Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I agree that it can be totally isolating! It doesn’t count as a romance REALLY but The Help was totally on my list for this one.

I’m going to be drawn and quartered for this, but Gabaldon’s “Outlander” was a biggie for me. After hearing everyone rave about this book, I tried to like it. Hell, I tried to actually READ the book, but with only minimal success. I gave up after the scene where he beats her and *enjoys it*. Don’t care about his back story, don’t care that this scene has more context to it, don’t care that that was how it was done back then. An ass is an ass. Plus the book was boring. Ass + boring = no Tonya.

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, is the big one for me.  Everyone loves it and it was a DNF for me.  It bored me to tears and I didn’t like Jamie at all.  Also, the Kim Harrison books.  I couldn’t get through Dead Witch Walking (again with the bored), but everyone sings the praises so much on this, I’m actually considering trying it again.

I would have to say Something Wonderful by Judith McNaught for 3 reasons 1)why would a rich and powerful duke like Jason be forced to marry a penniless nobody?  2)Jason is kidnapped and presumed dead for most of the book and it’s just skipped over, nobody is curious to find out what happened to him in all that time? 3)Alexandra was just too….twee?  She didn’t mind the tin locket from her lousy dad, took over running the household because her mom was too distraught, saved a duke, sprouted boobs and became the toast of the ton and I think took a bullet meant for her husband… I prefer a bratty heroine to a perfect one.  I just wish I didn’t remember so much of it!

It’s not one particular book per se, but I haven’t managed to get through a single Norah Roberts novel. She’s a romance genre goddess, I know, but her overly flowery descriptions predictably derail any interest that may have been built up by her characters or plot lines. I’m never going to be her biggest fan.

About As You Desire: I completely understand the criticism. You are absolutely right. And it didn’t bug me much. For whatever reason there are just some things that get under my skin and some that don’t. I think what those things are has more to do with my personality than the faults of a particular book. Books are generally imperfect (some more so than others) so I just enjoy what I can and pass on the rest.

The Psy books.  I have repeatedly tried to get into Nalina Singh (sp) books, because I can see that she writes well, but I just cannot picture her world.  I’ve read the first Archangel one and liked it, but then that series lost me too.  It’s frustrating because I am fairly intelligent, but I just don’t GET it.  I get confused about the world she’s talking about and then I put the book down and start cleaning.  And that’s just wrong.

I agree with you, Tonya. I did read the whole book, but the scene with Jamie beating Claire and getting turned on by it was when I realized that I would never read another of Gabaldon’s books. Also, Claire is, quite simply, an adulteress. She doesn’t even have any kind of reason for cheating on her first husband: after all, they’re on a kind of second honeymoon trip when the time travel happens!

Hated As You Desire… Love this post! Some other books I never got why everyone loved: Dream Man by Linda Howard (too graphic for me so I stopped reading. Which is weird because usually violence in books doesn’t bother me that much) and One Perfect Rose by Mary Jo Putney (too perfect… He’s not actually going to die and how fantastic, she can get pregnant. The characters annoyed me so much. This was my first Putney book and I’m afraid it’s turned me off her books forever. I do own a few of her other books so I will have to give one a try).

Thank goodness I am not the only one who does not like the Outlander series.  I have never read the books, but the synopses never really appealed to me enough to actually take it off the shelf and read.  I think it is the idea of a generational saga.  Just makes me tired thinking about reading it.

I also hate time travel in romance novels.  I just cannot suspend that much reality.  Maybe it just seems too obvious for me.  I do not know.  I just cannot read any book with time travel as a device.

There’s quite a little group developing here of people who are underwhelmed by Gabaldon!  I read to about half-way through Cross Stitch (which is what Outlander is called in the UK edition.  I think the first pages of the UK edition were also changed to correct historical errors in the original US edition relating to the UK in 1946, but I may have misremembered that). 

I didn’t give up because of a specific scene.  I chucked the book out chiefly because I was bored out of my mind and the damn thing seemed set to go on forever, but also because I heartily disliked the heroine, the hero and the prose style.

To be fair, I normally avoid time-travel stories, and I am less than enthusiastic about historicals of any period set in Scotland(*), but if the book is good enough (like Linda Howard’s Son of the Morning) I can still cope with those elements.

(*) This is not because I dislike Scotland but because I like the country: its reality, not the woolly romantic fantasy.

I have to confess that Lord of Scoundrels is one of my least favorite Loretta Chase books because I spent the whole book disliking the hero and wishing that Jessica would just give up on his bullshit.

I also never made it through Laura Kinsale’s Midsummer Moon because the heroine was too sheltered and childish, and the hero too controlling, for me to be anything but creeped out by their romance.

(Wow, I think this is my first comment here! But if I save anyone else from the same unpleasant surprise…)

I think the worst for me was “ShadowHeart” by Laura Kinsale.
The reviews I’ve seen have made a big deal about how ~weird~ the consensual BDSM sex is, often without even mentioning the fact that the hero rapes the heroine. On the whole he was so unforgivingly horrible to her to start with, and her reasons for deciding to like him so weak, that I couldn’t buy the romance at all. Admittedly, I only got halfway through before giving up.

Outlander/Cross Stitch for me too. Needed a jolly good edit!

After persevering for several books, I gave up Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series because, while enjoyed the plots, I found the historical inaccuracies too blatant to ignore. They refer several times to rescuing people from the Bastille (which was destroyed early in the Revolution and was a symbol of the old regime besides) and at one point the hero strikes a match. I don’t always have a problem with historical inaccuracy, but moments like those kept jerking me out of the scene. Also, the heroine in the frame tale starts investing in an imaginary relationship and naming future children after meeting the hero about four times. Such an appalling stereotype of the way women think.

I also couldn’t stand Lisa Kleypas’ Only With Your Love, which I’ve seen praised here. Too rapey, and I didn’t like either of the protagonists.

I would like the Roberts’ In Death series if they killed off Roarke. I like the REST of it…Eve, her constable, the crimes, the setting. But I kept hoping Roarke died. I quit on the series after one point where the angry sex (I think Eve had been flirted with by another man or something) crossed (for me, at least) became non-consensual.

Similarly, The Iron Duke (DNF) would have been a lot better if Rhys hadn’t been an ass. I flipped ahead, and he got better later, but by the time I quit, it was too late.

Love Loretta Chase’s Carsington Brothers books.

Loathe previous releases, including Lord of Scoundrel.

(ducting to avoid any objects being thrown my way).

I will definitely chime in with Outlander.  The book was so boring and repetitive.  It took me 4 weeks to finish and I had to read other books in between to break-up the monotony.  If Claire almost got raped one more time, I was going to scream.  Also, the plot was too loose and seemed to go on and on with no apparent direction.  Out of curiosity, I tried to read the second book, and put it down after 100 pages.

I also hated the whole beating her and liking it, but even more when she is not allowed to say no to sex.  It says something to the effect of, he would be gentle, but would not take no for an answer.  Even for the time period, I think if a man really loved and respected his wife, sex would be consensual.

The writing is just bad. 

Also, I read Mischief of the Mistletoe and loved it.  It was so sweet and tender and I fell in love with Turnip.  So, I tried to read the other Pink Carnation books and found myself bored.  I especially disliked the contemporary interludes.

I was working in a bookstore when “Bridges of Madison County” was so wildly popular.  I will give the book its just props - it made it’s way by word-of-mouth (rather than the more usual pre-release sales quantities…)  to #1 on the New York Times list BEFORE Oprah gushed over it.

I finally tried to read it.  DNF.  could barely start.  I remember wanting to toss the book (couldn’t, was at work, not mine…).  It was like trying to read a novel-length greeting card.  Sappy, treacle-y, ick, ick, ick.

I also DESPISE that the book is about adultery.  As a theory, I’m OK with fully-informed, fully-consenting playing around, but that was lying and sneaking.

I was told by an older woman (was 23 at time) “Oh, you’ll understand when you’re older”  which pretty much guaranteed that I would not.  I felt condescended to, and me? contrary much?  Heck Yes!

I have to confess that Lord of Scoundrels is one of my least favorite Loretta Chase books because I spent the whole book disliking the hero and wishing that Jessica would just give up on his bullshit.

Megs - I also didn’t like LoS but for the flip reason: I thought Jessica was a stone cold bitch. Any time before the invention of penicillin, you do NOT shoot somebody unless you are prepared for them them to die from the infection. Period. Everybody is always like, “Oh, she shot him, GIRL POWER!” whereas I keep thinking “I hope they get all the fragments of shirt fabric out of the wound before it turns gangrenous.” 

Even if you ignore the risk of infection, remember that you can’t really AIM a pistol that well in those days. She could just as easily have gut-shot him. How romantic would it have been to see Jessica nursing Dain not through an adorable Poor Widdle Arm Wound but palliatively, until he died from a septic perforated colon?

Guns are not toys. Guns are deadly and dangerous and I refuse to cheer for somebody who shot another person because it was the feisty thing to do. I’m a little hazy on the chronology, but when she pulled the trigger, she had to have decided the icon thing, or the brother thing, or the compromising thing was a death penalty offense, and that makes Jessica a terrifyingly narcissistic sociopath.

LIsa, I felt the same way about “Bridges.”  Was not sympathetic to the main characters at all. 

I cannot get into Kristan Higgins.  Everyone raves, but I DNFd “Catch of the Day” out of a combination of boredom and wanting to smack the heroine upside the head.

There are SO MANY that I don’t like that other people seem to love.  Just off the top of my head…Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, Debbie Macomber, most of them are contemporary authors, and I prefer historicals… but Nora Roberts has 6 freakin’ shelves at the library in the romance section (she’s got more in the regular fiction… and I think 3 or 5 in the mystery section under J.D. Robb) and I just don’t get it.  I’ve tried reading (or have read) many of her books - and just don’t understand the appeal.  Although kudos to the book cover designer for her Vows series.  Those books were PRETTY.

Also… like the original OP historical inaccuracies don’t bug me.  What I dislike, in historicals anyway, is when the girl is SO spunky it’s jarring.  Can’t think of any specific examples at the moment.  And, it’s not like I don’t like spunky heroines… but there is DEFINITELY a line.

Julie Garwood, for me.

She’s really good, and I get why other people like her, but…the Naive Frightened Virgin Heroine thing just makes me throw books across the room. It’s sex, Sparky; people have it every day and survive; the inevitable OMG AN ERECTION I SHALL DIE freakout just makes me want to shake the girl until she gets a grip. (Or visualize the hero as John Holmes, which is…not a good mental image. At all. Ew.)  I know they’re historicals, I know sex ed sucked back then, but the NFVH…I can’t identify, and I can’t really sympathize. Garwood is far from the only historical writer who does that trope, but she’s the one that stands out most in my mind—maybe because I’d find it so easy to like her otherwise.

Well, most of you know me by now and how I can’t stand historical inaccuracies. Not because they are, but because every time I read them, I stop reading with a “They wouldn’t say that” or “They can’t do that.” So it breaks in to my reading experience. I’m sad to say that the vast majority of historical romances seem to be the inaccurate kind.

So leave that alone. I can’t read Nora Roberts, mainly because of the head-hopping. Or to be more accurate pov shift, because you do know whose head you’re in. But I can’t do it. It’s like watching a tennis match. And I’ve tried, lots of times.

I originally came to the US for my romance fix because I can’t like the saga, the historical novel that is, or was until recently, big in the UK. It’s misery right up to the end, where the happy ending kicks in. So popular they edged out all over books for years.

Not many romantic comedies work for me, especially when they’re of the slapstick variety. I can appreciate that Laurel and Hardy are very clever comedians, but they don’t make me laugh.

Put me down as another Outlander disliker. That book was too damned long and it was deeply boring. To me.

Secret baby books. I know they’re popular, but I can’t be doing with them, even from my favorite authors. But I keep reading them, just in case the author pulls it off this time. Two things - the father has a right to know, and maintenance needs to be claimed, if only for the child’s sake (in the UK you have no choice. If you claim benefit, then they will insist on knowing the baby’s father and dinging him for maintenance).

The Iron Duke, although I suspect that the hype was so huge by the time I actually settled down to read it, that I expected too much.

Does anyone find the other thing? When you love a book that you’re supposed to like, one that has received universal hatred? Or one you know you’re not supposed to like, because it has a theme that’s distinctly non pc? Me? Oh yeah. But I’m not telling. It’s my guilty secret…

Sorry about the generalisation in the first para of the last. I didn’t mean it to sound like that, honestly. I’m sure the authors try very hard, and please, give them British editors! I have US editors for my US character books, and without them, I’d be just as bad, although I try very hard to get it right.

I could not DNF Thea Harrison’s Dragon Bound and Gail Carriger’s Soulless fast enough. Such abysmal writing, I’ve lost all respect for anyone who recommended them.

The Iron Duke might have made an excellent girl-detective adventure. Hated the romance. Particularly hated the rape-her-til-she-likes-it oral scene that nobody else seems to have a problem with.

Not romance, but I’m not in with The Hunger Games. It drove me bats. Sure, it was fast-paced and tightly written, but I didn’t buy the world building and Katniss was not relatable. She MIGHT have been when I was 15, but I know plenty of women in their 30s (and beyond) who enjoyed this book. Not this woman.
I’m really over coldness/fightiness=strength. I deployed it in a long story I wrote at 17. It just strikes me as juvenile, appropriate for the story or not.
But really…my big sticking point remains the world building, and maybe it gets more apparent in the later books that the gov’t and the wealthy districts really are as dark and decadent as we’re told they are, but that was not the impression I got. Thus, the whole “make your kids fight to the death” thing never seemed plausible.

I’m also going to wave at the Outlander crowd. :) I remember blogging while I was reading it something to the tune of: “This book in a nutshell—Oh, Scotland is beautiful. No. YOU are. No YOU. Let’s bone.” Gabaldon clearly loves her characters, but writes about them in a very self-indulgent way. I just never cared.

@Megs:

I also never made it through Laura Kinsale’s Midsummer Moon because the heroine was too sheltered and childish, and the hero too controlling, for me to be anything but creeped out by their romance.

Yes!!! This is the one book that irritates the crap out of me, because I went into it expecting great things and it didn’t happen. Everyone raves about Kinsale, and I had never read her, so I picked this one up for starters. It’s not that the story wasn’t well written, because it was, it was just STUPID.

You have Love Potion #9; a hero who rapes the heroine under the influence, but then tries to do the right thing and marry her. (She wasn’t even fazed. She was designing a flying machine in her mind while it was happening!!! Great start to a relationship. This usually happens after you’ve been in one for a while and are going through the motions.)

You have a TSTL heroine, who lives in a fantasy world, and manages to get herself kidnapped, not once but twice. You have a hedgehog (who seems to have started a fad for hedgehogs as plot bunnies) who only shows up to advance the story. You have a hero who tricks an amnesiac heroine into marriage. You have an entire house full of the hero’s family and employees (who depend on him for their upkeep) going out of their way to deceive him (and demolish his ballroom) after being told not to help Merlin build her flying machine.

