Today’s question for the Book Blogger Hop from Coffee Addicted Writer is:
If you read a book you ended up hating, would you stay away from future books by that author, or would you give them a second chance?
(submitted by Maria @ A Night’s Dream of Books)
My Answer
My knee-jerk response was, oh yes, definitely. Then I realised that wasn’t true. It depends whether I disliked the first of their work I read, or enjoyed some and disliked another.
A case in point was Jennifer Ellis’s Confessions of a Failed Environmentalist. I didn’t like that because it was too close to home, with rampantly capitalist males wanting to trash the environment so they could make more money, and the protagonist feeling up against that pressure from one side, whilst being ridiculed for not being what I would term a Deep Green, taking environmental living to extremes. It has in no way stopped me enjoying her fabulous Derivatives of Displacement series, or enjoying her somewhat apocalyptic In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation, and I adored the amazing Reversal as you can tell by my reviews.
But equally, there are authors whom I now won’t touch, ever again. The first that spring to mind are: Peter May after The Blackhouse; Dan Brown, and by extension, Simon Toyne (whose book I review towards the end of the month). I would be unlikely to pick up another Stephen Fry (ditto). There are a few indie authors I’d steer clear of, having read and reviewed their books on here. I won’t name them, since it’s only my opinion, after all. These best-selling authors are fair game, though, in my view!
What about you? Are you a tolerant type, giving an author the benefit of the doubt? How many chances do you give him/her? Have you ever completely changed your mind about someone you at first disliked?
You can do the Book Blogger Hop every weekend, or pop in when you choose. Check out the Coffee Addicted Writer’s sign up page for details.
It depends, doesn’t it….If I absolutely hated a book and it was the first of that author’s work I had read, I would probably steer clear in future, but there’s very few books I have ever “hated” as opposed to being mildly disinterested towards or less than enthusiastic about.
Good point. I’ve rarely hated a book, although Sanctus comes close, and it’s usual for me to just DNF rather than continue with something I dislike.
With you on Dan Brown! Someone lent me The Da Vinci Code when it was at the height of its popularity and I read it thinking all the time “this is such rubbish”. BUT – it was definitely a page turner and I finished* it, though I would never pick up another. Harry Potter is another, perhaps controversial, case. I read the first one before the hype and thought it was ok, but nothing special. I have never read anything else by JKR and don’t intend to.
*Being confined to the house with plaster up to my knee probably contributed to that.
Yes, amazing what you read when there’s nothing else. I read a Suzanne or was it Jackie Collins on a six month trip when there was nothing better to read. 🙂
I got wholly into the Harry Potter thing, probably because Hermione was obviously modelled on me. I read one of her more recent books and wouldn’t continue with others, although I suspect she was being pushed to keep the wordcount up rather than give it a good edit.
Hi Jemima. I’d give the author a second chance but not a third.
Very wise 🙂
I think I’d be more likely to pass over the author again, but if a friend said to give them another chance and why I’d probably do it.
That’s a good point. A suggestion to ‘try X’ always helps.
I don’t often even pick up books that I’m going to hate. It’s more about books that leave me feeling “meh” or finding I’m just not picking them up to finish them. If that happens with the first book I read by an author, odds of me picking up another are low (not impossible, though, since I don’t always keep close track). In other cases, I have liked some books by an author, and not others–Bill Bryson being a case in point. I like his histories, but his travel books are iffy, and the latest made me so angry that I quit in the middle and will probably not read any more of his work.
Ah, yes – books that make you angry for getting the facts of places wrong…. well, you know how I feel about those. Even if BB would defend himself by ‘it’s my interpretation’. It’s not fair to diss a place, although it can keep people away from somewhere you’d rather they didn’t discover!
It wasn’t just getting things wrong, though he did that in one I read about the US. The final-straw book was “The Road to Little Dribbling,” and he just plain got mean-spirited. Came off as a superior idiot, especially in one scene where he describes with great smugness how he harassed some poor kid working at McDonalds. Jerk.