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Who is your least favourite author?

as a person, or as a writer?

i mean the main question not nora roberts, but if dele wants to tell us, i wouldnt mind
 
Sure, I'd be glad to tell you why I can't stand Nora Roberts. But don't say I didn't warn you! :D Sorry in advance to any Nora Roberts fans or any romance fans in general.

I read a collection of some of her stories a little while back, and I was absolutely disgusted with it. Nora Roberts is quite a famous author who has millions of fans who adore her work for the same reason I despise it.

In each of the stories I read, a sensible girl (usually a virgin) meets his stereotypical guy who in her world in the ideal man but in real life would probably be a mass murderer or rapist. They meet as indiferent acquaintances but then all of a sudden the lighting's right or something superficial like that and the girl (or guy - whichever one it is who isn't interested) realizes that they've been in love with the other their whole lives. So Person A gazes into Person B's eyes, they kiss... sorry, "his lips crushed hers..." and they get down to business, more often than not, an act that is in complete contradiction to Person A's moral standards. Up until they realize they love Person B, of course. Then, the next morning they get to know each other, then something tries to break them apart but it doesn't work, so they are still together and happy as clams.

The sad thing is that I know many, many girls who love to read romance novels and just eat up the morals in these books. I'm talking about the girls who fall in and out of love so fast it's like riding a rollercoaster. They've never found true happiness and they've never been truly happy with one particular guy. If you get them on a bad day, they'll admit that they don't even know what love is.

The other type is the girl who'se been madly in love with this one guy for maybe years now, but either she's too shy to let on, or he doesn't treat her well but she thinks that's normal. (Yes, people like this actually do exist. I know plenty of them!) They're too star-struck with the notion of love at first sight that they block out all the negative about the person until they don't know them all. In the end, they're in love with the body and name of their significant other, but they've created a personality for them in their day-dreams.

That's the reason I don't like Nora Roberts. Books like her make people wishy-washy and if you buy into it, it'll mess up your life. I realize this is pretty harsh, and I'm not trying to start a debate or anything. These are just my personal opinions.
 
Wow, blimey! I'm definately not going to buy any of her stuff then. You know what? I reckon if she read something like 1984, she wouldn't even know what it meant. Or I bet she'd be one of those people who would ban The Catcher in the Rye. I don't understand those people at all. Seriously.

Sorry Horatio, I haven't got any suggestions of my own.
 
Hmm, hard question. I really dislike Lord Jim, so I'd say Conrad, but he is completely redeemed by The Secret Sharer. I really dislike Paradise Lost, but some of Milton's sonnets are very good.

While I read romance, I'm not a Nora Roberts fan at all. And a lot of romance plots do follow that scenario, so I'm always looking for the something different. Fantasy crossovers or the humor that is in Christina Dodd's books, for instance. What irritates me about the genre is that even tho they try to break new ground to attract a younger audience, like with the Blaze series (so hot it's borderline erotica), and they make the settings hip and urban, they can't leave the same tired plots alone. I just read one that was trying to be modern, but featured a main female lead that was a 25 year old virgin. I am pretty sure that anyone buying this book doesn't know a single 25 year old virgin; I surely don't. But it is a problem with a lot of genre fiction, fantasy can't leave the young man going on the quest plot alone, and mysteries can get pretty formulaic, too. Sorry to keep this thread off track.
 
Well, just to pluck a few out of thin air, my anwser to your question would be: Terry Pratchett, J RR Tolkien and David Gemmel. I won't start one why I hate them because you can only type 10,000 words here :D

Oh, and that Nora Roberts sounds terrible! Actually, talking of hating romance authors. I hate Catherine Cookson for pretty much the same reason. They are SO formulaic!

Poor girl meets and falls in love out of her social class or something similar and it can't be. They fall in love. They get torn apart. They meet again and live happy ever after!
 
Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen and D.H Lawrence. Austen is just plain dry, in my opinion.

And SillyWabbit-how can you hate Tolkien! :eek: ;)
 
T. C. Boyle

Because he's boring as hell - he writes about nothing.

Irvine Welsh

Because he's unintelligable - he writes in an alien language.

Cheers
 
Inderjit S said:
Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen and D.H Lawrence. Austen is just plain dry, in my opinion.

And SillyWabbit-how can you hate Tolkien! :eek: ;)
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lol Because he is utter rubbish ;)
 
Yeah, I mean, he has had absolutely no influence on the fantasy-genre on the whole, didn't even bother to invent a few languages, and it's not like they made a gazillion dollar movie about his books, right?

:p

Cheers
 
I didn't say he was not clever did I? :p

Being clever and inventing langauges is totally different from writing a good book, isnt it? :) I maybe great at painting but I might be a terrible writer.

