ve read Tolstoy, Flaubert and, yes, Henry James you’ve already learned all you’re going to about human nature from any novelist.

Fyreflye, you might want to bone up on your Lifemanship. Subtlety.

I also enjoyed Changing Planes though nothing much recent from Le Guin apart from that.

I gave up on Neal Stephenson after one book, so I guess that doesn’t count.

I liked Le Guin’s recent fifth book of the Earthsea series, but then, I must admit it might be nostalgia, as I loved the series as a child.

I have to be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t see Rushdie get mentioned by anyone. I gave up on him the moment I finished reading Fury. Writers aren’t always as intimate as they should be with the city they choose as a setting, but I’ve never read a book in which I felt like the author so thoroughly failed to evoke a location. Add that to the fact that it felt like a thin justification of his love life at the time…

I pretty much gave up on Philip K. Dick after The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I kept waiting for something else, but all we got was juvenilia.

I don’t know whatever happened to the brothers Strugatsky. Did they stop writing, did they stop being translated, what? I love Stanislav Lem, but he never wrote anything quite as weird as The Snail on the Slope.

I’ll agree with giving up Ursula Le Guin. The Earthsea trilogy is one of my favorites, but I really disliked Tehanu. I think it’s inherently difficult to add to a children’s trilogy when the original readers have grown-up, because the writer is caught between two very different audiences, and can end up pleasing neither.

(See also: George Lucas and Star Wars.)

Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon was good in parts, but I couldn’t face reading Quicksilver.

I’m a great fan of Le Guin, but haven’t been able to get excited about her most recent books. I liked The Other Wind more than Tehanu, though.

Definitely Orson Scott Card. I don’t really read many novelists in large quantities these day – I tend to read one or two books, maybe.

Don Delillo. Really, I know I’m supposed to love him, but I’ve always found him insufferably pretentious in a kind of “postmodern lite” way. I’ve never been able to get more than 100 pages into a Don Delillo novel.

Although getting books by Jules Verne for Christmas are among my fondest memories, “20K Leagues Under The Sea” for starters, and later the hard-to-get “Off On A Comet”, somewhere after “The Purchase of the North Pole” I found myself satiated.

R. Crumb is one of the few of my favorites who continues to inhabit my planet.

I’ve noticed this before –am I the only one?– that CTers, both posters and commenters, seem inordinately into fantasy and science fiction. At the risk of stirring the nest, I’ve always regarded these genres as a bit naive and adolescent, like Catcher in the Rye or certain political authors (no names), something one grew out of when reaching adulthood. I tried a few fantasy/sci-fi books, as a young reader, but never developed any interest to outgrow.

On the other hand, I’ve never outgrown my (pre-adolescent) weakness for mysteries/crime fiction, and the list of authors in that genre that I’ve given up on is far too long to be useful. To play the game, however, I could mention Reginald Hill, who seems to have become more verbose in recent years, lapsing into turgidity — On Beulah Height, Arms & the Women, Beyond the Bone , though the fact that I never read Dialogues of the Dead probably doomed my reading of the latter. I much preferred the earlier Dalziel & Pascoe books.

I cannot understand the reverence people feel for Ender’s Game. It was bad in almost every way it is possible for a book to be bad.

It might have had something to do with growing up as a target for bullies. Somewhat like this essay, people who were “nerds” in school or were the targets of bullies think it is a great (although long) essay, and people who were the bullies or who stood by when bullies acted don’t relate to it at all. Ender was the target of institutional childhood violence. He was very good at turning it around. That makes him the hero of every kid that was bullied.

If the only reason one reads fiction is to ‘learn’ about ‘human nature’, then yes, you may as well give up on all of it.

What’s been written to equal the quality of The Magic Mountain…? Contemporary fiction seems to be a symptom of our debased culture…

Shouldn’t a serious reader of Thomas Mann hesitate before unironically, undialectically using words like “symptom” and “debased” when speaking of an entire culture?

Does “give up on” mean they have to be alive and just writing bad stuff now? If not:

Elias Canetti, most overrated author to win a Nobel since…

His aphorisms are trite and underwhelming, Auto da Fe simultaneously too slight and too fat, and “Crowds and Power” has a lot lot lot of woolly blather in it.