I especially did not like the way Merlin walked around with blinders on, single-mindedly focused on her one goal, and did not change or grow at all by the end of the book, while everyone else, including the hero, eventually bent over backwards to accommodate her. (And that seems to be one of things people love so much about this book—how much he was willing to change for her. What about her changing for him?) Her response, when he says she can build all the flying machines she wants—“Oh, I’m done with that. Now I’m going to build a space ship.” She doesn’t need a husband, she needs a keeper. I never got the feeling that she loved him. He was just deep pockets and a means to an end.

Not the least bit BITTER, am I? I probably would have been less so, if I’d had a book to pitch across the room. But I read it as an e-book on my computer. Deleting it’s not quite the same thing.

Unlike most paranormal romance fans, I was not totally WOWed by Thea Harrison’s Dragon Bound. It was…ok. Readable, nothing special.

Also Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling books (love the Guild Hunter ones). I just couldn’t get immersed in the Psy-changeling world.

I kind of hate Lora Leigh’s writing. I’ve tried two separate series by her now, and I’ve realized I just don’t care for hers style—but I know to some people she’s like CRACK.

Oh there is more…J.D Robb’s In Death books—loved the first three, then I abruptly stopped caring. I am not a fan of murder mysteries in general.

Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books. And God knows I tried. But the early ones bored me and the later ones were all sex (which you’d think would be a good thing), I just found them gross and pointless.

OH! This one’s kind of obvious—Twilight. I love vampires, I love angst, I love YA, so wouldn’t you think I’d be a Twilight fan? Nope. I find the heroine TSTL, the love triangle contrived and annoying, and the plot generally uninspired.

Wow, I didn’t know I had that much book hate inside me…

Wow, I never expected Outlander to receive so many votes, but I’m kind of relieved because I wasn’t a big fan either.  The whole beating thing, the ridiculous barehanded wolf-killing and the tedious ending.  Pass! 

Also, I’ve never been able to read Bet Me.  I read an excerpt of the first chapter, and the whole idea of the bet made me uncomfortable.  I didn’t know if I could root for a hero who would take a dare like that, even if he does get his ass handed to him at the end.

Pink Carnation was a DNF - it wasn’t the historical inaccuracies - I don’t necessarily expect historical romances to be accurate - I think it was the time travelling.  I did read a number of the Outlander series - I wasn’t prepared to spend money on them, but borrowed from the library.

I canNOT get into ANY Mary Jo Putney. I read The Rake and the Reformer and barely got through it, but reading anything else sounds like white noise in my head—drives me nuts. Can’t do it.

Jenny Crusie’s books are brilliant and I can read them as a scholar, but I don’t necessarily enjoy them.  Her heroes are ciphers and her heroines are all the same.

I don’t like steampunk at all. By anyone. I just think it’s silly.

Do NOT understand the Kelley Armstrong love. I tried Bitten and almost bit my own arm off in boredom. And that was way before I was done with werewolves. Everytime SB Sarah sings its praises, I try again and then have to stop myself gouging out my eyes.

OMG I am SO glad to see other people voice dislike of Midsummer Moon. After reading the reviews of it here, I really expected to like it, and I just couldn’t. deal. As far as I could tell, Merlin was an ... um, is there a more appropriate term these days than “idiot savant”? B/c that’s quite offensive, but I don’t know what better term there is. The hedgehog was the only redeeming feature. And I am still irritated by the ending and the flying to the moon thing.

(Also glad to see someone else complain about the historical inaccuracies in The Pink Carnation series. I’ve gone on about these ad nauseum, and they really bug me b/c Lauren Willig KNOWS BETTER.)

And how delighted am I to get further reinforcement for my refusal to read Outlander? TOTALLY DELIGHTED.

Hm. I comment here again after a 2-year absence, and seriously, could I sound more like a teenaged girl? I charge myself with capslock abuse.

Nora Roberts is the big one for me. After forcing myself through a couple of her novels, I got really irritated at the recycled characters, the absurdly over-the-top evil guys, and, well, just about everything else about the books.

Teresa Medeiros is anothe one. I read the plot summaries of her books and say, “oooh, this looks really interesting” and then end up throwing it against a wall. No really. I have done this over and over again, trying to force myself to like them because they have such promising premises. At this point, I’ve pretty much given up and decided not to keep trying, no matter how interesting the back cover is.

Similarly, I’ve also pretty much given up on Candace Camp. I want to like her work, I really do… I just can’t seem to get into it.

And I’ll add another vote for Outlander. It was just too absurd… and rapey. Ugg.

For me, it was Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten.  It seems like everyone else loves this freakin’ book, but I found the heroine dour and the hero downright creepy, not to mention totally unversed in the concept of “boundaries”.  My review
here.

(Not that any of those characteristics bothered me in Karen Marie Moning’s hero Barrons, but there you go.  I’m no slave to consistency.)

(waives hand at the anti-Outlander crowd) Hi, there! May I join the party? I couldn’t get into it either.

I also don’t care for Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books, or the Stephanie Plum books. The best I can say is that their sense of humor isn’t mine.

*waves* One more for the Outlander crowd.

And Darkfever - I have read “barbie” characters before that were charming to read.  Mac just made me want to yell at her.  (there were other issues as well, but that was the main one).

And Twilight - had some real problems with the messages being sent in those books considering the primary audience.  And I didn’t like the writing style.  Plus, and this is important - VAMPIRES DON’T GLITTER!

In the romance genre, I can’t do the “In Death” series at all. I’ve tried a couple of times (pre spouse & kid) and failed horribly. I haven’t tried in a while and maybe now I’m in a different spot in my life and I’ll be able to do it. Hm.

The biggest one that gets my blood flowing, steam curling out my ears and the berserk button pushed is any time anyone brings up Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series as great epic fantasy. I got to book five before I through it across the room and said “the man’s never going to finish this in any way that makes sense!” It hit my other pet peeve of having a series that goes from being three books, to five, to seven to never being finished. I’m all for world building, I’m even for world building with trilogies where you pick the next main lead from one of the earlier trilogies (I’m looking at you, Mercedes Lackey, Jacqueline Carey)...but this never ending dragging it out because you weren’t able to write clearly enough? You’re dead to me. [maybe that wasn’t a good choice in wording…but leaving it]

captcha: maybe GRRM will finish ASoIaF before(I’m)73?

Not romance, but I’m not in with The Hunger Games. It drove me bats. Sure, it was fast-paced and tightly written, but I didn’t buy the world building and Katniss was not relatable. She MIGHT have been when I was 15, but I know plenty of women in their 30s (and beyond) who enjoyed this book. Not this woman.

Oh, thank goodness, I thought I was the only person on the entire PLANET who did not just love the Hunger Games trilogy. I thought the first book was okay - not mind blowing - and couldn’t even make it through the second book because I got bored. I am planning to see the movie - sometimes the visual helps.

I’m also not a big fan of the Nora Roberts ouvre, which seems to be about 50% of all romances written in the entire history of paper. I’ve tried several of her genres - historical, contemporary, paranormal and even J.D. Robb incarnations - and just can’t manage to find the love. But props to her for her success. She’s clearly doing something right for so many people.

Catronia - just to clarify the hero doesn’t actually make the bet.  Everyone just thinks he does.  (not trying to convince you to read a book you don’t want to - but if that’s the only thing holding you back…)

Actually, speaking of Crusie (whom I normally love) I didn’t even finish Wild Ride.

@ Lynne

So leave that alone. I can’t read Nora Roberts, mainly because of the head-hopping. Or to be more accurate pov shift, because you do know whose head you’re in. But I can’t do it. It’s like watching a tennis match. And I’ve tried, lots of times.

Thank you! I am glad someone else is bugged with the head-hopping by Roberts. I hate it when I don’t know whose thought it was, and I have go back to reread it. A tennis match indeed. Don’t want to read anything else by her again.

couldn’t get into the Outlander at all either… so happy I’m not alone.

non-romance “you gotta read it” was The Firm…  Guy was a big jerk and got himself into his own mess.  made myself finish it, what a waste of time. 

Apparently, I do not care for protaganists who can’t keep their freaking pants up when already committed

anything that includes a rape scene is an automatic DNF, “old skool” or no.

Here’s my list (both romance and not)
Nora Roberts - tried reading a few novels but couldn’t finish. Same goes for Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Mary Higgins Clark - I’ve actually read a lot of her books, but in most of them I found myself frustrated with the heroine and her attempts at solving the mystery.
Also, I just couldn’t force myself to finish Minion (1st book in the Vampire Huntress series). Subsequently I dropped the series altogether. I still don’t know why that is. But the whole thing just seemed to drag on and on and didn’t engage me. Same could be said for the Dresden Files. Although I did finish book one, Storm Front because I wanted to solve the mystery. But the world the books are set in didn’t really grab my attention enough to move on to book two.
Oh, and as for the Outlander. I wanted to read it but decided to check out the reviews on Goodreads. After reading a couple of detailed 1 and 2 star reviews with highlights on why the reviewers didn’t like the book I decided to spend my money on something else.

Jennifer Cruisie.  I’ve tried a few of her books on the advice of various posts and comments on this site and I just can’t quite warm to them.  I can’t even define quite what it is about them I don’t like but they’re not for me.

In non romance (although I suppose it is sort of a love story) - One Day by David Nicholls.  Everyone I know absolutely raves about this book.  I read it a couple of years ago and had to force myself to finish it.  Hated both the characters and the plot was so predictable and just really dull.

A lot of people liked “Loves Me, Loves Me Knot,” but I could not get passed the fact that the female lead drugged her ex then had sex with him in order to get pregnant after he specifically told her he did NOT want kids. That’s called “rape”. Women complain when men aren’t honest, but when they are honest, they get selfish and push the envelope like this? Please, that plot was so bad, I just could not get passed it. Also, the friend in the book trashed her boyfriend’s apartment, his hummer and stole his dog because she thought he was cheating. Nothing loving in that woman at all.

I may have to duck a few rotten eggs, but the whole Regency era groups-of-marriage-avoiding-noblemen subset? Meh. I’m over it. If there’s a sudden surge of noblemen keen to make good matches, I’ll be browsing the pirate and medieval books.

I was born without the contemporary gene, so while I admire Nora Roberts’ career, I’ve read through her official companion twice and not found one book (summary) that sparked my interest, so I think I’ll pass.

When I was in Star Trek fandom, I gave Imzadi by Peter David a double thumbs down; it didn’t work for me on any level, but is a huge, huge favorite with others.

I DNF Outlander.  Didn’t like the adultery and it just bored me. I made it about 100 pages in before I closed it and didn’t open it again.

I liked the story of the only Nora Roberts book I read, but the headhopping drove me mad, so I didn’t try any others.  That’s just my pet peeve.

I did like Lord of Scoundrels, but I think you do have to take it unseriously to enjoy it.  Most of what happened in that book is highly unlikely, but the characters both charmed me in their own ways, so I wanted to see them be happy and loved.

@Kerry Allen

I could not DNF Thea Harrison’s Dragon Bound and Gail Carriger’s Soulless fast enough. Such abysmal writing, I’ve lost all respect for anyone who recommended them.

I can understand not liking Dragon Bound (I actually couldn’t get through it myself), or not liking Gail Carriger’s Soulless, but to lose all respect for anyone who recommends them?  That’s pretty damn harsh - there are going to be a lot of people who you are going to lose respect for then, including me.  I really enjoyed Soulless.  Not sure I want your respect anyway…

I’m glad I’m not the only one who DNF The Iron Duke.  I got bored about 1/3rd of the way through.  I keep trying Meljean Brook’s books because her blog postings are usually HILARIOUS.  Her photochopped cartoons have me rolling.  But I just can’t get into her books.  :-(

I also didn’t get The Hunger Games.  Oh well.

I haven’t read Outlander yet and I’m not planning to anytime soon. But the one very famous series I hate is Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series. I tried to go through the first book twice. First time I tried to read in library - it has never failed me - but I was so bored that I started reading manga I’ve already read twice. I checked out just in case but just couldn’t get through. So I returned and checked it again a month later. Same. It was so mind-numbingly boring. And this time I had it for 42 days. So I dropped it.

Second is the Succubus Diaries by Jill Myles. I managed to get through the first book but it seemed very unoriginal, nothing interesting and the lame love triangle. All in all, a fail. I’ve had friends recommending this book for ages.

This is so much fun.  I also didn’t like Lord of Scoundrels, I thought the relationship was too one sided - Jessica gives and gives and he doesn’t give much in return.

Also, Interview with the Vampire.  When that came out, all of my friends LOVED it and I really tried to like it.  Anne Rice writes beautifully, lovely sensual language, and it really bothered me that what she was writing so beautifully and sensually about was death and murder.  Ugh.

In fact, I avoid most vampire romances because I just don’t like combining sex and death - the death part takes me out of the romance.  Every once in awhile I’ll try another vamp rom and I always have the same reaction.

Yes, Chelsea, yes!

“Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books. And God knows I tried. But the early ones bored me and the later ones were all sex (which you’d think would be a good thing), I just found them gross and pointless.”

I went to school with LKH (k-12) so when I discovered her pic on the back of a book, I bought the whole Anita Blake series. How can subject matter so strange end up so boring? How can such kinky sex scenes leave me cold? Sheesh.

Also, I do not like historicals. At all. Just don’t like them. About halfway through I get itchy for something to happen that isn’t near-rape or hand-kissing or some gorgeous virgin being sold into marriage to save the family’s honor (aka, provide a comfy living for a drunken dad, uncle, brother).

Ahhhhh, that feel’s good to admit. ;)

Minion was a DNF for me after just a few pages. I might have given it more time if I wasn’t in a reading crunch, but the writing style just wasn’t working for me. I like Lord of Scoundrels ok, but it’s not my absolute favorite - I like Your Scandalous Ways much better.

For me Gena Showalter lots of reasons:

But on the research thing: if you are going to use real places by a map, look on line. If you want a real general place but don’t groove on research then make the town’s roads, and such imaginary. Don’t use a real town and then place it completely off course.

Why, if like MASH’s Hawkeye Pierce’s hometown of Crabapple Cove,  Maine doesn’t exist that’s fine.  They could use the general idea of “Maine.” or if the Empire Falls in Empire Falls is a fake place fine. Once you place an imagined place on a map, get the locations of the places around it right. But if the town and business names are going to be real then do some research for heaven’s sake. The people who live there can read you know. And being wrong about real places is at best funny and at worst an insult. Either way, the lack of simple facts being factual is distracting.

Think of it this way. If a person makes up a religion or even makes up a pretend sect then we have varying degrees of expectation. BUT if a person were to have a Hasidic character and then act as if he were Reformed or even Orthodox. I would be annoyed by the poor research and if I were a member of the faith I would be ticked off.

My mother and I have about opposite taste in books but I have to suffer through a lot of those listed above anyway because she insists on relating to me, in detail, about the book she is currently reading. If you hated Outlander try receiving a rather disjointed summary of it every few days. Maybe it’s just the way my mother summarizes but Outlander sounded like some sort of torture porn. I love my mother dearly, but she is no storyteller and I’m sure makes all the books sound even more opposed to my taste than they actually are.

