Writing styles and books you gave up reading.

[silver_sun]

I know there are lots of different writing styles out there, and not all of them work for everybody, but most of the time when I start a book I do like to to try and finish reading it.

I'd actually wanted to read The Blade Itself for a while, touted as a realistic fantasy adventure it's the sort of thing that I read. The storyline might have been good, but the style of writing, ended up making me stop reading. I'm glad I borrowed it from the library as I would have been disappointed to have paid for it.

It's things like having multiple people talk within a single paragraph without indicating who is talking, bits of most paragraphs being italicized to show one of the characters thoughts, again without it always being clear whose and epithets everywhere.

This is just a small bit of it to show you what I mean.

“Excellent,” said Glokta. Practical Frost turned the document over. “And this is the list of your accomplices?” He let his eye scan lazily over the names. A handful of junior Mercers, three ship’s captains, an officer of the city watch, a pair of minor customs officials. A tedious recipe indeed. Let us see if we can add some spice. Glokta turned it around and pushed it back across the table. “Add Sepp dan Teufel’s name to the list, Rews.”
The fat man looked confused. “The Master of the Mints?” he mumbled, through his thick lips.
“That’s the one.”

I know that it's a very successful series of books (think there are about four or five in all now), so there must be a lot of people who do like this style of writing, but it wasn't for me.

So has anybody else come across a book where they might have liked the story but the writing style put them off? Or a book where the storyline perhaps was all that great but the writing style meant they kept reading?

Comments

[mickey-sixx.livejournal.com]

I'm like you, if I pick up a book I try to finish it even if by the end of it I haven't really enjoyed it. There have been a few I've stopped reading before the end but that's mainly been due to me squeezing them in in my lunch break. If I start a book in small bursts like that I find it really hard to get into so I end up dropping it. The only one that I can think of that I stopped reading due to the style was Fifty Shades of Grey. I got to Chapter 12 of book 1 before I realised what I really wanted to do was throw the book up the wall.

[excentric397.livejournal.com]

Life's too short and there are too many good books to waste time reading something you are not enjoying. I've come across a few here and there. Same with fan fiction. Not going to read it if I'm not really liking it.

[mcparrot.livejournal.com]

I was really disappointed with The Luminaries. It sounded like it had everything (except for the horoscope illusions)early New Zealand, goldfields, mystery, can't remember what else - plus it had won the Booker.

It was drear. And my mother thought so too. It had lots of beautifully crafted words. Lots and lots and lots of them, and the story got completely lost. Nothing happened. Well about three things did, but I can't remember what they actually had to do with each other at all. And that horoscope stuff. Went over my head completely. I mean there's clever writing, but clever writing that completely goes over the head of a reasonably intelligent and well read reader, isn't really clever to my mind.

Sadly, I bought it. So did my mother. It's on Kobo though, so I can't even share it or give it to you.

[aeron-lanart.livejournal.com]

I can't stand Stephen Donaldson as an author. Thing is, this isn't because he's a bad writer as I don't think he is, though he has a nasty tendency to use unusual words (first time I read one of his books I had to dig out a thesaurus) it's because a lot of his lead characters are utterly despicable and not likeable in the slightest, along with a strong misogynistic twist displayed by other characters in many of his stories. If he can make me dislike a character so much that I can't read the book, it's got to be fairly well written.

Having said that, I have about 11 of his books on my shelves but of those 11 I only really like about 3 of them - the others are series that have been abandoned due to my issues with them.

I find Cassandra Clare's style a bit too simplistic for me (I'm still struggling to finish book 1 of The Mortal Instruments - City of Bones) but my friends don't seem to have the same problem and insist she shouldn't just be lumped as a YA writer (while to me, her style means she most definitely is a YA writer). A simpler style isn't necessarily a bad thing, Mercedes Lackey is also essentially a YA writer, but I really enjoy her stuff.