Hi there 37,

With the science fiction, weirdly, I feel like I get more out of it than out of a lot of other fiction. Partly because I try to read it in light of Moretti’s essay on Dracula (where he talks about the novel as a story of bourgeois hatred towards feudal capitalism and also makes an interesting point about the American vampire-hunter).

The other thing is this: I get kind of bored with certain kinds of psychological subtlety. Do I care, even the tiniest bit, about the delicate epiphanies of an aging bourgeois, the topic of so many contemporary novels? Well, maybe a tiny bit, but if it’s an aging university professor and his fascinating affair with a student or something, not at all. But when I can read a really neat, politically smart book like China Mieville’s Scar (clunky-o prose in patches, though) and I can amuse myself with the scary deep sea and then think about how political projects organize groups…well, that’s interesting!

Admittedly, a mediocre science fiction novel is worse than a mediocre…um…standard novel…realistic novel…mainstream novel…

Because I am rather pathetic, also, I do like a happy ending now and again, or at least an ending that isn’t crushingly sad. And it’s easier to find a science fiction novel that is politically smart, left-wing, reasonably written and not terribly, terribly tragic than it is to find a non-science-fiction novel of this kind.

And then I’ve read such a lot of science fiction already, what with starting when I was eight or nine, that I’m kind of interested in the genre just from the weight of existing knowledge.

But then the science fiction/fantasy that I read tends to blur into the non-science-fiction–it’s all weird, with minor exceptions. I read Angela Carter, Alistair Gray, the weirder Dickens, Doris Lessing, Sarah Schulman–in general, novelists who are neither interested in the New Novel thing nor interested in psychological depth as practiced by Henry James et al. (Although I love Henry James, inconsistantly enough)

Several people have said that contemporary fiction is, essentially, too clever-clever. When does “contemporary” start? Where do the good novels stop, and with who?

And then, as a corollary, why do people read novels? It seems like your idea of a good novel would be pretty tightly tied up with what you think a novel is for.

I find that I read the…um…”classics” mostly when I’ve read interesting commentary on them–for example, I’ve been reading Flaubert because Samuel Delaney writes about him a lot, and I’m working on some other novels because I’m reading (slowly, slowly) Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World.

I haven’t given up on Richard Russo yet, but he’s on probation. Yes, I liked Empire Falls, but I liked it better when it was called Nobody’s Fool, and almost as much when it was called the Risk Pool , or Mohawk. If his next book is the same goddamn book again, he’s done.

Re: Stephenson

I enjoyed the whole Quicksilver trilogy, but I never got anywhere in Cryptonomicon.

I bought it, and it sat on the shelf for a while. I was going to read it on a summer roadtrip, but when I picked it up, I found I really couldn’t care less about a story built around a mid-90’s Wired magazine fad premise like “data havens”.

51: Oh, so did I! And the “blah blah blah…they were not [something portentous], they were scars“…and the many, many times that Bellis says “Jabber preserve us” and varients…and what exactly does the Brucolac do when he’s not brooding darkly over his Riding, anyway? And why are they called ridings when they’re at sea? There’s certainly a long list of bad writing habits in China Mieville’s work, but then there’s the sequence with the bonefish (scary!) and the fact that the Morning Walker is like the Dawn Treader exposed for its evil colonialist self and the terrible, metaphoric, despair-causing part where Tanner is in the water and he sees men and women sinking all around him, too many to ever save. That China Mieville sometimes needs a bit more editing than he gets, and I’m not actually too fond of Perdido Street Station, but with the Scar his politics and the story come together perfectly and it is, to me, very powerful.

Nobody mentioned Dan Brown? What’s wrong with you people?

Those of you who have given up on fiction: perhaps you could continue the thread by mentioning nonfiction authors you’ve “given up on,” to keep things interesting rather than degenerative? There’s no stipulation that these writers be writers of fiction.

[This is an interesting question for me: I can’t think of anyone who inspired enough faith in me initially to disappoint me later. I don’t know if I’m unerringly able to identify what I like, or if I’m pathologically loyal, or what. But I don’t read much — really any — contemporary fiction, genre or otherwise, and I don’t have the good ideas/poor execution problem very often because, honestly, how good are any of those ideas ever? I do hold good novels of ideas in high esteem, but there aren’t very many of those, and for everything else there’s “non-fiction”! Still, have I not been let down by a writer during my adult life? Really no one? BANDS, now, that’s a different story, and probably analogous.]

