Other books.
I can’t just read one book at a time.
I am faithful in all things but books. 245 pages into a new hardback and a collection of short stories on the shelf looks at me wrong? I may not ever finish that book.
The dividends? Carry at least three books everywhere, never bored, new appreciation for the sunk cost fallacy, everlasting shame.
Yeah, influenced for sure. But while I have no intention of reading her stuff, my secondhand impression is that she would probably have disagreed with some of the places he goes with his take.
Goodkind died? Damn, hadn’t heard that. Read all of the Sword of Truth series, which were pretty good overall, but definitely very heavy handed in relating the author’s views as it went on (FotF especially).
Can I recommend John Le Carrie’s Absolute Friends? There’s a little bit of signposting without the main character realizing it towards the end but I think its well done. And the protagonist isn’t the smartest person in the room. The majority of it is character development. I love it. Don’t look at the wiki page, it’s less plot summary and more spoilers.
Yes it says it’s an ‘esponage’ book. I promise it’s not James Bond. I’m pretty sure there’s at least 4 different scenes featuring book keeping. Anyway, I’ll go look at The Goldfinch now.
I mostly stopped reading around the same time my job started feature dense technical documents. After forcing myself to keep reading all day the last thing I want to do when I get home is keep going, even if it’s a different story.
As far as what makes me stop in the middle of a book, I don’t really know anymore. If I stop reading it for a week or so because life happens I’m very very unlikely to pick it up again. Normally if I start something I’ll push through to the end. Maybe that also explains why I read less…
You’re not the first person I’ve heard of who’s had that reaction. Happily, it doesn’t seem to have hit me. For the past 33 years my work day has been copy editing (and thus reading) academic publications. But then what I do to relax is read. Often fiction, to be sure, but I’ve also read current scholarly and scientific books and various classics from writers such as Aristotle, Hume, and Keynes (I confess, though, I found Kant too much of a struggle). I have no idea why I don’t get fatigued with reading . . .
To be honest I’d probably give that one a shot too 
Then you should check out Kafka on the Shore.
I had this recommended to me by someone who loved it because for her it represented a beautiful take on modern America. I finished it but I was far from loving it, and I think the reason you hint at is probably a big part of why it didn’t work for me. Turns out what I really like reading is a grim take on America, so everything by Cormac McCarthy works.
I nearly gave up on the book I most recently read, which was His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet. A large part of the novel is written as if by the main character, and I found the writing style extremely unconvincing considering who it was supposed to be written by. But I ended up enjoying the book so I’m glad I pushed on.
What has stopped me from reading something like two novels a month or more is that I’ve stopped commuting and my routine has changed a lot, so I no longer listen to Audible for 10+ hours a week.
Here’s a challenge to people who enjoy reading books that push a political point. Read both of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite novel) and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (loads of people’s favorite [sic] novel). Then wonder why both are often listed in ‘best books of all time’, especially when those books are chosen by popular vote.
Try The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Or Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel. Or Chocolat by Joanne Harris. Actually lots of modern or modernish novels have plenty of negativity about religion, though maybe they don’t rant exactly. It’s generally harder to notice, and a more pleasant reading experience, when you already align with the point of view of the author, which might go some way towards explaining the apparent imbalance.
When I stopped commuting (public transport) about fifteen years ago, my reading almost stopped, because I’d had that block of time when I couldn’t really do anything else. I’ve had to set aside time for reading and now I’m back up to 100-200 per year. This year what I’ve been missing is audio-books on what’s usually several hours per week driving to and from gaming sessions.
I don’t mind authors with opinions I disagree with, but I don’t like a book to preach whether or not I agree with it. A setup that is clearly just there so that this is the only possible solution (the canonical example being The Cold Equations) feels like cheating. When everybody on one side of a political argument is a stereotyped villain… no, even if that’s the side I oppose.
I’ve recently given up on reading Clarkesworld because too few of its stories are ones I enjoy. All too often they take the form “here is a situation, a minor thing happens, and life goes on”; but A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has been written, and if all you have to say is “and it just goes on like this without anything much changing” then I’m not really interested in your story. Clearly many people don’t feel the same way.
People sometimes ask “why did you read (book X) if you hated it”, and my answer is always “I thought I was going to like it” – which of course is more annoying than just looking at a book and saying “not for me”.