As I have stated before. I admire Tolkien a LOT. He was a genius! But as a writer, I find him terrible. And as stated before by otheres, he just ripped of the Nordic sagas. Also as stated before, other fantasy writers wrote fantasy novels before him and they did it better!

Obviously, each to their own :) We all have different tastes and I have tried really REALLY hard to like him and get into him, but I just can't. I find his writing dull, his characters boring, and his story boring.
 
On the whole 'ripping of the Nordic saga' issue-Tolkien did borrow some of the names from 'The Hobbit' (esp. the Dwarves) from the Edda's and some have also pointed out that there are similarities between his ring saga and Wagner's Ring of Nibelung, to which Tolkien glibly replied "both rings were round and there the resemblance ends"-Tolkien disliked allegory (I don't know if he hated the genre or hated writing in a allegorical way-I think it may have been the later, dozens of great books are allegories, Pilgrims Progress, Gulliver’s Travels and of course Animal Farm and so I think any similarities between the two may have been subconscious, rather then wholly intentional. And, bear in mind, he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, so the Nordic sagas would have influenced him a lot.

Also-and there is hope I shall not sound absurd-I was from the early days grieved by the poverty of my own country: it had no stories of it's own bound up with it's tongue and soil, not of the quality that i sought (and found) in legends of other lands. THERE WAS GREEK, AND CELETIC, AND ROMANCE, GERMANIC, SACANDINAVIAN AND FINNISH (Which greatly effect me) but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.....
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'Letters of Tolkien'

I don't know how much of Tolkien's work you have actually read, but his non-LoTR Middle-Earth work is influenced a lot more by other myths and legends then LoTR. His earliest works were definitely re-workings of old Scandinavian legends, or they borrowed heavily from old Scandinavian legends. Tolkien was, after all, hardly a dilletant when it came to old myths, and so they would have naturally influenced him a great deal-look at a lot of great novels or works-the romanticists were heavily influenced by Shakespeare, the story of Sinbad from the Arabian Nights was influenced by The Odyssey and so on.
 
Inderjit S, you obviously know a lot more about Tolkien than I do - and I'm agreeing with you.

Mr. Wabbit though, I think you've completely dissappeared down your hole now. Tolkien is my favourite writer, and I honestly can't imagine anyone could think he was the worst author they'd ever read. When I read his books I just get the feeling that he completely loved what he did, and it wasn't a 'mechanical' process that lead him to write it.

I agree with you and Ice though about Terry Pratchett. He's one author I honestly don't like. Hmm... and myself when I try to write lyrics. Everything ends up as cheesy as hell! I've wrote one set of lyrics and sent them to a few friends and they liked them though. I think I'll put them up here and see what everyone thinks. My credibility will probably go right down the pan though. Never mind...
 
Mr. Wabbit though, I think completely dissappeared down your hole now. Tolkien is my favourite writer, and I honestly can't imagine anyone could think he was the worst author they'd ever read.
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Yes, and that's the point, isn't it? :)

He is YOUR fav author. It just comes down to a question of taste. We can argue back and forth all day trying to rationalize why we like or don't like him but it simply comes down, in the end, to the fact we like or don't like him.

Just different tastes :)

For me, as I have stated a MILLION times and people keep choosing or are incapable of reading what I say so will say it AGAIN.

I think Tolkien is great at world buidling and blah blah blah blah. YES, he loved what he did. YES, he is very clever. YES, he is a genius at world building and blah blah blah.

The point is that, for me personally, he just can't write. He is just boring. I don't want serveral pages of how somebody drank a glass or water. I'm not interested in 28 pages of who came from where, who there fraggin father was and his father and his father and grannie came from over the hills! I just DO NOT CARE! I don't want a friggin elf song or poem every other page either. Also, I would like him to get on with it. I don't want 10 pages of hobbits walking over a hill. Just write: They walked over a hill. I don't want 19 pages of what they had for breakfast, how they ate it, what they had with it, and what are they having for bleeding tea!!!

OK, I feel better. I am going for a lay down :D
 
Hehe, I know I know. I quite like all the details though. And the poems, songs and languages I like aswell. I just think it's all very honest. And I like honesty. Blimey, I feel like the baddy of the forum after that though. :(
 
lol You are not the baddy. You don't wear black and go mmmmahahahah.

Like I said, everybody has their own taste in things.
 
Hmmmm, you certainly do have your own taste Wabbit :p

Though I can see what you mean - one of my favourite series is Jean Auel's Earth's Children books. However I felt that she did go into far too much detail in the fourth book of the surroundings etc and when I first read it I skimed over certain details, especially when they began to get repetative :eek:
 
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