What about political theorists who have just gotten crazier and crazier over the years?

I want to like Kim Stanley Robinson’s new stuff, but just can’t read through the preaching.

Amis fils after London Fields. Rushdie after the move to New York.

“Philip Roth. Yawn.”

Tragic.

I gave up on Roth about 10-15 years ago, and then un-gave-up (gave down? I guess “took up”) with him again with The Plot Against America, which was the best thing he wrote since at least “The Conversion of the Jews”.

55: Never having read any Dan Brown, I find it hard to have given up on him.

I’ve definitely given up on O.S. Card. I’m having a hard time with V. Pelevin, too. K.S. Robinson also, though I’m stuck between the first and second Mars books, which is probably earlier than other people who’ve given up on him. The premise is interesting, it’s that I just can’t summon the desire to spend any time with those characters. Harlan Ellison. Bill Bryson (though not a fiction author). Tried David Foster Wallace once; I may even have written a review titled “A Supposedly Good Author I’ll Never Read Again.” Also in non-fiction, Stephen Ambrose.

More? I give up.

I haven’t given up on anyone.

I don’t have time to think it through that explicitly.

And when I’m working (literary critic/writing teacher), I don’t evaluate, and when it’s the book I’m reading to read, then I find what I like and go with that.

I used to have a friend with whom I played golf. One day he shot an 81, missing a couple of makeable birdie putts, and was very, very pissed. I shot 96 and enjoyed one of the most beautiful mornings in the history of Indianapolis IN. Later we had dinner. His steak was a hair overcooked. My wine was terrific.

That said, ever since a middle-aged woman in an American Lit class of mine said, “I hate ‘On the Road,’ because Sal reminds me of my first husband, and I’ve had to raise our girl alone because of his drinking,” I’ve had little tolerance for that book.

peter, speaking as someone who was bullied quite viciously as a kid, and read Ender’s Game for the first time when I was 12 and some of the worst of it was still going on:

— you.

(Mod gods, I fully understand if you feel this response merits a banning or a disemvowelling. But a comment like peter’s deserves no other response.)

Kb: I don’t understand what you found offensive about Peter’s comment. (And BTW, cursing is allowed here — I do it frequently.) Is the idea that you would find Ender heroic?

I gave up on Heinlein once I got far enough past his juvenile works to realize that his later works were all about sex and conspiracy theories. I gave up on Niven for much the same reason. And I enjoyed some of Card’s early works (anyone else remember “A Planet Called Treason” which I understand has been totally reworked. Ah, well!) but nothing since the third book in the Ender series has whet my appetite.

I wholesale gave up on the Victorian English novelists when I was in my teens and realized that I’d enjoyed nary a one. This is probably also the reason why I never considered becoming an English major. If only I’d known that a love for Dickens, Trollope, Bronte and the like weren’t required for the field, I might have chosen differently.

I also gave up on Agatha Christie when I read through her entire oeuvre in the mid 70s. Sadly, I don’t have any desire to return to the books — knowing the ending robs crime fiction of its power for a return read. But Jane Austen makes compelling reading every time. I can’t imagine ever giving up on Jane Austen!

Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men was shockingly shallow.

Ian McEwan: Saturday was a mega-disappointment.

Herman Melville: Petulance + philosophical naivete + pedagogical exuberance = Moby Dick.

Ann Patchett: She butchers the Spanish language in Bel Canto. Unforgivable :-)

Salman Rushdie: I’ve always wanted to like him; it just never happened.

I agree with so many people. It is great to read these posts. I also can’t read OSC although I have read some of his older books and liked them (I am not big into SF anyhow so I actually never read Ender’s Game, but there was one alternate history of Columbus’ voyage that I really enjoyed).

Rushdie – I read Midnight’s Children, fell in love, then tried to read the Satanic Verses. Argh!

