What I am saying is that there’s a difference between being negative about religion as part of the story you’re telling and writing a book to convince people that religion is wrong that you happen to include fillips of story around. I’ve certainly read plenty of books that are cynical about the subject of religion, including Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Douglas Adams’ work as notable examples. I can’t think of any (and I’m highly skeptical that I would agree the ones you list fulfill that criteria) that are the latter. As opposed to something like Left Behind that is, purportedly, a science fiction story about what happens in the wake of the Rapture, but is actually intended to indoctrinate readers in the specific premillenial dispensationalist views of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Now, that’s not me saying that there are none. The internet has enough bull-headed, die-on-any-hill-whatsoever atheist types that I’m sure someone’s written something of the sort. But I’ve not, to the best of my knowledge, run into such a work.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember James P. Hogan’s Code of the Lifemaker routinely bringing itself to a screeching halt so the human characters could talk about or demonstrate the awful horrors of faith.
For the most part what winds up stopping me from finishing a book is other books, especially library books. I only have three weeks before Cibola Burn vanishes from my Kindle account? I guess I’d better read that before I go back to my copy of Tooth and Claw. What do you mean I haven’t touched Tooth and Claw in six months?
As for what turns me off a book, the big one is unlikable protagonists. I remember deciding I needed to read some Alfred Bester, and really liking The Demolished Man, but being almost unable to get through The Stars, My Destination because Gully Foyle is such a monster for most of the book.
I notice that more in film: action film in particular wants me to cheer for this violent white man rather than those violent (sometimes non-) white men, but often seems to forget to say why beyond “because he’s the guy you met first and something bad happened to him”.
I think that you may have meant ‘echo-chamber’. I do hope that you did because that would make it such a beautiful typo. The idea of a Guardian reader having an eco-chamber instead just makes me grin.
Stuff which stops me reading a novel (or graphic novel for that matter):
- Unlikeable people doing incomprehensible things.
- Characters which I can’t engage with. I don’t need them to be ‘nice’ - I’ve enjoyed enough Judge Dredd, and he’s not exactly the sort of person you’d invite round for tea. But I’m turned off by entitled spoiled brats, or by people who I don’t care if they live or die.
- SF New Age acid trip prose. Reading about your acid trip is as dull as looking at your holiday photos. There might be the occasional flash of lovely imagery, but overall it is tedious and pointless because there is no context and no personal meaning.
- Stories where nothing happens. At length. If it is all character study and no conflict, I’m bored. If the conflict is twenty seven chapters for Janet to do “character development” about should she tell her mother she lost the necklace she gave her, I’m bored.
- Books where standard romance tropes make the main characters acts as if they don’t have a brain cell between them.
Books I would have stopped reading if I’d only known this would go on right to the end:
- Where the main protagonist has no agency and just gets led around by the nose by other characters.
- Where the main protagonist has no impact on the plot development, and if they had just stayed in bed all day, or gone on holiday to the Bahamas for a month, the events of the book would have played out exactly the same.
Things that make me roll my eyes and/or skip a few pages:
- Dream sequences. I fekking hate dream sequences. Visions and prophecies in a fantasy or historical religious setting, yeah okay, they are okay. But paragraph after paragraph of ‘meaningful’ hallucinatory drivel - no, no, no. Christopher Priest once did a marvelous sarky advice for writers article which included a writing exercise. It went along the lines of “You are in an aeroplane, it is attacked by a giant bird, and then you too turn into a bird and fly away together. Write about what you dream about that night.”
- Breasts. I do not want to know what the breasts of the female characters look like. (I would be prepared to forgive this if the author also described the arse and/or crotch of every male character. But they never do).
Oh, that reminds me of a couple other things that turn me off books:
- going on extended digressions about things I personally don’t find interesting and which the author is not capable of selling me on. I love some of Alan Moore’s comics, but then in things like From Hell and Promethea he tells me a lot of things about real world occultism that are dense, boring, and are of course in my estimation arrant nonsense. It’s certainly possible to discuss these ideas in an entertaining way - I like hearing about them as filtered through Robin Laws and Ken Hite on their podcast, for example. But I think Moore’s too much of a true believer.