I dislike Lisa Kleypas’ historicals. It’s mostly a style and voice thing, where her writing just leaves me lukewarm, but she also couldn’t keep her characterization straight in the Wallflower series, and that just drove me batty. Somewhere in the third book I realized that I was grinding my teeth way too hard, so I decided not to read any Kleypas anymore.

I did like one of her contemporaries, but not enough to convince me to try another one.

I just can’t get over the fact that an author so well liked, loved and admired should be a good enough writer to keep her characters consistent throughout a series.

Another one, though maybe it’s more UF than romance is the Night Huntress series by Jeanine Frost. If you write in first POV you have to make sure that POV is someone the readers can root for. I really can’t see how the rest of the world can get past the incredibly annoying stubborn obnoxious blech person Cat is. She drove me so crazy I didn’t even skip to read the sex scenes, but just couldn’t give away my copy fast enough. How anyone can enjoy being stuck in her head, it really boggles my mind.

We’ve gotten this far and nobody’s mentioned Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter series?

I tried this after numerous rave reviews and within the first chapter of the first book, the heroine, WHO IS A SEX THERAPIST, says she’s creeped out by vibrators.

Girl, bye.

This one isn’t really a romance per se, but Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which most people seem to love, left a bad taste in my mouth. First of all, I never got the sense that Janet and Thomas gave a damn about each other; I think Janet ended up a frustrated, pill-popping Seventies housewife, Thomas shagged every teen girl with a pulse, and they ended up hating each other and their child for ruining their lives.  Second, I felt lectured and condescended to by the author, in an obnoxious, “I’m so clever; defer to me; if you don’t then you’re an idiot” kind of way.
And second (or third or fouth, now) for Midsummer Moon; the idea of a high-functioning autistic being taken advantage of by a rapey douchebag wasn’t funny; it just turned me off.

Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books.  The first one was okay, so long as I ignored that whole part with Bubba and the using vampire blood to help heal after tearing Sookie’s hymen.  I read the second and couldn’t continue with the series.  Sookie constantly needs Bill or Eric to come and save her and is, apart from her ability to read minds, pretty much helpless and nothing special.  And after seeing how many books there are, I just couldn’t keep up with that idiocy.  Loving vampires and werewolves doesn’t mean I’ll take them any way I can get them.

And it’s not romance, but my boyfriend who usually has the same tastes as me in books tried to get me started on S.M. Stirling’s the Change series (alas, it’s not about menopause).  That might not be the title of the series, but I do know the big event that happens in the first novel (fire stops working, essentially—no combustion engines, no guns, no electricity, etc.) is called the Change.  Anyway, I got a hopping six pages in and had to stop (yes, I looked).  One of the heroes was a complete tool.  Some ex-military pilot who was ogling his client’s 18 year-old daughter before their flight, and I was supposed to like him.  Then there was the pagan singer who said, “Oh goddess!” every other sentence and reminded this pagan of too many insufferable idiots she’d met in her time.  And I was supposed to believe this woman was going to go on to run her own compound, but she was too much of a, as we say in some circles, “fluffy bunny.”

And my feminist self enjoyed Outland as a guilty pleasure, and I do recognize its problems.  I didn’t read more than the first book though, and may not enjoy it as much on a re-read a few years later.  The hate is justified and I can’t defend my enjoyment at all.  I just liked it.

*whopping six pages in

Lovely typo!

Anything Nora Roberts. I’ve suffered through 8 of her novels. Story inconsistencies. All of her characters have the exact same voice, and use the same strange phrases, and WTH are LONG eyes? I always think cartoon beagle when I read that - which I don’t think is anywhere near the reaction the author intended for readers to have.

Oh, yeah, and Kim Harrison’s series—read the first one, couldn’t be bothered to pick up the rest.  The heroine was too dumb to live, and the worldbuilding was just sloppy.  I mean, didn’t it occur to anyone to just cook the tomatoes?  Come on!  And a worldwide pandemic results in a total ban on medical research?  I should think it would do exactly the opposite.  That one really was an eye-roller for me.

Jayne: Oh god, I read Dark Side of the Moon and barely finished it.  The heroine was a former investigative journalist who won some prestigious award before her reputation was damaged beyond repair and she was stuck working for some Weekly World News-esque tabloid.  I know this because it was brought up at every given opportunity again and again.  Oh, and the goth chick who used deadjournal, though I’m still not sure the author or editors knew that’s an actual website (or was).  Oh, and finally, the heroine was allergic to the hero, but only if his hair wasn’t pulled back (see, he was a cat shifter and she was allergic to cats).

Yeah, I couldn’t bring myself to read another Kenyon book after that.

How about Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught? So many people rave about that book—it was even re-written and re-issued a few years ago—and I hated it. The hero rapes the heroine. That’s really all I need to know about a book.

Jennifer Crusie and Kristan Higgins really don’t do it for me.  Also I loathe and despise Julia Quinn’s books with a passion.

I can quite see that Outlander wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, but I’m surprised to see so many people citing adultery as one of the reasons they didn’t like it.  If your husband isn’t alive, how can you be unfaithful to him?  And second, if you think it’s adultery, then presumably it would actually be bigamy rather than adultery.

@Jade: Oh, see, I like the Change series—though Sterling seems to write one love interest per trilogy that I cannot stand OMG SHUT UP SIGNE AND MATHILDA HAAAATE—but Juniper’s swearing just bugged the living hell out of me. Sterling, dude, I love you, but profanity doesn’t work that way.

@RebeccaJ: Ewww. I haven’t read the book, and now never will. Cheating as justification for physical harm or property damage is an instant DNF for me, now that you mention it.

What else? Historical inaccuracy doesn’t bug me except in language—if your Regency hero sounds like a California surfer dude, it grates. (And I’m pretty sure “boyfriend” and “bimbo” did not come into common use before the 20th century, so please avoid.) I don’t hate vampires, but I’m not that interested in them either. And I cannot read about were-anythings as heroes. Too much time in too many corners of the Internet; the associations are either comical or icky.

No rape. At all. Ever.

60-odd posts and nobody’s mentioned The Name of the Wind yet?  Okay, it isn’t really a romance, but I feel like the only person on earth who isn’t over-the-moon in love with this book.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay, but terribly repetitive, not much of anything really happens, and the characterizations, especially of the supporting players, are weak.  It’s really a 200 page novel crying out for multiple rewrites and a ruthless editor.

As a writer, I am finding this thread a complete delight. If people can dislike so many best-selling authors, then if someone doesn’t like my books, I’m in good company. (Just incidentally, I loved The Grand Sophy - every book has its fans.)

I’d actually be better able to create a list of books I do like, rather than don’t. It would be shorter. So I’ll just toss in the things that make me want to throw the book across the room:

* head-hopping, yeah. Love Nora, but there’s a good reason for the writing rule that says to maintain a POV through a scene!
* historicals that pour every bit of the author’s considerable research upon your head, at the cost of such unimportant things as pacing and characters.
* historicals where the characters speak in “accurate” dialog. May be accurate, yeah, but it’s also incomprehensible, which makes it a tad difficult to get involved with the characters.
* bad grammar. Commas do exist for a reason.
* inaccuracies of common sense. I can handle the Duke of Porsche, but I can’t deal with being able to tell a person’s eye color in the dark, or someone yelling out a long narrative explanation while running.
* obvious attempts to engage my sympathies. Don’t kill off someone just to make me feel sorry for the hero.
* heroes or heroines who are continuously persecuted. (Dorothy Dunnett, I’m looking at you.) This is even worse when the persecution doesn’t bring out any strength or action in the character.
* ...then there’s the usual. Cardboard characters, poor pacing, unlikely plots, the dreaded deus ex machina, etc.

Lord of Scoundrels doesn’t bother me because at least the heroine has some verve but I could not stand Last Night’s Scandal. Everyone was raving about how perfect the couple was for each other when all they did was bicker and act foolish for the entire book. They didn’t even seem to like one another. The whole book was a big silly waste of my time.

Another pet peeve is “After The Night” by Linda Howard. I love 99% of what she has written but this book makes me go ballistic. The “hero” tosses the 14 year old heroine and her mentally challenged brother out of their home because their mother is a hussy who dared to fool around with his father. (Lord knows it’s all her mother’s fault- they’re poor!) Then he harasses her to leave town again as an adult because he cannot have his Mom and sister upset by gasp, seeing her! What a prince!! And people *LOVE* this book. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

I’ll limit myself to three main themes!
1. I’ve never been able to like torture porn, and I’m astonished how well it seems to sell.  Karen Rose, anyone?

2. Blood is not sexy.  Vampires are not sexy.  Perhaps we women are too accustomed to parasitical men?

3.  No-one who lies for their own advantage deserves a happy ending as a result of that lie.  As well as Too Stupid To Live there is Too Selfish To Like.

I used to love Stephanie Laurens, but lately she is grating on my nerves in a big way.  Her heroines are all the same damn person and I absolutely can not relate to that person.  Same for the hero.  It’s like she has the same set of 3-4 characters and she just gives them different names, hair colors, and problems and then writes the same damn book over and over and over again.  I feel the same way about Nora Roberts.  I tried, really, really tried, but I just can’t do it.  I just can’t get in to the stories and I don’t like most of the characters.

I really love historicals, but I can’t stand when authors try to write accents/dialects.  The occasional bit tossed in occasionally or whatever is fine, but when I’m reading a book set in Scotland and it is all “dinna” and “lassie” and “och” all the time I get irritated (and it is almost always Scotland that authors do this to, rarely anyplace else).  Inaccuracies don’t bother me too much, so long as they aren’t horribly, horribly blatant.  Honestly, I find that I’m a lot harder on contemporary romances than I am on historicals.  I can put up with a lot in a historical romance and suspend my disbelief quite a bit, as far as being able to relate to characters or details of the setting and what not, but in a contemporary everything has to be more or less perfect or I get yanked out of the story and that is just frustrating.

But the only thing I really, truly hate in a novel (romance or not) is telling the story in the first person.  I just can’t read any fiction written in first POV—it takes me right out of the story.  Drives me batty every single time.

Hmm chalk up another vote for Sherrilyn Kenyon - I liked some of the first books, but then it was just the same thing over and over again (Acheron’s early life sucked - I do not need being told about it over and over again in mind numbing detail.)

Jane Eyre pushes my buttons - I hate you Mr Rochester.

...as I’ve learned on the internet, you’re never alone in your likes and dislikes, no matter how outlandish they might seem.

And so I learned (or re-learned) today, because I wasn’t going to post about having previously been dogpiled for my dislike of Outlander, and here I find I’m not alone. I thought it was far too long, with the plot propped up a seemingly endless series of attempted rape scenes. It reeked of homophobia (I’m told Gabaldon made up for this in later books, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to read them). And the final chapters were straight-up torture porn. :shudder:

I really didn’t like Kinsale’s Midsummer Moon but I was so irritated by the rampant historical and cultural (for want of a better word) inaccuracies that the creepy aspects of the romance other people are pointing to slipped right by.  I read it way back when it first came out (and while I was a graduate student in history of science and technology—which undoubtedly made me more sensitive), so my memory of details is not great, but I do remember the annoyingly cutesy-poo hedgehog.  It’s the only book of hers I’ve never re-read.

I read much less historical romance than I used to, and one major reason is that in the vast vast majority these days the heroes are dukes and earls and lords and enough already!  At least in books written twenty years ago and more untitled members of the gentry occasionally got to star.  I think my brain interprets this as a genre-wide historical inaccuracy—there were really very few members of the nobility, back in the day.  When I pick up a book and the hero is the Earl of Wherever or the second son of the Duke of Whathaveyou there’s the little voice in my head saying “Oh, come ON! Not again…”

@Isabel C – Oh, thank goodness! I’m not the only one who can’t stand the Virginal paragons in Garwood’s stories. I had a lot of problems with her books, beyond the NFVH, but that was always my biggest issue. I hated her book, Honor’s Splendour , which got rave reviews all over the place and is on, like, 10 national lists for being awesome. NO THANK YOU. My review on my blog turned out to be more of a rant than anything else.

Personally, I loved Loretta Chase’s LoS, but I think it’s because I saw it as a fantasy setting. I was so caught up in the mini-world Chase had built that I was ready to believe anything she wrote. I really liked that story, but I can see how it could be less-than-perfect when looked at from a realism POV.

Other books I haven’t liked that everyone else seemed to enjoy?  Stephanie Sloane’s Devil in Disguise was awful and I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy How to Marry a Duke by Vicky Dreiling either. I haven’t read Outlander and I’m not planning to now (jeesh, it sounds horrible!) but I think I may pick up Iron Duke just for kicks.

As for me I hated Lois McMaster Bujold “the sharing knife” don’t get me wrong I love love LOVED the whole monster plot world building thing and if I ever go back it will be for that but I hated the romance between Fawn and what’s his name, it just screamed “daddy issues” at me and Fawn was so helpless and sweet and just ugh… it annoyed me how she was so stupid. I really like stronger heroines. 

I really liked Sharon Shinn’s Archangel books but except for Archangel I had problems with the other books, I couldn’t finish Angel-Seeker because I keep feeling really uncomfortable with the way in which Rebekah and her people kept reminding me of the Islamic faith and how Sharon was showing it in such a negative light. I also got kinda pissed with the way everyone seemed to have casual sex all the time LOL but that’s just me :P

Quizzabella:

I thought I was the only one.  I absolutely could not stand Jane Eyre when I read it (admittedly as a teenager, but still).  I hated that so very much that I now have an irrational dislike of all the Bronte sisters and I can’t bring myself to read any of the others’ books either.  I know that isn’t fair to the them, as my sisters and I wouldn’t write similar books either, but I just can’t get over it.

Meljean Books Demon Moon. I had zero idea what was going on. A friend suggested i start from the begining…nope. The world building in the series is odd and disjointed. EVERYONE is full of angst. Reading them just makes me sad. On the other hand, I enjoyed The Ion Duke and the previous short story featuring Mad Madchen. Ms. Brooks does steampunk really well IMHO.

Another clunker for me was Drink Of Me by Jaquelyn Frank. It was just awful. The dialogue was almost laughable, and I never figured out why the heroine was so awesome. She spends most of the book not knowing who she is, but the hero doesn’t care because she has magic va-jay jay.  I’ve read the authors other books & really enjoyed them.  Proof that sometimes it’s not the writer but what they write.

My people! I thought I was all alone in my deep abiding hatred of the Outlander books. It’s not just me, then! Though, the beating didn’t bother me as much as I sincerely, thoroughly hated Claire. To the point where I lost respect for Jamie for loving the nitwit. I forced my way through the first few books - everyone told me that it’d get better - before finally calling it quits in the fourth.

I do have a serious Hate On for the Southern Vampire books as well. I can’t say Sookie is the worst heroine ever (see: Claire), but her naiveté is breathtaking. And annoying. And, yet, I keep “reading” the books. Don’t know why I torture myself that way.

