While doomscrolling the apocalypse on Twitter this afternoon, I saw this intriguing Tweet…
G.F. Allen, I don’t know who you are, but since you asked…
Yes. I have finished a book and vowed never to read another word by the writer. There’s even a case where I have an autographed book by the author, as I bought the book from him at a convention some years ago.
I need to make something clear. I tend not to read books written by my friends. I’ll buy them, but unless they ask my opinion I generally won’t read them as I don’t want to be in a position where I say something honest but unpleasant. Over a decade ago, Dave Galanter extracted a promise from me to never read one of his books, not because he thought I’d be mean about something, but because he felt his writing would not withstand my scrutiny. I use the word “generally,” as it’s a blurry line; if a friend were to write a Lord Peter Wimsey novel or story collection based solely upon the public domain novels in the series, I would probably give that a shot. In short, it’s a situational thing — generally buy and collect, but not read. I don’t want to have to dissect a friend’s book.
Back to the topic at hand. Yes. I have read a single book by an author, and that was also the last book.
There was an instance several years ago, might have been before COVID, where I bought an ebook on the Kindle, and I wasn’t even 10% of the way into the book before I damned the author to the “never again” pile. I took a screenshot of one particularly egregious page and texted it to a friend. “Stop!” she said. “Don’t read any more!”
“But I paid five dollars for this! I’m not getting that back!”
The book did not get any better. I can’t even say I “hate read” it. I came to the conclusion the book was “pantsed” — written without any sort of plot outline, the plot developing as ideas came to the author in the writing — and, as it was self-published as an ebook, never edited. (The thing I screenshotted involved some basic knowledge that was horrendously incorrect. An editor would have caught it.) If the writer couldn’t even be bothered to care about his own work, why should I bother to read more? A quick glance at Amazon shows the book had a rating of over 4 stars, so maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe I was never the audience for this book in the first place.
There’s a long-running historical mystery series — I think it’s about fifteen books now — where I saw the then-latest at Books a Million here in York, thought it sounded interesting, and decided to start the series from the beginning. That was probably the wrong move, as the book felt less like a novel on its own than the pilot episode of a television series, as much of the book was about establishing the characters and the historical setting and the potential love interest and the main character’s desire to lose her virginity (she didn’t, at least not in this book), and only incidentally was their a murder mystery to be solved as it was very much a background element that the book suddenly went, “Oh, year, here’s this thing I have to solve since this is an historical mystery!” Stripped of all the pilot nonsense and reduced to the plot, the book would have shed at least half of its length, and might have made a decent novella. But alas, this book left me annoyed, and I never did read the second, or the third, or the eighth or ninth, whichever was the one that caught my attention that day up at Books a Million.
These are two examples — I’m being deliberately vague, I won’t “name and shame” — but there are others, and it’s not limited only to fiction.
I can be a picky reader.