I understand the comments on Le Guin, but as her stuff really is suited to young adults can’t you just consider that you grew out of it rather than she got worse? (Same for L’Engle, or anyone else whose writing is for the teen market)

I have totally gotten over Anne Perry. Her writing style just did not grow on me and it never varied and after several books I managed to get through the final book in the WWI recent series she wrote and said “Never again.” My sister and I both have declared ourselves to be over her.

Patricia Cornwall – Yes, the right-wing Reagan-worshipping started to really shine through Scarpetta at some point and as the SF people say the books are now “Mary Sue” throughout.

Re Dan Brown, all you have to do is read one book, they are all formulas of each other. I read 3 of them just because they were there and I am the sort of reader that, when nothing else is in the room, will read the phone book or the zip code directory.

#54 – your gracious defence of Canetti makes me slightly embarrassed to have gone off against him so fiercely. But this theater production was great apart from the damn words, made of EC’s aphorisms. Maybe I dismissed him too much as a result of that disappointment.

On the original post, I agree on the latest Ballards. Not worth bothering with. Thing about JB, though, is that he was always a bit lazy and slapdash at times. He’ll happily repeat the same observation within the space of a few pages, even in good books (e.g. Crash, Kindness of Women). In general, his prose is nothing to write home about – many of his sentences lump along, heavy and ungainly.

But somehow the force of his vision often pushed through all that. The earlier commentator @16 is right too, that at his best, a certain kind of repetition serves him well. The moments at the end of many of his better books (High Rise, Drowned World), when the hero calmly, cheerfully even, faces the post-apocalyptic era, have a force that gains from the their repetition across his work.

Le Guin: The problem isn’t that her books are for adolescents. (Anyway, show me the adolescent who actually likes Always Coming Home! And I don’t really think that you get the most out of the Earthsea books when you’re young, in part because they’re a bit Pollyanna-ish and you need to be old enough to read through that.) Her earlier books (and parts of The Birthday of the World) have a mobilizing quality to their naivete, and they’re written level with the audience. Her later books are much more de haute en bas. It’s as if, in Always Coming Home or The Wind’s Twelve Quarters she is saying, “Come on, we can make a different world! Look at all these terrible things! Let’s change them!” and in her later books she’s saying “Why don’t you people get it? Let me explain in simple language and then maybe you’ll shape up!” I don’t know as I blame her, though, since I think a kind of intellectual-spiritual burnout is one of the hazards of left-wing writerdom.

I…I was a bullied child. And very conscientiously never a bully except on one single occasion. I don’t like Orson Scott Card. Or rather, I like a couple of his books while recognizing how politically problematic they are. He revels in the almost lascivious depiction of child suffering, over and over and over again. He loves setting things up so that the world can only be saved if one child is tormented repeatedly and unjustly, and therefore tormenting the child is the right thing to do and the really sensitive characters steel themselves to do it. (In this he’s the opposite of Le Guin–even at her sappiest, in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, her politics do not permit her to enjoy depicting pain.) The key to Card is found in his horror/thriller book called something like Lost Boys where there’s actual pedophile murderer…he’s someone who is really in the grip of some unpleasant intellectual compulsions and it’s kind of embarassing, like “anti-porn activists” who amass libraries of the stuff.

That said, his interlinked stories in The Folk of the Fringe are really classic US science fiction and deal very handsomely with some interesting things. I also like Wyrms a lot even though it’s really about justifying colonialism and genocide. The funny thing is, what I like about Card is that he gets–almost uniquely among conservative white science fiction writers–that race and genocide are major, serious and tragic issues in American history. I don’t like his conclusions but I appreciate his engagement.

I’ve sort of given up on Carl Hiassen; at least, now if I were going to read one of his books I’d expect to be fun but to contain a lot of the same old tricks. Though that’s not so different from my old appraisal of him.

I gave up on both tries of reading Scott Card, first of Seventh Son and then Saints. In both cases I refused to go past the child-torturing scene on page two.

John Kessel wrote a fabulous essay about the moral bankruptcy of Card’s Ender books.

Now, of course, his public anti-gay stance makes me even less willling to pay a dime for anything he writes.

Hey Pedro,
I should have a chance to read The Road soon. We’ll see. I’m guessing we are quite different… I found Moby Dick hard to put down.
peace
Bill

Ancarett (November 20th, 2006 at 5:39 pm) said:

I gave up on Heinlein once I got far enough past his juvenile works to realize that his later works were all about sex and conspiracy theories. I gave up on Niven for much the same reason.