Laurell K. Hamilton.  Anita Blake and Merry Gentry.  I loved it at first but then then… it devolved into a fuck-o-rama.  I couldn’t get past a single page without something SPILLING somewhere.  They needed more Bounty than a pre-school classroom.

Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse - just lost it after awhile.  The protagonist was never shown as growing but more just changed, INSTANTLY.  Plus the guy hopping.  Irritating.

I’ve read one Nora Roberts in my lifetime.  And I hated it.  The POV hopping made me hate every character equally.

There are stories that didn’t press the rage button but just faded.  Which I think is far more sad than the rage button.  At least with that you get an emotional response.  With the fading all you feel is indifference where you once felt something more.  That makes you wonder what happened to the author.

I don’t get vampires. Maybe, someday, I’ll pick up a book featuring a vampire and dearly love it despite the whole cannibalism thing (maybe its not cannibalism as the vampires are not actually people? Then we’re just prey? I dunno).  I prefer that the men know the difference between their mate and their meal. Whatever.

So, there is a whole honking section of the bookstore that I don’t swoon over and that so many romance readers dearly love. And I love paranormal, fantasy, sci-fi. I just don’t get turned on by leeches.

@LizW65:

And second (or third or fouth, now) for Midsummer Moon; the idea of a high-functioning autistic being taken advantage of by a rapey douchebag wasn’t funny; it just turned me off.

I didn’t read Merlin as autistic. But, you know, looking at her that way, just makes the whole thing that much worse. (And that view makes sense, given what I understand is Kinsale’s penchant for damaged protagonists.)

@ks:

I used to love Stephanie Laurens, but lately she is grating on my nerves in a big way.  Her heroines are all the same damn person and I absolutely can not relate to that person.  Same for the hero.  It’s like she has the same set of 3-4 characters and she just gives them different names, hair colors, and problems and then writes the same damn book over and over and over again.

I read a bunch of Laurens once upon a time, until it dawned on me that she wrote to a checklist. Alpha hero - check. Curious about sex heroine - check. Four step seduction of heroine - check. Doggie sex - check. Mirror sex - check. Sex morning, noon, and three times at night - check. (How do her characters ever have time for anything else? Don’t they ever get tired? Or chafed?) Inappropriate and excessive use of the various forms of the word “evoke” - check. Weak and non-existent plots - check. Egregious appearances by various Cynsters and their innumerable relations - check.

I tried one more time with her Black Cobra series. By the time I was half-way through the first book, I was paying more attention to the checklist than the story. I decided then that enough was enough, though I will still admit to a weakness for Vane Cynster.

I don’t hate Robin Schone’s books, but I don’t like them—- yet they fascinate me—-it’s like they’re written in this short-hand code that I can’t crack.

I can admit to hating Emily Giffin’s books (Something Borrowed and Baby Proof).  For some reason I just don’t like her heroines.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t like Outlander. I threw the book across the room a few times. Spanking? Wham! Nessie? Wham! Rescue 1, 2, 3… Wham! Wham! Wham!

Fantastic post! I was actually just thinking about this the other day as I took in another lovefest of Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series.
I’ve read the entire Fever series and I don’t care for it. I like KMM’s Highlander series, but the Fever series and particularly it’s main characters, mostly Barrons, left a bad taste in my mouth. When is a male character an alpha male and when is he just an A-hole? For me Barrons was an A-Hole and I found very little redeeming about him. Of course it’s all my opinion, so I simply stay out of conversations about this series.
Also, I have never, aside from Wicked Lovely, been able to finish anything by Melissa Marr. She’s no doubt, a fantastic writer, but I cannot for the life of me get motivated enough by her characters, plot or prose to get past chapter 10 in any of her other books. I would never discourage anyone from reading her books, but I won’t read them. That’s all.
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I feel better.

1.  Another thumbs down for Outlander.  Struggled through 100 pages, just couldn’t deal with it any more.

2.  Ditto for Auel’s “Earth’s Children” series.  Found Clan of the Cave Bear unbearably (pun intended) boring.

3.  Nora Roberts’ POV shifts don’t bother me, but there’s something quintessentially sleep-inducing about her style.  Attention to every minute detail, maybe?  Dunno, because I have never been able to finish one of her books.  Ten pages, max.  I have no clue what her appeal is.  Not. A.  Clue.  Nice lady, but the books do nothing for me.

4.  I love historicals, long saga-esque historicals.  Absolutely loathe, despise, hate McNaught’s Kingdom of Dreams, which seems to top a lot of readers’ keeper lists.  Loathe the heroine, loathe the hero, loathe the writing.  Few books in my extensive collection have actually been physically banged against the wall; KoD has, and the only reason I still have the copy is I’m keeping it out of circulation and the first edition has a gorgeous Morgan Kane step-back.  That was my first and last McNaught.  Never,ever, ever again.

I could barely finish Lord Perfect by Loretta Chase. I thought it was so silly the way the heroine kept falling into the hero’s arms. I’ll try again with the other Chase books I have in my TBR pile.
I also couldn’t get into the JD Robb books—they’re probably too gritty for me.

Oh god, don’t even get me started on Hamilton. I bailed on that series as soon as I saw it was taking a hard left turn into pr0nland, and I haven’t ever been tempted to come back. Don’t get me wrong, her books weren’t stellar before that, but at least she occasionally had really striking imagery (a vampire self-immolating in the sunlight, surrounded by a cloud of his totem butterflies) and ideas (a vampire so old he wasn’t even Homo sapiens). Now… meh.

I’m also not a fan of Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten, I fear. It was a DNF for me—bailed about a hundred pages in when I got to the part where the male lead ties up the female lead. I was also irritated that she’d been sustaining a hate-on for ten years because he’d turned her into a werewolf, and yet all she could muster when confronting him was a pathetic little mutter of “you bit me”? For chrissakes, woman, YOU’RE A WEREWOLF. Snarl, can’t you? But really, my biggest objection to her was that she was actively lying to the person she was supposedly actually having a relationship, and seemed to have no compunction about that whatsoever. So very not cool.

Another vote for Kenyon.

Loved her characters at first.  Adored Asheron.  But after a while, I realized Kenyon’s writing sucked.  Tell, tell, tell.

Not romance, but Anne Rice is another author I don’t read anymore.  Being told a story through a character’s dialogue drove me up a wall.  It’s like your brain has to keep up with 2 stories.  One:  character in coffee shop telling another character about his/her life.  Then the story the character is telling.  Ugh.

I’m so glad there are others who were not enchanted by Carriger’s Soulless. It was a bit difficult for me to even give it 50 pages (re: the Nancy Pearl Rule of 50). To be fair to the series, though, I think it might have to do with vampire and werewolf fatigue. And did I mention that I LOVE steampunk? Still, couldn’t do it.

Also, La Nora. I’ve tried a couple of her books and just could not finish them. Which is a shame, because Ms. Roberts seems to be a pretty awesome lady, and her work ethic is impressive to say the least.

As a general plot device, I can’t stand the constant bickering type of couple (did someone already mention this?). I’m re-reading the Belgariad by David Eddings (which is fantasy, not romance, but does feature a romance-ish storyline). I love, love, LOVE this series, but the constant fighting and pouting and misunderstandings between Garion and Ce’Nedra drive me nuts. Of course, they are just teenagers, so I guess that’s pretty accurate behavior. hahaha

Finally, I have to say that adultery plotlines really push my buttons (the bad buttons). This is one of the many reasons that I have never picked up the Outlander books.

Two words: Nora Roberts.  Haven’t been able to go past the first couple of chapters of any of her books that I’ve ever tried.  I gave up.

A few months ago, I DNF The Iron Duke. Then last week, I picked it up again and ended up falling in love with the book.

Nora Roberts has never done it for me.

@TiceB, Whitney My Love truly disturbed me, and I can’t believe so many people love that book. The only McNaught I’ve enjoyed is Kingdom of Dreams.

I’m glad to see so many anti-Outlander posts! I felt like I had to read it, even though the description really turned me off, but now I’m fine with avoiding it.

For me, Christine Feehan is one - I tried several of her books, and I’m still not sure what the appeal is. Her heroines always seemed to get stepped all over, and her heroes seemed to me to be the worst kind of Alphas. Shelly Laurenston may be another, but I don’t know if she necessarily counts, since I only gave her one shot (The Mane Event) and then couldn’t bring myself to try another one of her books. I just don’t like her humor as much as others seem to (too over-the-top for me), and for some reason the focus on certain aspects of the heroines’ physical characteristics (enormous breasts or big feet) annoyed me.

Jane Feather’s Beloved Enemy. Just ... ugh ... I made myself finish it, but it didn’t end up on the keeper shelf. It’s in a box full of books to be donated to the hospital or somewhere that will take them. I didn’t mind the first bit of the book, but the crap at the end just pushed it too far for me.

@Rae - OMG, I thought I’d never find another person who couldn’t stand the whole Wheel of Time crap fest! My husband (once upon a time when he actually read books) had them, so I got started on it ... and I don’t remember which book it was exactly but I just knew it didn’t take that many pages to nuke the planet from orbit and let more intelligent life take over a few centuries later.

Usually I hate one or two characters - but I’ve never wanted the entire cast killed off as quickly as possible before. WoT fell into Anne Rice land for me - Interview was okay, but I just couldn’t get into anything after that. Took me longer to reach critical mass with WoT only because I wanted to like it. I love fantasy, but I’ll stick to the demented crap in my own head before I touch another one of those books.

Anything Danielle Steele. I can’t read past the first chapter. And, perhaps not exactly romance, but I couldn’t stand Water for Elephants. The prose and dialogue in that book were barely passable for me.

Oh, as far as Nora Roberts goes, I learned that I can only read certain “flavors” of her books. I can’t stand her romantic suspense, which is weird, because I love the books she writes as J.D. Robb (I avoided the In Death books for ages because I knew I hated Roberts’ romantic suspense). Although I hate her romantic suspense, I can plow through most of her lighter family-filled romances (The MacGregors books being a good example).

I couldn’t get into Outlander, Thea Harrison’s book, or Soulless by Gail Carringer. The Soulless character seemed to me to be a reincarnation of the Amelia Peabody character by Elizabeth Peters. And I couldn’t wrap my head around the mean of “soulless.” If a character doesn’t have soul, how do they function?

I liked J.D. Robb up to Origin in Death. The books after feelas though she is just writing to please her fans. It is frustrating because there is still a lot of potential in that series for character growth and mystery, but instead it feels unoriginal.

I really didn’t like Joanna Bourne’s first spymaster book - and haven’t read anything else by her. Also dislike Eloisa James and Julia Quinn for similar reasons - cutesy tone, ahistorical and vacant. And I know a lot of people rave about Carla Kelly but I find her books nauseatingly twee and implausible.

Am in full agreement with anti-Willig, anti-Twilight and anti-Hunger Games views, didn’t like Lord of Scoundrels, am relieved to see other people share my reservations about Kinsale. Did books 1, 2 and 3 of Outlander and then it jumped ship for me, never liked Anita Blake books, only ever read one Norah Roberts and I did the first Roarke/Dallas book meh.

All of this makes me wonder if I really like romance at all, but I do, I do. Nita Abrams, Janet Mullany and several Georgette Heyers are DIKs for me.

Books that I wanted to love but CAN’T…

Outlander - boring

Charlene Harris - Sookie Stackhouse Series - I’m sorry but to me Sookie is Too Stupid To Live. She irritates the heck out of me!

Kelley Armstrong - Bitten - Ugh, I forced myself to finish this. Was rooting for the anti-hero, because to me the hero was un-heroic. None of the issues btwn the hero and heroine ever got resolved. At the end I was so completely dissatisfied that I never want to read another book by her again. Meh.

I’m re-reading the Belgariad by David Eddings (which is fantasy, not romance, but does feature a romance-ish storyline). I love, love, LOVE this series, but the constant fighting and pouting and misunderstandings between Garion and Ce’Nedra drive me nuts. Of course, they are just teenagers, so I guess that’s pretty accurate behavior. hahaha

If you enjoy Belgariad - try Redemption of Althalus. Everyone ends up paired off by the end. There’s some couple bickering, but it’s more of a teenage bickering like G&C.

@Rae - OMG, I thought I’d never find another person who couldn’t stand the whole Wheel of Time crap fest!

My sister!!! We must spread the word of WTFery!

I don’t actually remember a rapey scene from The Iron Duke.  Did I just block it out?

Anyway, I have to give another vote for Laurell K. Hamilton and Nora Roberts.  I started out liking both, but both turned me off pretty quickly.  Someone needs to tell LKH that a series of sex scenes involving an annoying woman with the Most Powerful Vagina in the World is not actually a novel. You need plot and character development for that.  With Roberts, I just think you can tell where in her career she started hiring ghost writers, and all of the books after that point are deadly dull retreads of the books that came before.

My sister!!! We must spread the word of WTFery!

Truly. Except heaven forbid a person not like WoT ... Those fans scare me more than Twi-hards (or whatever they’re called. Haven’t read the Twilight saga, don’t think I’ll waste time on it either). Maybe because WoT books are thicker and would hurt more if used against a person.

Jane Eyre - even though I knew what the ending was, I kept hoping that it wasn’t, and when it was I was mad. I hated it and haven’t been able even to watch a TV or film version since watching it.

And not quite romance but sort of, The Time Traveller’s Wife. The whole premise was just so tragic to me.

And I’m afraid I’m another Cross Stitch/Outlander DNF. I wanted to like this book. I admire Diane Gabaldon’s research tons, but I just hated the heroine and the adultery.

And also Little Woman for the same reasons everyone else said. I loved Jo. I wanted to be Jo. Until she gave it all up.

I hate the Anita Blake books.  I don’t mind the sex (although actually, PP is right—it’s amazing how unhot a lot of it actually is), but after three or four of them I just couldn’t take the WHINING.  If Anita Blake were your friend, and she called you to piss and moan about how zomg she was having WAY TOO MUCH AMAZING SEX and was just a TERRIBLE PERSON OH WOE, you would hang up on her, right? *I* certainly would.

Also, Sophie Kinsella. Specifically, the Shopaholic series. I had friends who loved it, and when I tried to read it, I nearly had panic attacks at the heroine’s painful denial. The worst part was knowing she’d go on to do it again and again and again.

Oh, and for people who gave up on the Wheel of Time - the series is actually being wrapped up really nicely.  Before Robert Jordan died, he asked Brandon Sanderson to finish the series, which he’s doing with a series of 3 final books.  The first two of those have come out and been really, really good - as good as the first few books in the series.  So good, in fact, that I’m now reading Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy and liking it a lot…

Sorry if this post violates the premise of this thread!  I just have been reading these books since the first one came out, which was over TWENTY YEARS AGO, and I am absurdly grateful that it’s going to have an ending, and the ending is going to be good.  Even if that ending doesn’t explain to me why anyone would ever become a Darkfriend given that being one seems like a guarantee of a pretty miserable existence.