I grew up with a strong bias against abandoning a book unfinished, but in recent years I’ve accepted that reading fiction is a thing I do for pleasure and there’s not much virtue in persisting with a book I hate. (This was certainly enhanced by the idea a friend of mind had a few years back to reread all the joint Hugo and Nebula Best Novel winners; I think everyone will agree that there’s some utter rubbish in there even if we don’t agree on which ones they are. I know because I’ve heard them talking about it that some people vote for the one Hugo-nominated book they’ve actually heard of, even if they haven’t yet read it.)
I blog-review everything I finish (sometimes they go into the “in brief, avoid” category), but at the end of the year I summarise the ones I didn’t. I think it’s reasonable to quote some of those here as examples of answers to the original question.
Lovesey, Peter: Stagestruck (2011): DS Peter Diamond has to investigate a case at the Theatre Royal, but theatres are his “worst nightmare” because of a childhood trauma. But two books earlier in The Secret Hangman (2007) he’s been entirely happy to spend time at a theatre. This smacks of an author who doesn’t care, and I suddenly find I don’t care either. A let-down in a series which until then I had mostly enjoyed.
George, Elizabeth: A Great Deliverance (1988). First of the Inspector Lynley series. Lynley the womanising toff cop is paired with Havers the ugly female prole cop; they will in theory solve crimes, if Havers can ever get over her hatred of herself, and coincidentally also of the perfect Lynley and of everybody else in this world that’s populated entirely by horrible people. Also, an American writes Britain, just a little bit off. This felt like the sort of dirty unpleasant crime book that was popular in the 1970s, badly dressed up as an imitation of the classics.
McCall Smith, Alexander: The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004). Isabel Dalhousie will eventually investigate the death she saw on the first page… eventually. But not until the author has proved beyond doubt that he’s in love with the look of his own writing as she bimbles along being vaguely unhappy while nothing terribly interesting happens for pages on pages on pages.
Christopher, Adam, The Burning Dark (2014). Desperately derivative skiffy horror that’s full of buzzwords (“psy-Marine”, “technetium star”, “lightspeed link”) that turn out to have nothing to do with the story. (The lightspeed link is faster than hyperspace across interstellar distances. The violet (!) light from the technetium star drives you mad. As far as I can tell from a skim, we never find out what a psy-Marine does that’s different from a regular Marine.) The planet-eating robot menace, which might be the basis for an interesting post-Berserker story, is wasted on an introductory scene. Heavily telegraphed villain, a handful of characters on a mostly-abandoned space station (plus a few hundred background expendables), random spookiness happening until it’s time for someone to die, a millennium-dead cosmonaut… look, I quite enjoyed the film Event Horizon, and very clearly Christopher did too, but that film was by any reasonable standard rubbish, and this book did not engage me.
Dudley Edwards, Ruth, The Anglo-Irish Murders (2000). I’ve been havering on this series for a while, but when everyone is a stereotype, the “humour” consists of repeating all the tired old stories about the Irish being lazy, incompetent, argumentative and on the make – the author is Irish herself, but that doesn’t make it any more funny – and everything else is about how anyone to the left of Genghis Khan is deluded and useless (also fat people are evil), I just get tired. Giving up on this series. (The remaining volumes deal with, no doubt “skewering”, a literary prize, American academia, and conceptual art.)
Olson, Karen E., The Missing Ink (2009). First in the “Tattoo Shop Mystery” series: Brett Kavanaugh runs a tattoo shop in Las Vegas, her brother’s a homicide detective, and someone goes missing after coming to her shop. I liked the way she picked up information by virtue of knowing about tattoos, but there’s a lot of preachiness about how tattoos aren’t just for That Kind Of Person, an equation of male homosexuality with being a wimp, and most importantly a main character who does nothing to gain my sympathy (and makes some very silly decisions).
Phillips, Louise, Red Ribbons (2013). Ireland, criminal psychologist, murdered schoolgirls. Too self-consciously Literary for my taste; a mystery story’s first job is to entertain, not to show off how clever the writer is at very great length. I need to care about the characters, at least a little bit; the actual psychology is at the TV show level of sophistication; and far too much is described at second hand rather than shown.
It depends on the skill of the author doing it. Robert A Heinlein notoriously does this in many of his novels, but in some of them I barely notice it (like in Glory Road), some it enhances the book (Starship Troopers), and for Stranger in a Strange Land it seems the bits people seem to read and quote most are the protagonist explaining his martian faith and customs.