I probably haven’t read all of Niven, but read most of the “Known Space” series, especially the Ringworld trilogy, and I don’t see the sex and conspiracy theory angle for him. Vast cosmic forces impacting and shaping humanity don’t count as conspiracy in my book.

Niven tantalizes me because of the huge disparity between the grandeur of his conceptions versus the paltry execution of the books. The palette is huge but the colors are thin. The books are a kind of dark and filthy window through which I can just barely discern an amazing world. That’s why I can’t give up on him – if Niven had been a better writer he might have created something to rival Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy.

89: See, to me his short stories prefigure a lot of the stuff I don’t like about his later work. They aren’t, true, as vexing–possibly because the disturbing stuff isn’t worked out at such length. The horrible fetus-thing story…I dunno, gender problems if you ask me. And the one about the unendingly punished genius boy-musician? That one about the china salamander is pretty decent, in a kind of soppy way. They are vivid and memorable stories, though. I could probably recount a lot of them just off the top of my head.

I was just musing on this, and it occurs to me that the systemization of his books is one of the non-sinister (well, sort of sinister) things that may make his books appeal to adolescents–the orderly discipline in Songmaster and Ender’s Game, the doubled plot points, the system of the computer game in EG, etc. Systems and rankings really fascinated me in my early teens and I remember even when I was in college being sort of aesthetically pleased by some of the recurring things and echoes.

I wonder whether Card is just too nasty to be recuperable? I can still read certain ideologically toxic books with some pleasure–parts of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the Space Trilogy, for example, just because I like the idea of, say, the spooky island with the water that turns things to gold or the floating plant-islands of Perelandra–and I read certain books like the Ring trilogy for the pleasure of counter-plots (Sauron is really an anti-colonialist ruler akin to various sixties/seventies African leaders; the hobbits are really non-aligned powers who suddenly become important, etc.) But Card is too powerfully icky, at least his later work. And honestly, given how many planets he describes, Card doesn’t really give you that much descriptive pleasure.

Although Wyrms now, Wyrms is bizarre and does have some vividly described passages. (Passages, that is, that are not about children being abused.) It also has some pretty decent aliens.

Giving up on Tom Clancy would imply there was a reason to read him that has changed: the prose is still wooden, the plots are still plodding, and (unlike post-Cold War Le Carre) the atmosphere is still the same.

There are writers whose works I gave up because life is too short: Tim Sandlin comes to mind. (Apparently, his publisher gave up as well.)

I can’t tell if I gave up Vikram Seth or he gave up me when he moved from poetry and short stories to novels.

Those who gave up Rushdie because of The Satanic Verses should try The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

I’ve given up Kroeber’s daughter so many times now, I don’t know what…oops, wrong riff.

I suppose I could claim to have given up Stephen King, but the truth is that he writes faster than I can read.

But to give up on James Graham Ballard would bwe to give up on life. One might as well claim to give up Tom Holt or Christopher Priest or M. John Harrison.

I pretty much agree with everyone’s comments regarding OSC: he’s exactly the author I would pick for the original meme.
However, he had one son, Charlie Ben, who was profoundly affected by cerebral palsy-I don’t believe he ever really spoke– and who died quite young. Card has written very movingly about him. Perhaps the endless suffering of children, an admittedly creepy and off-putting theme that’s one of OSD’s very favorites, is an attempt to make sense of this tragedy?

James Ellroy peaked with “White Jazz” and it’s been all downhill since. Elmore Leonard too, judging by the embarrassing “Be Cool”.

68: Russell, I just sorta barely made it through Australia with BB. His Short History of Nearly Everything stares unread from a shelf near the computer. I think there’s one or two since then, too, but nah, no thanks.

As others have mentioned above, Heinlein and Asimov tend to pale past a certain point. Clarke less so because he is so damned clever after all. But Bradbury? His gifts keep on giving. In One More for the Road (very late Bradbury indeed), there’s a terribly poignant story about being young and gay in the 1940s. Bradbury is a wonder.