- Using dialect, typography, or similar in a way that colors the whole book and makes it much more difficult to read. I bounced off Alan Moore’s book Voice of the Fire because it (at least to start with) is all told in a extremely difficult to parse made up “future” dialect, and I’ve pretty much sworn off Cormac McCarthy after reading The Road and discovering that he basically doesn’t use punctuation, at all. And I ultimately did finish House of Leaves, but I found that all the spiraling pages and doorways in the prose and stuff really just made the story much harder to read and follow and made me enjoy it less.
Reminds me, is “The Catcher in the Rye” any good? I tried reading it as a teenager, then discovered it was about a whining bastard who reminded me of the most annoying of my peers and put it down after a few chapters.
It’s very entertaining to read people describe the things that engage me in great detail as the things that turn them off.
Opinions differ, but Catcher does nothing for me. (This is the point at which we founder on whether we have the same tastes.)
Your impression as a teenager was my impression as an adult.
I’ve seen arguments that Holden Caulfield is being depicted as having undiagnosed depression and it’s a pretty accurate depiction, and…like, that’s quite possibly fair…but I still didn’t like him or the book at all.
I don’t think we need to encourage male teenagers to think that they’re the most important people in the world who should be given everything they want because adults just don’t understand.
Bad prose and gratuitous exposition, which often come together. It took me 20 years to finally enjoy Stephen King’s writing (always loved his stories and I’m a sucker for bad films, so never an issue getting my fix on screen). Tolkien and Gibson are unreadable to me.
Worth noting: I’m sensitive to this in all storytelling media.
I’ve been reading Gibson lately and thinking just how great a prose stylist he is. Different strokes, I guess.
I read Catcher… and Highrise on a holiday once. I really struggled to recognise a believable character in Catcher.
The Goldfinch did everything I wanted to get from Catcher but didn’t. Theo was more relatable*, and his motivation was clear in every decision he made, even when he made bad choices. And in being a longer book there was more gradual development rather than a whistle stop tour of adolescence.
I found Holden annoying, and maybe it’s just the difference in the times, but none of the stuff he did seemed like something a kid would do. Plus he was one note throughout. I liked the idea of Catcher, but it never caught me. I might read it again. It’s been so long since I’ve read it maybe I would soften to it more now.
*Theo was relatable to me at least… The only two times I’ve seen my younger self in a character has been Theo in Goldfinch, and Max in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. Both are savaged by the critics as spoilt brats. SO THAT’S GREAT!
Turns out Quinns was wrong; talking about all the popular things you don’t like is what we all really want to do! (judging by the popularity of this thread)
What I hate in writing is technobabble. Particularly because I like “sci-fi” as a setting, and obviously it’s more a problem there. I already know that “the space marines carries spritzers, which unlike traditional firearms, ejected a milimetre-wide einsteinium pellet through an electromagnetic rail at ultrahigh velocity by means of the tremendous energy contained in their ultraconducting micronised fusion cells…” That’s obvious! In space, you can’t fight with a shotgun, so you use a Space-shotgun. I only want to read what they actually do with it.
I actually read an article on a writing blog that claimed that the secret to “show don’t tell” is just to describe everything in excruciating detail. What material was the couch made of, etc. I feel bad that anyone should take this advice, because it’s the worst I’ve ever heard. The last thing readers want to know about is the material of the couch, unless it’s either mechanically significant (“they survived starvation by eating the genuine leather of the couch!”) or because the POV character is in a mental state where they would specifically note that themselves. Otherwise, you can just say that they sat on the couch.
The fastest I’ve ever put down a book was David Weber’s The Honor of the Queen, (which apparently was also part of a series? That didn’t help, but shouldn’t have hurt that much). The first sentence went like this:
The cutter passed from sunlit brilliance to soot-black shadow with the knife-edge suddenness possible only in space, and the tall, broad-shouldered woman in the black and gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy gazed out the armorplast port at the battle-steel beauty of her command and frowned.
Aside from “The… woman… frowned.”, I didn’t understand a single word in that sentence/paragraph. And I wasn’t about to. I did plod on, but felt just as lost through the first chapter and dropped it.
Otherwise, I can generally handle even “preachy” themes that I don’t agree with, though the book just mentioned seemed to have some weird agendas that made me like it even less. But only because I already disliked it was that actually a problem.
I’m told it’s great, but I detested it.
John Wick was a recent spectacular example of this for me, but perhaps the epitome was the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback.
My interest in John Wick was mainly focused on the economic system.
Payback was just horrible things happening to people I didn’t care about.