It is so nice to be in good company and to read so many great opinions, even about a book or two I may love. My list is a doozy so please be kind. I am tough to please when it comes to a series and these were all recommended to me and to be honest, none of them stuck. The only one that ever has was “Thursday Next”.

Nora Roberts - Queen of the Romance world. Don’t care if she is a nice lady, I am sure she is, but her In Death series made me so angry with all the repetition and horrible writing. I swear she has a mad libs template for that series on her computer. Eve was impossible for me to relate to since her hard ass attitude borders on narcissistic. Numerous times I wanted to hurl the book because of her bullshit.
Laurell K Hamilton. - Someone needs to get her a thesaurus and fast. One sentence used the word “gleaming” five times. Seriously??? Also, Anita Blake’s wardrobe was always described to the point I thought I was reading a catalog.
Janet Evanovich - Quite possibly she has written one of the most annoying, supposedly empowered female characters ever. Stephanie Plum falls under Too Stupid Too Live for me.
Twilight - read one page at random and could not believe people thought this was a well written romance. The blog Reasoning With Vampires highlights all the awful writing/editing which is pretty much almost every single written line.
I also loathe when 9 times out of 10 I pick up an erotica novel and dammit to hell, the woman is a virgin and the hero has a raging whore past. No matter if the hero is a shape shifter or Dom, somehow it is supposed to be more appealing to me as a grown woman that her virginity will be ripped away by some strapping buck named “Cole”.

Here is my “WFT is this crap” list

:

Gena Showalter - left the tstl heroine in The Darkest Night running in the woods and have not looked back.

Kresley Cole - actually read all of A Hunger Like No Other and then immediately wished I had spent that time cleaning instead

Iron Duke - I really, really wanted to like this one, liked the prequel novella, but Rhys annoyed the hell out of me and the “good rape”-scene mentioned earlier in this thread also really put me off. Struggled to finish this one and will not continue this series.

Julia Quinn - boooring

Maya Banks - returned Colter’s Wife to Amazon after a few pages

However, I loooove Outlander with a passion ;-)

Oh, I forgot about hating Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten (always thought Chance would make a nice rug), and Kim Harrison’s Witch (worst heroine EVER). Thanks for the reminder!

Mine is Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me. (or any Crusie, really, but this one specifically) Many of my blogger buddies love it so much, it inspired a reading challenge for me.

While I liked the main characters, I hated every other person in the book. So much that the thought of it just gives me the shudders.

This is very encouraging.  Sometimes I wonder whether I am peculiar, of whether it is just being old and British, but clearly plenty of young Americans share some of my tastes.  What a relief.

I once read a Sherrilyn Kenyon, which was so utterly, childishly silly that I couldn’t believe it had been published.  Nora Roberts:  I have read a lot of her books over the years, but never really warmed to them.  Her sex scenes are always a bit creepy because they are somehow generic and impersonal, but worse than that (and probably the result of her immense output) is that her plots are sometimes extremely shaky.  The worst example I know of is Birthright, which has so many plot holes, ridiculous characterisations and factual errors that, for me, the whole story simply unravels.

Linda Howard:  I can cope with After the Night, though I can well understand those who find it unbearable, but some of her early categories are worse, notably The Cutting Edge and Sarah’s Child, and I strongly dislike her most recent books.  Yet she has written some brilliant, unforgettable novels too.

Anything with vampires disgusts me (I have too literal and visual a mind), and most fantasy simply does not engage my interest;  I get bored almost immediately.  I once attempted to read Anne Bishop’s Midnight Jewels thing.  Absolute tosh, and so boring.

:-)

Hm - They’re not really romances but I despise Gone With The Wind. Hated Anne Rice’s Belinda - she’s 16 for goodness sakes! This isn’t a romance. And the “hero” is a man who admits he likes seeking out sex from underaged girls and boys! He even seeks out underaged prostitutes for it! But he illustrates children’s books! YUCK!

Hated Catcher In The Rye and Old Man And The Sea too.

Oh God Wendy yes, i did not like hunger games.  it was interesting and pretty well written but the ending! who wants to read a book that ends in PTSD! ugh it actuall gave me nightmares, to horrific and gruesome.

Twilight sucks. you all know why. so no discussion there.

Haha Sandra I LOOOOOOve Kelley Armstrong and don’t find it boring at all. how funny.

so glad everyone pointed out that Outlander is essentially about adultery.  I wanted to read it, wanted to buy the fancy new edition.  Now I know I shouldn’t.

RKB: well said! your respond to Kerry Allen was great.  I despise Twiligth for at least 20 different reasons, but I still love my friends who love them.  Because them are my friends, and people are more complex than their taste in a specific series.

when it comes to Sherrilyn Kenyon, some are great, some really suck.  it can go either way, and often it’s the tiniest thing that ruins it for me, like the hero’s over use of a cliche.  but the ones I love, I REALLY love.

I tried one of the BDB books, (I think it was BDB) and found it unoriginal and I didn’t really care about what would happen next.  But worst of all? the CONSTANT use of the word “shit-kickers” as a replacement for boots.  it was just sprinkled throught the book.  It was like the author had NEVER heard the word boots.  drove me nuts, stop trying so hard!

Kristi Lea:  maybe you’ll like Kresley Cole’s books? you could argue that the canibalism aspect of vampirism is removed because all of the characters are essentially “monsters” so it’s sort of more animalistic? I don’t know how to explain it, but maybe it will work for you.

blech blech blech for something blue! HATED the heroine, what a moraless woman! and her disregard for her unborn child was just horrifying to me.

I really hated the Shopaholic series. Like, with a passion that is surprising, even for me. The first one was okay. Not great, but okay. The second one made me want to scream. Did this stupid nitwit not learn anything from the last book? And, why is this man putting up with her? Ugh. I hate them both. In fact, I had to get rid of all my Sophie Kinsella books after I read that one because now every time I read another one all I can think about is how angry the Shopaholic series made me. This is a totally out of proportion reaction to the terribleness of the books and yet I can’t stop myself.

Outlander- I like it for a few hundred pages, then I wanted to chuck it across the room for a hundred pages, and then I just wanted it to end. Meh. I would never read another of her books.

Not really romance but- The Pilot’s Wife. Just thinking about that story makes me feel sick to my stomach. Adultery makes me squeamish. Especially when one party is clearly so oblivious.

sorry, with regards to BDB it should read “it WASN’T just sprinkled throughout”

Oh, I’d forgotten about Nora Roberts - it’s been a while since I’ve tried to read anything by here. The POV jumping drives me crazy too - nice to know I’m not the only one. I also find them really… beige and lacking in internal conflict. The hero always falls for the heroine very early on and spends the rest of the book endeavouring to convince her of this.

Oh! Jamisings- I hated Gone With The Wind too! Scarlet was a horrific person. I didn’t give a damn long before Rhett.

@Cabell - Ah, but if you hung up on Anita Blake, it would be revealed later in the series that you had some hidden, horrible problems, like maybe you secretly were a kelptomaniac, kicked puppies for giggles, or were an uncontrollable liar. Even if you at no earlier point showed tendencies for these kinds of problems.

I used to love the Anita Blake books, but I have since dropped them with hardly a twinge (the twinge comes from having been invested in the series for years). I admit, I liked the large cast of gorgeous guys at first, but when Anita stared collecting them and hypocritically telling them they couldn’t be with other women (other men was more debatable, since it added to the list of men Anita could then have sex with). Richard went from being a nice guy to being a jerk, and, if I remember correctly, Ronnie developed a sex addiction (I think?) out of the blue. Argh.

Pride and Prejudice.

“Wow, Darcy’s house is nice. Suddenly, I love him.”

Yeah, awesome.

I am really not loving vampires as protagonists. I don’t find cold-bodied, blood-sucking parasites to be sexy. They are suxy. And that is not a good thing. This makes me rather “Meh” about a very popular trend in romance books.

After seeing all the hype about Lord of Scoundrels I decided to read it and was expecting the BEST BOOK EVAH, Y’ALL…WHOOOOO!!!  Instead I got a run-of-the-mill romance with two characters who ended up mainly because he was a big bully who needed someone to set boundaries for him and she was a smarmy b*tch who needed someone to manage because she was already so perfect she had nothing else to do except shoot people.  Meh.

I’m so surprised I’m not alone on the Gabaldan thing. I couldn’t get past the fact she’s on her second honeymoon with her husband who she loves, and she is almost instantly ready to hop on the Jamie wagon. So the adultery aspect doesn’t work for me. IF it she hadn’t been married then my problem would have been i found it boring.
I haven’t read Gena Showalter’s Lord’s of the Underworld. I was really excited about reading them as I have seen videos of her talking and she seems adorable and super nice and everyone loves the books. Then I read King of the Vampires, and I literally could not believe this wasn’t a spoof, or a Satire of every over the top trope of Paranormal Romance. If it had been, it would have been brilliant. The heroine magically is transported to another plane of existence because she is the perfect mate to this Vampire who is jailed by an evil princess and used for sex. She doesn’t know this guy, but he likes the way she smells so that is reason enough for her to let him out of jail where he instantly starts sniffing her and grunting “mine”. A chapter later and they are having sex. Which they continue to do every time they are left alone, even when its near the enemy and a bad idea.
I’m not going to go on about Anita because frankly I think more people hate that character now than love her so it feels like kicking the “special” child on the bus, but yeah..it is awful.

Oh, my. I thought maybe there’d be a few others who didn’t like Outlander, but gracious. It’s nice not to be alone since all I’ve seen is overwhelming praise of it. I greatly disliked it and I only read a few chapters (which may somewhat nullify my opinion of it, but oh well). The main reason being that I hate adultery. I really do. The only time I’ve ever been able to at least sympathize with the adulterer is in Bridges of Madison County. Especially when Outlander’s heroine’s husband was such a nice guy. And then I kept reading and the hero appears to be an ass. Okay, so they seem to deserve each other. But I don’t wanna read any more about it. For a lot of people, adultery in romance isn’t a squick and that’s fine or if the time travel thing makes it okay for you that’s fine, but it’s not enjoyable for me at all.

Whitney, My Love - oooh, this books makes me so angry I’m not even gonna start.

Sookie Stackhouse is one of the most irritating heroines I’ve ever encountered. Everything I can’t stand about the majority of modern heroines in one little package.

Kresley Cole disturbs me, Nora Roberts bores me, Christine Feehan makes me wanna scream.

Glaring historical and cultural mistakes, adultery, rape (in any form, but rape is rape), overbearing hero, and bratty heroine are a few things that I see in a lot of books that are popular that will completely turn me off.

I’m with the other Ellie in that I couldn’t get into the Psy books at all—nice idea, but the world-building just didn’t cut it for me.

Also a big fan of Loretta Chase, but Lord of Scoundrels wasn’t my favorite. But my real beef is with Don’t Tempt Me. While not touted as her best, it’s not even remotely close to the quality that I expect from Chase. Offensive ethnic stereotypes, complete twit of a heroine, and the ever-convenient “schooled in the mystical Eastern Arts of Lurrrve, but still a virgin.” Her sex-talk with the hero was not remotely hot and just embarrassing to read.

And I really enjoyed Zoe Archer’s Warrier, but the rest of The Blades of the Rose series gradually annoyed me because the series was so formulaic. All of the heroines, even the virgins, had 21st century sexual and social mores. (I realize historical romance often requires a bit of stretch to keep it fun for modern readers, but it just got to be too much for me to process.) And the sex scenes were totally formulaic. @Ch 3: First hot sex (always much too early on without enough built-up tension. @Ch 11: Heroine performs oral sex on hero, but hero stops her short of orgasm, because apparently having to decided whether to spit or swallow is just more than a 19th century woman should bear even after all of her previous hot, modern sex with the hero….

Wow, did this push some buttons!

For me it was J.R. Ward’s Bhrothers or whatever the hell they are.  Just could not finish the first one, had no desire to go any further.  And I’ve liked other Ward books, so it’s that series.

Also, I gave up on Anne Bishop after about book 3.  Liked the initial premise, after that it was “Meh.  What else is on my TBR shelf?”

And I swear, the next person who tells me Wuthering Heights is a romance is going to get slapped. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

ok here’s my (non) hit list:
The Time Traveler’s Wife—I had so many issues with this book. There was no consistency in the world-building: first, he traveled only within his lifetime, then he traveled into the future to see his daughter. And if he always arrived somewhere naked, why the bleep didn’t he move to a warmer climate where it wouldn’t be quite so much of an issue! And finally, he expected her to wait for him . . . and she did. Drove me bananas that she spent her whole life waiting.
Libertine’s Kiss—I had a feeling I wouldn’t love Judith James, but when I found this at the local UBS I decided to give her a try. It just did nothing for me, at all.

Forgot to mention: vampires. I’m so sick of vampires. I used to like them as heroes because it was fun even if it was outrageous and a little gross. But now that they’re everywhere, I really want them to go back to being their soulless, blood-sucking monster selves. Cold, brooding guy who sucks the life out of you is not appealing at all.

And a footnote to “bratty heroines” being a turn off. That’s mostly if they’re touted as angels. But if it’s a character like Scarlett in GwtW or the heroine in Ain’t She Sweet, I find them fascinating and a refreshing change from the usual. ...Kinda seems like a contradiction, but there it is.

okay so i figure i’ll probably be flayed alive when i say this, especially since i haven’t seen this book mentioned yet. but i didn’t like Scoundrel by Zoe Archer. i thought that the male lead was kind of a douche and i didn’t like the way the female lead acted around him. i didn’t like the characterization so much that i don’t want to read her other books. and the problem was not the plot, because the plot i loved. just the characters ruined it for me. this isn’t the only book that was terrible that i read this year but this is the only one that i hated with such a passion.

I feel like I have been vindicated. I can’t stand the Outlander series. I keep trying to get through the first one, and no luck. The Iron Duke—-DNF. The hero was a huge ass!. There is one author that everyone seems to love, and she constantly gets starred reviews. I feel like I should love her, but I can’t. I keep trying her books, but nope. It’s Loretta Chases. I just don’t get it.

Others on my list are Fern Michaels, Danielle Steel, and Nicholas Sparks.

Finally, I would agree with another post about first person POV. I am not a fan. There are very few books that I am able to get through that are in first person.

It felt good to say this “out loud”.

@Darlene Marshall - Yes, yes, yes on Wuthering Heights! Not even remotely a romance!

i liked Outlander, although the books became more of a struggle later in the series, like she completely lost hold of whatever loose plot threads used to tie everything together.  But i honestly don’t remember the rape thing…  maybe i skipped over it, maybe i blocked it out.  it’s been a good 8 years though, so it makes me wonder it i’d still like it after going back and re-reading.

Same with the sookie books…  Liked the first few but then they kind of lost wind and got really arbitrary and patchy. (although as scary as it may sound, the books are more coherant than the show has become.)

i have a bunch of sherrilyn kenyon on my shelf though, and i just can’t seem to get into them, or the LKH.  and i will generally read anything.  I don’t know if i can explain it, but something about their writing styles just makes every scene feel completely ridiculous and the characters don’t seem to react to things in even semi-realistic ways.