Sorry meant to say 95, 93 hasn’t given up on Plato its 95- apologies to both.

He’s probably too low brow to be mentioned in the above company, but I read the first two or three of Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” (or whatever) series, enjoyed them for a while, but then tired of the excessive repetition (some big confrontation with one of the Fallen, or whoever they were in the third last chapter). When I look at the fantasy shelves in the bookshop he seems to be up to Volume 10 or so, with no sign of stopping. Not only is it a waste of paper, it seems like a waste of space on bookshelves.

Ursula Le Guin remains a very fine essayist and lecturer even though I don’t much go her fiction anymore. Her acceptance speech for the Washington State Book Awards is a delight, following in the tone of its opening:

Thank you all for the honor given, through me, to Literature by this award. It makes me happy, of course, because writers live on praise; and because it is regional, and I love the Pacific Northwest. But I feel above all that I’m here as a proxy, a stand-in, for Literature. Literature is too busy to come collect her prize, and she’s too big to get into the building, even this building which was built for her. Literature is huge — they can’t fit her even into the Library of Congress, because she keeps not talking English. She is very big, very polyglot, very old, even older than I am by about 3000 years, and she weighs a lot.

Huh. If you asked me whether I’d rather be forced to read Heinlein or be forced to read Card, I’d take Card and be thankful. I can’t stand Heinlein’s “smart hot women serve the patriarchy and love it” routine, or the incredible smarminess of Stranger in a Strange Land. I think it’s tough to make a case that Heinlein is more “profound” than Card, since both are sterling examples of pseudo-profundity in its manifold guises.

Oh, hey, I can list a classy author I’ve given up on: Paul Auster, although my reasons have everything to do with ideology and nothing to do with quality. I was reading “In the Country of Last Things” on the Amtrak from Minneapolis to Chicago on a lovely winter morning in the late nineties when I happened across a creepy-snotty frat boy passage where the heroine reassures us that even though everything is a disaster and she and her lover are living in desperate conditions, they certainly do reserve their last remaining razor to shave her legs, because it’s just so sexy, giggle giggle. Up until then, I had been ignoring the relentless reminders that even in poverty, dirt and misery the heroine is just smoking hot. But I couldn’t take it any more, that perennial need to reassure a male audience that they aren’t wasting their time reading about some homely chick, because who would want to do that? Even if she was brave and talented and interesting and off on a crazy, foolish bizarre adventure, if the readers had to think of her with stubbly legs it would just…ruin the whole thing. And that’s actually the main reason I don’t read that Snowcrash/Diamond Age guy anymore–the constant nudge-nudge-wink-wink about just how attractive the main women characters are.

Oh, I forgot a big one: David Lodge. Loved the Changing Places-Small World-Nice Work trilogy, and the earlier books I’ve read have been good. But Paradise News had too much sentimentality, and Therapy I found sentimental and unpleasant. Lodge seemed so pleased about bringing that jerk to a happy ending. The reviews of his subsequent books haven’t made me want to pick them up; it sounds as though his protagonist are getting more unpleasant and he’s getting more invested in them.

I liked Nice Work fine, but haven’t ever felt inspired to reread it. In a sense Nice Work is a more serious novel, and I reread Trading Places and Small World for the academic comedy.
I also just think I like Phillip, Morris, and Percy as characters better than the characters in NW.

I can happily recommend “Thinks…” Give it a shot.

Piers Anthony.

The only Card I’ve read is EG. I was wondering what was bugging me about it when I learned that it was an expansion of a short story. That’s it exactly: it’s an excellent short story (I assume) with lots of tendentious and redundant padding. If he gets worse I certainly am not interested. I should check out the early stories, as someone suggested.

No one has mentioned Robert Stone, which must mean that no one was ever into him in the first place, because his later books are Just Awful, but A Flag for Sunrise had a big impact on me when I read it (20 years ago).

Hm. I read Ender’s Game as an adult, not as a kid. I liked it a lot but felt no urge to continue in the series. And I can’t say that any of my inner bullied-nerdness felt any connection with Ender’s torment, which was so openly deliberately engineered by adults as to seem entirely unlike the Lord of the Flies character of junior high life that I remember.