On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of very hamfisted attempts which just annoy me.
One example which might help people decide where they stand on this is “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”. Neil Gaiman said he loved that book until the point he realised CS Lewis was trying to promote Christianity through the story. Me, I think it’s such a beautifully written piece of fantasy I would enjoy it whatever the author’s underlying intention.
I have a lovely Le Carre anecdote!
My mum did a small time book review thing to get free books. She falsely claimed Le Carre’s son, Nick Cornwell (pen name: Nick Harkaway), was the son of Bernard Cornwell.
Out of the blue she received this email
Hi!
I just wanted to say, because I know [the editor’s] been onto you and the text is now corrected to say “le Carré”, that it was a moment of sheer delight to read that I was the son of Bernard Cornwell. I should explain that dotted through my family’s home there are various articles trimmed from exalted print journals identifying dad as the author of one of Tom Clancy’s novels or attributing Smiley’s People to Len Deighton, and I feel as if I’ve come of age to have one of my very own. And it makes perfect sense - Cornwell is our family name, and I did ditch it for exactly this reason. In a bookshop in the Cotswolds I saw a whole damn wall of Bernard and Patricia - neither of them even distant relatives, so far as I know - and thought I’d never escape them, and started there and then trying to work out an alias.
Lest you think I’m being cheeky: I swear to you, without a shadow of snarkiness or slantendicular smirking, I will treasure the screencap I have of the original paragraph for ever more. I’m not sure if I can really convey it - you almost have to be me - but you’ve given me not only a lovely review but a bit of heartfelt pleasure and even some kind of mad author-offspring fulfilment. An unexpected benefice on a freezing Wednesday night as I wait for publication to hit me like an onrushing train.
Thank you. Cheers, Nick Harkaway
A thing I have heard a lot of people say is “I loved it as a child, then later (I noticed) / (someone told me) about the Christianising”. The message is very obvious once you know it’s there…
I read the whole series in my teens, not long before I went to college. Partway into The Last Battle I realized it was Christian.
I got it rather younger, when I was about eleven. And though I was not as thoroughly familiar with Christianity as some were at that age, I seem to remember that I started to find the allegory obvious and tedious in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
It’s worth noting that Heinlein explicitly wrote to at least one person who adopted the ideas in Stranger as a philosophy of life that his intent was not to teach that specific doctrine, but to ask questions and get people to ask their own questions and seek their own answers. (I read the three volumes of his letters back when we had access to the University of California Riverside libraries—though now we’ve acquired to complete works for ourselves.)
Though it does strike me, now that I know the history of the encounter between Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons, that there may be some influence from Aleister Crowley. Stranger does explicitly reference Crowley’s Book of the Law as one of the books Mike reads in exploring human religious beliefs.
I was told by a friend, years ago, that John Scalzi’s first novel was like Starship Troopers, but with the boring philosophical bits left out. I took a look at the sequel to that novel—Old Man’s War, I think it was—and couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I guess the boring philosophical bits were the part I liked.
That happened to me with the first sequel to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. I really enjoyed the portrayal of Holmes teaming up with an incredibly bright teenage girl in the first volume. But when he married her in the second volume it not only ruined that volume, but retroactively poisoned the first for me.
Though I have to say it was a bad sign in the first volume when a sum of money was cited in shillings and pence, in a way that made it clear that Laurie King thought that a shilling was 5d—before the Great War! That’s the sort of detail that shows the author didn’t bother to do any serious research. (Admittedly I learned how L.s.d. worked in elementary school, long before British currency was decimalized.)
I think Scalzi’s made a career out of writing good old fashioned space adventure while sanding off any sharp edges. He’s rewritten Piper’s Little Fuzzy; plot summary here. Whether or not you like the original (I do), I can see basically no virtue in rewriting it.
It had a vein of ‘Guardian reader echo-chamber’ running throughout in that smug “if everyone agreed with me, we’d have no problems, so I accept no accountability for what is going on. It’s someone else’s fault” kind of way.
I thought it was fitting using generic white upper middle-classed suburbia as the setting, whether that was intentional or not. It seemed like the intention was the Great American novel, but it hit wide of the mark. It was verging on being a climate change version of Get Out. I really wasn’t sure if Franzen was completely blinkered in his earnestness or acutely aware of the self-parody.
In the end I enjoyed how fantastical self involved it was, but no way could I take it seriously as a message.