@ Kerry Allen

The Iron Duke might have made an excellent girl-detective adventure. Hated the romance. Particularly hated the rape-her-til-she-likes-it oral scene that nobody else seems to have a problem with.

I didn’t read that scene that way at all. From what I gathered from the book Rhys character only ever had consensual sex when he was feeling the need to prove to himself that the years of being used against his will hadn’t broken him.He was not accustomed to feeling passion. In the scene they are both under the influence of alcohol and hormones. It starts out consensual, she wanted to have sex with him, until her past trauma causes her to panic mid-oral. He doesn’t realize that her pleas are for him to stop until after the fact and is then horrified and sickened by what he’s done, as someone who spent his childhood/adolescence as a sex slave might be upon learning that he’s basically done what was done to him to the one person he’s ever wanted.

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who disliked The Hunger Games. I have a friend who loved the whole trilogy, just went through them like they were nothing. I enjoyed a good chunk of The Hunger Games, but then I started to hate the heroine. I understand that the situation made her actions necessary. However, that didn’t make me hate her any less for what she did, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel sympathy for her when Peeta finally learned that a lot of her behavior was just an act.

Props to the Kenyon truthsayers!! I’ll toss J.R.Ward onto the fire as well. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: there must be some sort of crack-like substance imbedded in the pages. There’s no other reason for her books to be that popular. And she’s getting worse as time goes by.

But the one that makes me tear my hair out? “The Horse Whisperer” by Nicholas Sparks. Suicide by wild horse?! Are you effing kidding me?!!!!!!

@KerryAllen,  I still respect you even if you don’t respect me.

@Eb Rai: for god’s sake, READ THE FIRST BOOKS!! As I’m in the process of rereading all the Guardian books prepatory to the release of the latest addition, I will defend this series with my last breath.

I mostly enjoy the Pink Carnation books (the historical inaccuracies do bug me, but not enough to stop me reading, and I skip the present-day bits) but I really didn’t get along with The Seduction Of The Crimson Rose.  Not only did I not believe the hero and heroine would make each other happy in the long term, I thought they’d end up making each other nastier people.  And from their appearances in the later books, it seems I was right.

@Donna - I’ve never read any Nicholas Sparks, but the phrase “suicide by wild horse” kinda makes me want to read it for freak value.

So in love with this topic!!

Three books sit on my nightstand calling to be me to finish and I just can’t. Giving them to the library during my next donation drop.

1. Outlander - Can’t get past the adultery!

2. Twillight -

3. The Hunger Games -

And the one book guaranteed to get a visceral reaction from me…Catcher in the Rye. Hated the book from cover to cover.

Put me down for not liking Lauren Willig’s books. I’ll never understand why they got printed as hardbacks. Mediocre writing, annoying heroines, silly behavior. Just don’t get it.

I liked Soulless just fine, but I cannot understand why this isn’t shelved as a romance. It so is! :) And it always seemed more Steampunk-lite than true Steampunk to me.

Goddess of Spring is another one I don’t get. It got an A here but I kept wondering if I had the right book as I read. Very much a Mary Sue, gumdrops and lollipops plot to me.

Lastly, The Perfect Play probably tops my WTFery list. Yeah, the cover is awesome, but the writing is just bad. The heroine is annoying, and jumps all over dumb misunderstandings. The hero is a Mary Stu. And the dialog? Gak. Cringeworthy in sex scenes. Yes, thank you for announcing that you are coming; I wouldn’t have known otherwise. And please, beg to be fucked every single time you have sex. *eye roll worthy of muscle strain*

One that hasn’t been mentioned yet, which I’m almost afraid to mention, is The Shadow and The Star by Laura Kinsale.  I read it based on a couple SBTB recommendations.  I really enjoyed it, up until the very end, and the ending destroyed it for me.  I’m trying to not be spoilery, but the fact that he DIDN’T TELL HER about a key part of his life bothered me.  I mean, come on - they were involved in this crazy life and death fight and he doesn’t explain what it was about, and she doesn’t push him?  That lack of honesty made me doubt their hea, and made me realize that it’s one of my rock bottom values - in life and in books.

And I swear, the next person who tells me Wuthering Heights is a romance is going to get slapped. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Yes, Darlene Marshall, yes!

I hate Wuthering Heights with a blazing passion.  I hate every person in that book.  I despise the parents, and I loathe the children, and I gritted my teeth to finish it, because it is “Literature”.  Some lovely writing, of course.

I like the Willig series (and love some of them), but I’m with Ankaret on Crimson Rose. I have hopes that Sebastian and Mary will lose all of their money and end up having to work for a living. Also, after hearing through 3 books about Sebastion being a seething mass of hotness, I didn’t even get a nookie scene!

So nice to see I am not alone…

I have friends who adore Sookie and I read the first book and said, “meh” and never went back for the second.

Laurens - I was given a huge box of her books.  Oh god, three characters and two plots over and over. Her historical inaccuracies made me batshit. “It’s so nice to have a witch in the family now” - in a historical!!! That hit the wall.  Gave them all away in turn and was very pleased I had never actually bought any.

I read the In Death books and they are OK, but I rarely read Nora Roberts otherwise. The ones under her name all seem too simplistic to me.  The characters are sometimes likable but never compelling, and I can usually spot her few plot twists a mile away so they are a little boring. She does better as Robb, IMO.

@Jen - Thank you! Oh I wanted to beat the crap out of Scarlet the entire book.

Okay, I know not everyone is going to love Soulless, I don’t see why one person called the writing “dreck” though. It’s very good writing. Better than a lot of famous writers out there IMHO.

But on the subject on how being “soulless” works - Gail got the idea from two things -

1: She wondered if vampires and werewolves were apex predators, why they weren’t in control and over populating the worlds they lived in.

2: A real docotr named Duncan MacDougall who tried to weigh the human soul -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_MacDougall_(doctor)

He’s where we get the title for the movie 21 Grams.

So she postulated that some people had excess soul - artists, scientists, singers, actors, etc - these happened to be the only types who could become werewolves, vampires, or ghosts. On the same token, if some people could have more than 21 grams worth of soul, some could have less than average soul, down to being soulless. Sort of a balance of nature.

I like the books because Alexia isn’t like other heroines I’ve seen. Being soulless she’s incredibly practical for one thing. Instead of keeping all the reasons Connal might not wish to marry her inside her (she’s overweight, her skin’s too dark, her nose too big, etc) she actually TALKS about it. Something no heroine with body issues every does in any other book I’ve read. They keep it all bottled up inside, have sex with the hero even though they hate themselves, and his Magical Disco Dipping Stick fixes all their self esteem issues. “Ooo - he had sex with me! I must be beautiful even though I weigh 300 pounds and smell like rotting fish!” (Well, that’s how it always seems in those books.)

I also like her because unlike other heroines she has a support system. She does what real women do when faced with problems. She talks about it to others. Her husband, their pack, Ivy, Lord Akeledama, etc. None of this running around doing it herself like if she was just a man with boobs and a vagina like all other “strong” heroines do.

Now, I’m not saying you have to give the books another chance or anything. It’s okay for people to not like what I like. But I did want to explain that part.

I also like them because they’re steampunk I can actually understand. Most confuses the crap out of me. I also like to think about what the future of a world where they know for a fact the soul exists would be like. Let’s not forget that Hilter, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung were all atheists who used the theory of evolution and their own twisted science to justify the murder of millions of people. Jews, Christians, homosexuals, the handicapped, etc all murdered in the name of evolution. They didn’t believe in the soul or the afterlife. But in a world like Alexia’s they can’t deny the existence of the soul. So how would they justify things like the Holocaust? I like it when a book gets me pondering like that.

@ Sandra:

I tried one more time with her Black Cobra series. By the time I was half-way through the first book, I was paying more attention to the checklist than the story. I decided then that enough was enough, though I will still admit to a weakness for Vane Cynster.

I really liked the Cynster books, although it has been a long time since I’ve read any—I’d probably be annoyed now too.  But yeah, the Black Cobra series was when I finally gave up as well.  I managed the first one okay.  It wasn’t great but it was manageable and something to do, I guess.  But the second was just it.  I couldn’t finish.  Not only was there the whole checklist issue, but that heroine was way, way more annoying than most. 

I don’t have that much time to read for fun anymore (full time job + full time school + two kids, husband, cats, and house make me a very busy woman) and I’ve decided that I want to make what time I do get worth it.  I hate when I feel I’ve wasted that precious 2-3 hour uninterrupted chunk of time that I so rarely get anymore.

Okay, I know not everyone is going to love Soulless, I don’t see why one person called the writing “dreck” though. It’s very good writing. Better than a lot of famous writers out there IMHO.

@JamiSings - I think people’s opinion of whether an author’s writing is good or bad is very subjective. That’s one of the reasons why I try never to say that I disliked something because the writing was bad or liked something because it was good - that doesn’t really tell anybody anything. I had this point brought home when I had a discussion with a friend of mine about Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series versus Collins’ Hunger Games series. She said that she disliked the Uglies books because she felt the writing was bad. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I think it all depends upon what in writing pushes your buttons or is something you can ignore. Those things are different for everybody.

Mine is Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me.

I actually do tend to like Crusie, but I’ve never been able to finish Welcome To Temptation which is always right up at the top of a lot of peoples’ favorites list.

Lord of Scoundrels. Omg. I’m sorry but Daine was such a selfish, pathetic man-child that I never could buy an HEA. With the exception of Mr. Impossible and Miss Wonderful Loretta Chase doesn’t work for me in general. For some reason her books seem emotionally detached and sort of cold to me.

I also disliked Thea Harrison’s books. They’re just a rehash of old tropes and they don’t live up to the promise of a strong heroine.

I’d also like to jump on the No Thank You Laura Kinsale train. The characters in Prince of Midnight, Seize the Fire, and Uncertain Magic were such assholes. I generally enjoy moral ambiguity and characters that aren’t all rainbows and sunshine, but Kinsale characters cross the line into just sucking.

I really liked the writing style in Gone With the Wind, but man did I want everyone in that book to get hit by a bus. Good lord, most of the protagonists belonged to the KKK. Rhett lynched a man. Scarlett was a heinous bitch. Just no.

I think as women we’re expected to just loooove certain books, because we’re women - the Brontes, the Roberts, the Gabaldons, etc.  We’re just supposed to be all nice about it and not hurt the author’s feelings if we secretly don’t like a book.

Well, nuts to that.  I don’t hate authors, I hate their books. If I pay good money for a book and an author doesn’t deliver, that sucks and I want a refund.  Why shouldn’t we stand up and say, “this book tasted terrible and I deserve something better?”  Our time and money are too precious to waste on something we don’t like.

I can’t stand heroes who are possessive or jealous. A lot of people find that romantic - I see it as the first step down the slippery slope to abuse.  It’s like some hear Every Breath You Take by the Police as a beautiful love song, while others (like um, Sting) know it’s about a creepy stalker.

Because of this, a lot of beloved heroes are way too controlling and possessive for me, like Cam in Lisa Kleypas’ first Hathaway book.  Or the hero in Julie James’ Something About You.  He griped a knife when her (gay) best friend told a funny story about trying to pick her up in college.  That’s not romantic - that should be on a warning list somewhere.

Oh, I forgot about Kenyon (blocked her out, I guess). I tried with that series, up until the one where the powers that be or whatever trick the heroine into getting pregnant. And there’s some situation where she will die at a set time, like right after her pregnancy? I’m pretty sure this was a book, otherwise I just hallucinated a really terrible plot…

Oh, man. What a great discussion topic! I have this feeling a lot. To stick with a few topical examples, I actually really like Nora Roberts. Sure, her books are formulaic, she populates them with the same recycled characters, and she head hops a lot, but for me, she’s like the book equivalent of mac and cheese—comfort reads. I know what I’m going to get and I know it will entertain me. But I just CANNOT get into any of the JD Robb books. I read the first 4 or 5 In Death books before I gave up on the series, so I definitely gave it a fair shake, and just no. Eve Dallas annoys the hell out of me. The police procedure often doesn’t make any sense.

There was one Laura Kinsale novel that bombed for me, too; I think it might have been Midsummer Moon, but I’ve clearly blocked it out of my memory. But I have adored the other of her books that I read.

I read more m/m than anything else these days, and I have a whole pile of those that everyone seemed to love but that I was really underwhelmed by.

And I don’t really like Jane Austen. *ducks*

What a relief to know I’m not the only one to HATE the Outlander series! 

As for Nora, I like her books most of the time, but the Irish ones… oh dear.  Definitely an “American who has never been to Ireland” ‘s idea of what Irish people are like and how they speak.  Also drives me insane when she doesn’t spell Irish names correctly.  There are plenty of Irish people with English names… use those. 

Anyone ever read any of Tami Hoag’s early romances?  Cringeworthy!  Thank goodness she moved on to crime!

Wish i had a nickel for every time Danielle Steele used the word “stunning” in her books.  *sigh*

Anything like Sex and the City with relentlessly shallow, shopping-obsessed heroines = do not read. I have never been that person, don’t know any woman who is, and don’t want to spend time with her.

I gradually developed a severe allergy to Christine Feehan, LKH, MaryJanice Davidson and all incarnations of Jayne Ann Krentz and won’t go near any of their books anymore.

The whole SatC/chickLit hate was the only time I really felt I was overwhelmingly in the minority, at least during its heyday. With the other authors, I knew I had company.

Whitney My Love. is the one that makes me froth at the mouth. Too many Big Misunderstandings, and the hero rapes the heroine. Oh, and he’s a douchebag,

I don’t get Julie Garwood at all, her historicals are just so inaccurate I cringe at the dialogue, Pa and Ma, are not commonly used in medieval England.

and to be fair, Diana Gabaldon always stresses that Outlander isn’t a romance novel so the things that readers dislike most about it, the adultery and the ‘beating’ are more common in fiction and more ‘acceptable’.

This discussion is so good. Many thanks for the points on various books I might have read but will consider more carefully now.

I’m kind of in the Outlander camp. I enjoyed the first one but could never finish the second and didn’t bother with any of the others.

Totally on board with the Wheel of Time dislike. I didn’t even bother finishing the first one.

Ah, George R.R. Martin: I so want to love his books. They have everything I normally love in fantasy and yet… I got maybe 100 pages into the first one and forgot about it.

I could not finish Kresley Cole’s A Hunger Like No Other and there are a number of UF/Paranormals that I simply don’t finish if they can’t grab me in the first chapter or three. My level of happiness and content in the world has increased considerably since I owned the fact that I will not like a great deal that is published in that particular genre. (Maybe I am too picky because when I love an UF/Paranormal, I really love it.)

Oh, the big hate for me… Dan Brown. Not romance, obviously, but I hated the Da Vinci Code with a passion so great that there are no words.