[Robert Stone’s] later books are Just Awful

When do the later novels start? I remember liking Outerbridge Crossing, then I read Children of Light (if that’s the one where they’re filming The Awakening) which I thought was hilariously self-important, and Dog Soldiers which is supposed to be The Great One and which I thought was a second-rate Elmore Leonard with pretensions (could you please stop pretending you have something to say about Vietnam?) I admit this may be a flaw in me, and I’ve like some of his short stories, but no more Stone for me.

124 posts and no-one’s mentioned The Greatest (according to one of those silly millenium polls) Writer Of The Twentieth Century, Tolkien? Loved “Lord of the Rings” when I was 12, but can’t understand why people keep going back.

Writers for grown-ups: Rushdie (started off bad, got embarrassingly bad) and, maybe, Pynchon (why 1080 pages? I have to cook dinner…)

Wow. I find myself agreeing with every author cited by others above (that I’ve read, which is most of them). I was a huge Card fan in my teens (A Planet Called Treason, Wyrms, EG and SFTD, particularly) and watching him self destruct has been particularly painful. As for Stephenson, I slogged through Quicksilver but have no real interest in going further. No interest in reading more Simmons, though I enjoyed his first trilogy at the time.

But beyond that, I have just recently realized that I’ve given up on ALL the writers that I have read. I still read a fair amount (http://www.webnesia.com/booksread.htm) and try to read pretty eclecticly, but it dawned on me the other day that while much of what I read might be rewarding enough while I’m reading it, virtually none of it sticks with me, none of it becomes something that I’d feel good about unequivocally recommending to someone else. Is it me? Has anyone else experienced this? I’ve been a reader my entire life and value books extremely highly…why aren’t they doing it for me anymore?

#126 (Miriam),

I never worried too much about Reginald Hill’s plots, or lack of them; his charm always lay in the characters, their interplay, the literary allusions, etc. But the going has become a lot heavier in recent (oh, say 8) years. Is every new Hill book 50 pages longer than the previous one, or is that just my imagination?

Okay, I was too quick to assume that’s Stone’s story was one of decline (I haven’t read Dog Soldiers). I’ve only read three: A Flag for Sunrise, which I really liked, and then two later ones which I hated: Children of Light (yes, that’s the one with the film) and Damascus Gate (apocalyptic self-indulgence). (For the record, the other one you read is called Outerbridge Reach, not “crossing”.)

122 made me laugh – yes, there should be a warning on the first Dune book: Stop Here, They Go Downhill Fast. I didn’t like the end of #3, so I skipped #4 and I thought I was done. But someone recommended #5 (Heretics), which takes place way in the future (w/r/t #4), and that one was fun (still no patch on #1 though). No interest in the others.

back in college some of us creative writing types thought a better question was which writers -didn’t- steadily decline after reaching an early peak. I think sustained success is probably a bad thing for a writer. one counterexample is Melville. haven’t read -Pierre-, but “Bartleby” and “Billy Budd” certainly are up to standard.

I’d propose Paul Auster. -The Invention of Solitude- is quite astonishing and -The New York Trilogy- is really good. Some decent stuff in the early 90s but of late I’ve given up.

I haven’t given up on most of the authors repetitively listed here (Pynchon, Stephenson, Gaiman, LeGuin, etc.)

I have nearly given up on Card: I still (foolishly) hold out hope for the Alvin Maker series to actually end some day.

I have nearly given up on Iain (M.) Banks. “The Algebraist” is resisting all efforts to distinguish it from any of his other novels, alas.

I gave up on LeCarre somewhere between “The Night Manager” and “The Constant Gardener,” though momentum led me to read up to that point. His Smiley/Karla books are classic, though.

I gave up on P. D. James long ago, during a book I can no longer remember the title of, when I realized I had read the same story in her previous ten books and no longer cared who dunnit.

I have not been able to finish Mary Doria Russell’s “A Thread of Grace,” so I may be giving up on her.

Le Carre’s “Absolute Friends” justifies his entire career.

Anybody who mentions Rushdie and Pynchon in the same sentence needs to live on a way tighter budget.

I seem to be the last person to have done that. I DO need to live on a tighter budget, now that you mention it, but the connection with Rushdie and Pynchon escapes me. (God, I’ve done it again!)