The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanne Bourne. I had really high hopes for this one. In fact, it started off sooo well. Blind heroine who is a superspy kicks the hero’s ass. Awesome! (I especially enjoyed the ass-kicking because the hero was a brooding bore.)

Then she gets her sight back, meets whatshisface again, doesn’t recognize him, and wanders around the English countryside with him, babbling all her secrets. It’s like her sight is restored at the cost of her IQ. Horrible.

Also vampirey, brotherhoody stuff by Sherrilyn Kenyon and J.R. Ward. Huge, testosterone poisoned males. Ugh.

This one isn’t really a romance per say, but Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which most people seem to love, left a bad taste in my mouth.

  This one is beloved in fantasy circles, though I can’t for the life of me understand why. Largely devoid of fantasy, unlikeable characters. Total DNF.

Skipping ahead to say I couldn’t stand Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm. It was beautifully written and I love Jervaulx, but Maddy was a hypocrite. (My religion won’t permit me to lie even to save someone’s life—but when the lie is what other members of my religion want to hear it’s totally OK!) It annoyed me to no end.

Now back to read the rest of the comments.

Readings these comments is so soul-cleansing! I thought I was the only one who hated some of these revered books. I’m reading Dragon Bound right now, and meh… Like the premise, but not a keeper. Nothing original in there beyond the opening hook. Soulless was the most grating read I’ve ever forced myself to get through. I think I have an aversion to stupid sex in the face of imminent danger.

Could not finish In Death, even though I like dark and gritty books. Eve just gave up so quickly. I hate the premise of ‘I’m so strong and independent and committed to my job as a cop… and I guess I’ll give all that up for hot sex with a suspect.” A lot of Rom Suspense (Linda Howard, Laura Grifin) is guilty of that. Drives me up the frickin’ wall.

I read Spellcast by Barbara Ashford, which got rave reviews in the blogosphere but I thought the writing was technically atrocious and characters utterly unrelatable. Almost chuck-against-a-wall worthy.

I have noticed with UF and PNR I almost never like the first book in the series. Info dumping is not my cup of tea, but once I slog through, as with Dead Witch Walking, I’m often glad I did. I struggled with the first Psy-Changling book but man do the next nine knock my socks off. Singh’s Angel books, though, not so much. Uber-alphas and weak heroines are not my favourite trope.

Zoe Archer’s Scoundrel. I tried, twice, because of all the raves, but I couldn’t stand the heroine and the bad guys were just EBIL and sexist, not interesting at all.

Jim Butcher, and if earlier posts here are any indication, I may be the only person on the planet to feel that way.

Nalini Singh’s books. I read the first Psy books, but could never remember who the characters were because they all read the same. And the angel series, or whatever it is, I don’t understand the attraction at all.

Also, any book in which a character sneers or chuckles. Yeah, I’m weird, but those two words drop me right out of what I’m reading.

I would like to add that even though I couldn’t stand these books, I completely respect the mad love for them and their authors that other readers have. Such is what makes the world go round, y’all.

Man, I am delighted to find that I’m among friends with my hatred for Outlander.  I would have found a way to kill Jamie, I’m sorry.  It might have taken me some time, but he’d be dead. 

Other highly recommended stuff I’ve really disliked: 
- Gail Carriger’s Soulless: wooden writing; stock characters - reminded me of a puppet show more than a novel
- most Kelley Armstrong, except for Bitten and No Humans Involved:  I know Bitten is controversial, but I don’t really read it as a romance and I think that it gets at the heart of how f’d up love can be.  But if I were reading it as a romance, probably wouldn’t feel the same way.  Other than these two, I find her plots to be pretty uninteresting.
- On the non-romance front, but because it was mentioned here, The Name of the Wind:  I’m sorry, but I own both the complete Earthsea series and the complete Book of the New Sun; why would I read that piece of crap when I could read the (far superior) books that it’s ripping off?

- And also on the non-romance front, I thought The Corrections was a self-indulgent piece of crap, and I hate Philip Roth.  SO THERE, literary establishment.

I hesitate to say that I disliked it (and it’s not really romance), but I struggle a lot with the ending of Lilith Saintcrow’s Dante Valentine series, and whether I think that it’s a bad ending, or just a horribly realistic one that I, due to certain issues leading to personal identification with the heroine, would have liked to see come out differently.  I’m actually kind of afraid to pick up the Jill Kismet books as a result.

And, since I’m being long-winded, I think that the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are crap, but I’ve read most of them in order to find choice bits to mock on my livejournal.  SO MUCH MATERIAL.

I wasn’t at my computer when the book discussion went down last week, but I’ll pipe up now and say I really hated Touch of Frost by Jennifer Estep. To the point that I regret spending money on it. It seems a lot of other folks liked it a lot, but I feel like I was promised Buffy and Veronica Mars, and got Bella from Twilight instead.

I don’t know how spoiler-y I should get, but what I love about heroines like Buffy and Veronica and Tiffany Aching and Charlotte Doyle and even Valancy Stirling is that they have these moments when you think they’re defeated—when THEY think they’re defeated—and then they reach way down and pull out some kick-ass-ery, whether it’s verbal, physical, intellectual, emotional, what-have-you. They rescue themselves, in some way, and come out stronger and more self-assured because of it.

I didn’t see any of that in Touch of Frost—oh hell, okay, **SPOILERS**—the protagonist gets rescued *twice* in the final scene by the love interest and ends up just as direction-less as she starts out. It seems that there’s this kick-ass Slayer-esque role waiting for her, but she never really steps into it. And there’s that weird Twilight-y forced-chasteness-for-supernatural-reasons plot device, which I hate. AND (big issue for me) the protagonist repeatedly calls another female character a “slut” or “slutty” as a synonym for “bitchy, selfish, or vain.” It yanked me out of the story every single time. I know teenage girls police each other with labels like “slut” and “skank” all the time, but for me, “slut” is just not an acceptable label for a protagonist to throw around, especially in a YA book. I mean, there’s NO acknowledgment that this word is ALL ABOUT the double standard, wherein dudes can sleep around but women are not supposed to have sexual desires—and it’s being used repeatedly by a character who can’t touch or be touched by the guy she has the hots for? That could’ve made for a really interesting revelation about sexual desires and jealousies and girl-on-girl policing among 17-year-olds, but the author doesn’t seem to realize it.

I’d rather read a story where that good-girl/bad-girl dichotomy is pointed out and problematized instead of reinforced. I’d rather read a story where the sexual desires and activities of teenage girls are acknowledged and handled with a little more sophistication and complexity. I finished it because I was hoping I would finally get that “YES! Finally!” moment, but it never came.

I have become leery of bestsellers of late, because so many of them have turned out to be not my cup of tea. The only romances I remember off the top of my head that fall into this category were the Sign of Seven books by Nora Roberts, in which everything was so pat and symmetrical that I expected at some point the three couples would all start having simultaneous six-fold orgasms.

I avoid Lori Foster after having read three books by her in a row where the modern heroine was a virgin, long ago gave up on Danielle Steel, and find myself hesitating to read any more Georgette Heyer because of a fear of discovering yet another intolerably featherbrained young heroine or secondary ingénue between the covers.

As for other genres, I have made four attempts to read The Shadow of the Wind, which theoretically should be right up my bibliophilic alley, but which after the first chapter reads (to me) like a bad 50’s pulp melodrama. Another book a lot of people loved was The Little Stranger. I was more than halfway through it but stopped because the suspense was still being built up and nothing much had happened yet.

On a more general note I avoid romances with pirate heroes like the plague because I see nothing romantic in robbery and murder, I find my disbelief difficult to suspend when I come across a virgin in a contemporary romance novel, and I have been known to use old skool rapey romances as kindling.

BET ME - Jennifer Cruise – everyone loved that book and shouted its praises.  I HATED it and could not figure out what was so great about a heroine falling for a hero that’s only interested in her because he’s made a bet – and she KNOWS he’s only paying attention to her because of the bet.  That just pushed her over into my TSTL category. 

LEAD ME ON – Victoria Dahl – that book just SUCKED.  It pushed all the buttons – heroine to stupid to dump a loser family, says she “won’t” but then she does, and has no problem calling people out - especially her family but she lives the lie.  If she’d been serious about creating a new life to escape her past “skankdom” – she’d left town.

I agree on the Sookie Stackhouse books. I picked up the first one on a friend’s recommendation and just did not care for it. The mystery was ok, but I found Sookie so wishy-washy that I couldn’t be bothered to read anymore of the books.

Hunger Games I thought was good. I enjoyed it while I read it, but I felt I would have been happier if it had been stand alone with her and Petra going home having managed to survive and realizing their attraction for one another. I have no interest in reading more about the world or the guy at home the emotionally void heroine has suddenly decided she likes.

Johanna Lindsay is also on my list. One of her books was the first romance I read, and as such is probably the only reason I reread it as many times as it did because thinking back at its plot, it is far to woman-being-overpowered for my taste. All other books I’ve attempted by her have just made me feel dirty.

And since I saw Wheel of Time mentioned, the first few books weren’t bad, good fantasy quest type stuff, but I just couldn’t find the world interesting enough to read through whatever the final number there are in the series.

Meant to add this to my EPIC COMMENT IS EPIC, but I hate, hate, hate virgin heroines in contemporaries.  In fact, even in historicals, I like it better if the heroine has some kind of previous experience (widows!  I’m perfectly happy with widows!).

And if the hero is excited about the heroine’s virginity?  NO NO NO.  Book-at-wall-chucking-event shortly to follow.

This is so funny. I was thinking Outlander as I read the post, and then when I clicked to the comments, seemed like half the early comments were mentioning exactly that book. I’m glad I’m not alone in my dislike. I can’t stand Outlander. Torture porn. Eroticism of wife beating. So not my thing. And yet people keep giving me copies as gifts: “This is the greatest book ever! You have to read it!” I think I have 3 copies in my personal library now, and I’ve already gotten rid of the one I originally purchased.

Count me in as another reader who DNFed both Outlander and The Iron Duke.

I could barely stand Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood. I really wanted to, I liked the worldbuilding well enough and was curious about the world, but omg the characters. Nothing to like about them.

Oh, oh, and I really can’t stand the Bridgertons. I think light wallpaper historicals can be fun, but the humor in those books wasn’t really my idea of good fun, and I found that family INSUFFERABLE and, maybe paradoxically, bland. (Colin and Penelope, I did quite like, until the moment Colin spitefully forced Penelope to down a glass of champagne in front of everyone. I mean, he recognized the act immediately as childish, but it’s hard to forgive an otherwise nice guy who resorts to some sort of physically domineering and humiliating act. UGH.)

Reading my previous comment, if it comes across as if I hate Heyer. I don’t, I just hate those of her books that have impossibly featherbrained young females in them.

Okay so first of all there a lot of books I feel this way about:
1. All I Ever Wanted by Kristan Higgins
First the heroine is a ding-bat.
Second I take serious offense to the fact that our beloved heroine describes the hero as autistic.Anyone that annoying should expect people to be rude. Also several reviewers and readers took this to be real: seriously believing the hero had autisism. As someone who has known at least one autistic person and several people with disabilities; this makes light of a serious disability. This makes this book as offensive to me as the Grand Sophy was to SB Sarah.
2. Romancing Mr. Bridgerton
I have loved many Quinn books, but not this one. Penelope is awesome, but Colin is mean; yelling at her, sulking at her, for no real reason. He was not good enough for her.
Also I like Quinn, but she sometimes she has more family values than the average GOP politician.
In general I wish overprotective brothers would be less common. How is it sexy (among other things)? Your brother gets worked up over seeing you having sex or getting kissed. Think about it.
I agree with Miranda at least a little bit. Eve is absolutely awesome; Roarke not really. He is controlling jerk , who buys his way into anything.
Finally I like the other people have issues with the Alpha-rape heroes.

How much am I loving this thread?  I even love seeing how much folks hate the books I love (Outlander, beatings and all!  Souless! The Name of the Wind!) as it reminds me what great variety there is out there.  Add me to the haters of Twilight, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind.  Now I’ll go out on a limb and confess that I hated a book I heard about here: A Nerd in Shining Armor.  Lord, how I did hate on this book.  Hated the heroine, hated the hero, hated the one-dimensional villain for whom I was rooting in the end.  Hell, the book almost made me hate Hawaii.  But when the heroine referred to her breasts, out loud, as “titties”  I kept reading for the lulz.

Ahhh the Bridgertons, Regency Romancelandia most happy big family where no one is actually happy. Seriously, for a series of which the premise is that it’s about a big happy family, all its members have a huge amount of issues and self-image problems, which could mostly have been solved with a couple of conversations with people who love and know you - like for instance your family.

I read 7 of them, but by then I was so tired of the forced happyness and cheer, and it felt so fake because of all of them had family related issues. Got me off Quinn for a long time I think. (Still not recovered).

***SPOILER***
Maybe I should’ve been warned by the rape by the heroine in the first one, for which she never, ever feels sorry or shows remorse.
***/SPOILER***

@Darlene Marshall - Bless you for saying that about [Wuthering Heights. Thinking about that story can turn me into a bitch (not a smart one) in 0 to 10 seconds.

It’s so interesting to hear other people’s dislikes! I really liked Midsummer Moon and enjoyed Soulless, although I can understand why they might bug someone else. Bet Me? Harder for me to understand the hate. :)

darlynne, I’m right there with you on the Dresden Files series. I think I made it through the first 2 or 3 before I stopped forcing myself. They read like Gary Stu books to me. Couldn’t stand them (although I enjoyed the short-lived TV series!).

Also Bitten. I said my piece when it was reviewed on this site, but ditto to the commenter above who said they lasted about 100 pages in, until the “hero” tied up the “heroine” and demonstrated that “consent” was a foreign concept.

The Pink Carnation was a DNF for me, although I can’t really remember specifics—I was just pretty bored and couldn’t keep forcing myself back to it.

Oh, I’m seeing some others that make me remember:
Outlander - I just couldn’t get into it. Stopped after about a hundred pages or so.

The Spymaster’s Lady - it was ok, meh, but certainly not enough to make me a fangirl and pick up the next one.

Interesting that some love Nora, but can’t get into the In Death books. For me, it’s completely the opposite. Her Nora books I find rather (dare I say) boring, but I’m all atwitter when I read Eve & Roarke. Must be the suspense/mystery lover in me.

And oh yes, given that others have already chimed in on these volumes, and I feel that I am obliged to as one of the avowed SF/F readers on this thread:

I have not yet been able to bring myself to tackle The Name of the Wind. Every time I read the blurb of it, in the protagonist’s voice, going on and on about how “you have probably heard of me” and “this is the story of how awesome I am”, my immediate reaction is AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.

I never brought myself to get into Wheel of Time, either. I have way less patience than I used to for doorstop epic fantasy, even now that I’m a digital reader and don’t have to worry about them giving me hernias if I’m carrying them around.

O u t l a n d e r times elventythree!

It doesn’t really bother me when everyone loves a book I don’t (The Many Sins of Lord Cameron) because I have total faith in my correctness. I’m not the type of person to say “wow, was there something I missed there?” I’m the type of person who says “Hm, they like sucky books.” I believe in the vernacular this would be Record Store Clerk Taste.

I don’t like a ton of popular authors. Rebel by Zoe Archer did nothing for me. I can’t get behind 99% of the paranormals. Jayne Ann Krentz makes my teeth hurt. I could just make a huge list.

Diana Gabaldon always stresses that Outlander isn’t a romance novel so the things that readers dislike most about it, the adultery and the ‘beating’ are more common in fiction and more ‘acceptable’.

Sorry to double post, but that’s just cos she’s a snob. She’s modulated her opinion over the years but she used to come out swinging on that one in the way back day. It’s a romance. For people that like abusive people.

Also hated Lord Langley Is Back In town. When the hero is an absentee dad with a cruel streak, I can’t get behind him. If he were your ex, you’d be in court 24/7.

Clearing the italics.  And can I just add - the Lord of the Rings.  Couldn’t get through it but I really tried

I recently read HARD AND FAST by Eric McCarthy”.  She’s an author I had read about here on SBTB and added to my to-read list.  So I did.  The book infuriated me because of it’s treatment of the female graduate student theme (I’m a female graduate student); something that will not get everyone up in arms, but sure did for me.

And I’m glad to see that there are OUTLANDER haters out there.  Granted, I did love the first book, but I hate every single moment of the books afterwards. Jamie is the only character I can actually stand in the books, and even he gets tiresome after a while.  The series is definitely a DNF for me, and I get angry just thinking about the post-Outlander books, and consequently the series as a whole.

It doesn’t really bother me when everyone loves a book I don’t (The Many Sins of Lord Cameron) because I have total faith in my correctness. I’m not the type of person to say “wow, was there something I missed there?” I’m the type of person who says “Hm, they like sucky books.” I believe in the vernacular this would be Record Store Clerk Taste.

um, wow.  ok…

@LEW,
I can relate. Pretty much every book featuring academia is a DNF for me. Same goes for movies and tv shows featuring profs/grad students. The only book that came close to getting it right (though not quite) was Chloe Neill’s Chicagoland Vampire series, though that was pretty much a DNF for me for other reasons…

A Hunger Like No Other. When that book came out, everyone I knew was reading it and just loving it. I read it, and I DNF, because I’m sorry, no matter how turned on the heroine got, I was not charmed in the least by a hero who takes a heroine hostage and forces her to jack him off. That’s rape, even if there isn’t penetration. And Lord knows, I’ve had plenty of fellow readers try to explain to me that it isn’t rape, because he was tortured, because she was a supernatural creature, because she was turned on, etc. The scene totally squicked me out. I have no idea at all why that book became so popular.

Recently, I read the first of the Mercy Thompson series. It was a really engaging Urban Fantasy, but I had an issue with the way Mercy kept insisting, over and over, that women don’t like her. Well, sorry, Mercy, but in real life, if I meet a woman who keeps saying, “Women don’t like me, women are intimidated by me, women don’t get along with me,” I’m going to see that right away as a projection of a woman’s own insecurity, and I’m not going to like her, either. Which happened for me with Mercy. If the next book is another round of “Women don’t like me because I’m the anti-feminine and they’re all threatened by how awesome I am because I’m just like a dude,” then I’ll be out.

Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s “This Heart of Mine.” I wanted to love this book so badly. I like the rest of the Chicago Stars series and I was really looking forward to this one b/c of who the characters are in it. **SPOILER ALERT***

I loved Molly as a character and should have been able to identify with her over all other SEP heroines, but then she RAPES the male lead. He sort of calls her out on it by saying if he were a woman that it’d be rape, but then they fall in love and have an HEA. but to me non-consentual sex is rape, no matter what the genders of the people involved are.

re: “bad writing”

There are two parts to a story. There’s the story (plot, characterization, worldbuilding, etc.) and then there’s the way the words are put on the page (POV choice, description, dialogue, etc.). I can speak only for myself, but when I refer to “bad writing,” I’m referring to the actual words on the page being so distracting (AKA “fishhooks in the eye”), I can’t even see the story.

Examples of bad writing (to me, YMMV): Someone is supposedly fleeing for her life but stops to check her reflection in a window so the author has an excuse to jam her physical description in there. Jamming the character’s stats in there takes precedence over mentioning the presence of a mob of protestors across the street. A water bottle is used as a prop a hundred times in one chapter and it doesn’t end up being used to kill somebody or something equally deserving of all the attention paid to it. The character’s actions totally contradict her thought process. The POV ping-pongs from paragraph to paragraph so you need a spreadsheet to keep track of what thought belonged to whom. The word “primal” is used seven times on one page. There are more sentence fragments than sentences.

Good writing can drag along a limping story. Good story can transcend less-than-brilliant writing. But flat-out bad writing (whatever one’s personal hot buttons are) cannot be overcome by anything (except maybe blunt trauma to the head resulting in amnesia specific to one’s literary standards).

I wasn’t a big fan of Bitten, although I enjoy the female assassin series by the same author.

Patricia Briggs is on my do not read list. I don’t like rape as a plot device, thank you very much.

Wheel of Time: The first book was okay, but it went nowhere fast.

Also, and I’m thinking I’m the only one, In Falling, Fly was a DNF for me. Everyone I know raved about it, and I couldn’t get into it at all.

I am so glad to see I’m not alone in my dislike of certain “popular” books.  Here are my top 3:

1. Pink Carnation—ended up skimming through the second half.  I just thought it was completely uninteresting and the historical heroine was a childish dingbat.  And I could not believe that it was originally marketed as “historical fiction.”  A romance is a romance.

2. Lord of Scoundrels—I love a lot of Loretta Chase’s books, but I could not finish this one.  Didn’t like any of the characters or the setting.  I scratch my head every time someone brings it up as a must-read.

3. Twilight—I was so turned off by the IDEA of this book that I have never read a page and I intend to make it to my grave without ever doing so.

Whew, thanks for letting me get that off my chest:)

Some people love Julie Garwood, but her book For The Roses remains the only book I have ever actually thrown in the trash can.  There was one point in the book where she says no, he says yes and won’t take no for an answer.  Years later I still refuse to read Garwood.

*Joins the anti-Outlander crowd*  Adultery and rape!  Yay?

Lord of Scoundrels was entirely “meh” for me.  The parts people seem to think were hilarious were only mildly amusing to me.  Dain was kind of a douche, and never really redeemed himself in my mind.  I liked Mr. Impossible MUCH more, and even than took two tries for me to get into.

I read two Psy-changelings books, realized they were pretty much the exact same book, and gave up.  Neat premise, but the writing and characterization turned me off.  I’ve determined I can’t get into shape-shifters.  Too close to bestiality in my head, with too much alpha-male nonsense.

I keep trying Nora Roberts books, and have yet to find one that I actually like.  Everybody’s always, “Oh, she writes friendships so well!  And realistic men!” and I keep thinking, “I must be hanging out with the wrong people because none of my friends act or talk like this.”  I read that wedding quartet and MY GOD, that sucked.  In a the-heroines-should-look-into-seeing-a-psychiatrist-for-medication-because-wow kind of way.

I thought Soulless was too awfully fond of itself, and it wound up a DNF for me.  Scoundrel started out good and then just got bizarre and silly, and not in a good, keeps-my-attention way.  The Iron Duke had a neat premise, but I came away confused and angered by the world and rape. 

And, speaking of rape, I hated The Duke and I.  Daphne freaking RAPES Simon, and I’m supposed to be okay with that?  I actually physically grimaced anytime Daphne showed up in the other Bridgerton books because I was so repulsed by her actions.

Okay I am trying this the last time.
At Myself
Romancing Mr. Bridgerton
Another thing that really annoyed me is the fact that its so romantic Penelope sat around waiting for a guy, who was out traveling and having sex. Then the best of their sex life for him is that she is purer than the driven snow (a virgin with cobwebs and hymen completely intact and tighter than Scarlett O’Hara’s corset) and for her its that he is happy. Seriously he think he deserves this and how great for him. if she showed any signs of not being completely pure; he probably would have started punishing her just like he punishes her for no reason throughout the book. Sex is almost a punishment anyway.
I also dislike Violet not letting your grown children grow up is not good. According to my mama marriage is best between two adults. also I know a family that reminds me a lot of the Bridgertons I thought it was just the family values, the controlling mother, and the large size. But Jan oda, reminds the real problem might be that everyone is secretly unhappy right beneath the surface.

Forgot to add this to my previous comment, but P.C. and Kristen Cast’s “House of Night” series, the first one, was a DNF I actually threw away. It was so offensive, so unthinkably offensive, I couldn’t continue with it. Mystical Native American grandma? CHECK. Evil girl enemy who is clearly evil because she exhibits openly sexual behavior? CHECK. Heroine uses “retarded” all the time? Come on, who doesn’t know that “retarded” isn’t an acceptable word to use as a pejorative? Even if it is “authentic” teenage dialogue, it really isn’t something that needs to be encouraged.

@JL - which other acadamia ones have you read?  One of the others I’ve read that comes to mind to me is Karen Moning’s SPELL OF THE HIGHLANDER.

Re: tv shows/movies.  I LOVE Big Bang Theory.  I think they nail it. I don’t do physics, but they do a great job parodying hard science academia (and I know many physicists who love the show).  But things like Bones, I can’t handle.

Twilight.  Just Twilight.  I think I get an eye-twitch any time someone says they love those books.  I finished the first one so I could have a valid, informed opinion about it.  My opinion is officially “what the EFF?”  Bella = claw my eyes out depressing.  I cannot count the number of times I wished she were a real person so I could smack her upside the head and tell her to get over herself.  Edward = creepy.  Do not see the appeal there.  Now, I could maybe forgive all of this if the writing was good.  It wasn’t.  There was about 400 pages of nothingness until we actually got to something resembling a plot, at which point Bella passes out and we miss all the action.  I don’t know about the rest of you but I was rooting for what’s-his-name (the main “bad” vampire) to win the day and kill everyone.

Also, vampires should not sparkle.  That is all.

Wow, there are others out there who don’t like Nora Roberts! And for similar reasons: the rapidly changing/sometimes unclear POV makes me dizzy; some of her older highly recommended books plainly bored me; never came across her over the top villains, though…

As to Jennifer Crusie I only like her early straight contemporaries and Bet Me, couldn’t bring myself to care about the highly praised “Small Town books” that came later and all those suspense etc. books.

The much praised Follow My Lead by Kate Noble was a DNF for me.

Like Ros, I passionately loathe Julia Quinn’s books.

Another extremely popular author I can’t read at all is Susan Elisabeth Philips, mostly because of what Janet at Dear Author called “The Bittered Heroine”. The book that finally put me off trying to like her books, and one of the books I actually hate with a passion, is “It Had to Be You” (the combination of the exaggerated “hilarity”  and the—to me gruesome (rape!)—backstory of the heroine made my skin crawl; additionally IMO there was no discernible character development for both h/h, and I didn’t believe the HEA. I absolutely don’t get why this is funny - er, it’s meant to be funny, isn’t it?). Since nobody mentioned her, I might be the only person on the planet in this…
Generally speaking Philips’ It Had to Be You”  is an extreme example for something I tend to dislike more and more the older I get: extremely disturbed people who are in desperate need of counseling or therapy are miraculously healed by love—not believable. And I mean extremely disturbed people; not overcoming personal, biographical or ongoing problems or hardships.

I am loving this thread.  Even when the books are ones I quite liked (OUTLANDER) or would rescue from a housefire before my children (LORD OF SCOUNDRELS) it’s so fun to hear that they are not universally adored.

I’ll add to the rejection of IRON DUKE (hated the rapist hero from the elevator scene on) and SOULLESS (okay, you’re practical and clever and witty and not sentimental one bit WE GET THAT) and the Sookie Stackhouse books (does that woman ever learn anything?)

From recent raves, I’ll mention FOLLOW MY LEAD—the hero was whiny and useless, the heroine annoying and selfish, the sex was both unbelievable and boring.

As far as classics go, Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles should be catnip and crack to me, but I couldn’t get past what a raging smug JERK the hero is.  Oh, and yes, when he sexually attacks the heroine we’re supposed to cheer him on. 

Several people have tried to get me to read Peters’s Brother Cadfael mysteries “because you love the Middle Ages and these are so historically accurate”, and I get tired of explaining “Yes, I’m very interested in the Medieval period, but I couldn’t care less if you get the politics and the shoes right if every single character thinks and talks like a twentieth-century middle-class woman.

And I’m sorry, I can’t let this pass:

Let’s not forget that Hilter, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung were all atheists who used the theory of evolution and their own twisted science to justify the murder of millions of people. Jews, Christians, homosexuals, the handicapped, etc all murdered in the name of evolution. They didn’t believe in the soul or the afterlife.

Hitler was definitely not an atheist, he was “a member in good standing” of the Catholic Church his entire life.  He made several remarks critical of various religious institutions but never explicitly rejected Christianity. 

Stalin and Mao may have been atheists, but NONE of their crimes were ever justified by or used to further the Theory of Evolution or any other “science” except for economics, politics, and some sociology.  They were interested in obtaining and increasing their personal power and would use any rhetoric handy, whether or not it was completely irrelevant and contradictory to their policies.

The acceptance of evolution or any other modern science preclude beliefs in the soul or of an afterlife; and in this century alone, many world leaders have practiced and endorsed heinous crimes while proclaiming (and occasionally in the name of) their fervently held religious beliefs.

Please do not use religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, or lack of same as a litmus test of moral character or behavior.  It is as reductionist and insulting to those of us with strong religious faith as it is to those who do not share it.

I walked away from Julia Quinn after trying The Duke and I after many recommendations. It is NOT OK that the heroine rapes the hero and the book never problemetizes it. Like, it might be possible to have that happen and then talk about how it was a mistake, or shitty, or whatever, but no, she wanted a baby, and that makes it ok to fuck him against his explicit consent? UGH!

Anything by Thomas Hardy.
I want to kick Jude the Obscure until he stops whining, hammer Sue’s head against the wall, and OMG Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Angel Clare! Kill them now. If they’d hanged her at the start, I’d have two days of my life back.

I didn’t enjoy Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels. I thought the hero was an ass and that the sex scenes were way too purple for my tastes (“her body weeped its feminine tears of desire” and “lust-swollen rod” were the two memorable phrases). The heroine and her grandmother were the only characters who saved the book for me.

Whoops, I was so indignant on my soap-box I forgot two crucial words:

“The acceptance of evolution or any other modern science DOES NOT preclude beliefs in the soul or of an afterlife”

I bought Ravished by Amanda Quick on Kindle because it had so many 5-star ratings, and OH MY GOD if Harriet talked about her fossils any more my head was going to explode.  I have to say, mad props to Ms. Quick for writing a believable spinster. NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR FOSSIL TEETH.  That’s right.  I’m using Caps Lock.  Every time Harriet named another bone, my eyes would start to glaze over.  Poor Viscount St. Justin.