It’s happened again. I’ve fallen out of love. Well, actually, I don’t think I was ever in love, but after 200 pages of George RR Martin’s A Clash of Kings, I’ve decided to take some space. I mean, I think it’s better for the both of us. I need to answer some very serious questions: Who am I? What do I want? More importantly, what don’t I want, and right now, that’s this.
It’s nothing personal against George RR Martin. I read A Game of Thrones two summers ago and I loved it. I will, however, say that it took me a long time to get into it. Say, 150 pages? But I just can’t do it this time. So, that led me to think about why. Why do I ditch books halfway through? It seldom happens. I honestly think I’ve only ever done it to about a dozen books, but is there a formula?
I strove to find out.
I Hate the Characters
I’m not going to lie, this doesn’t happen very often for me, but when it does, it’s a huge turn off. And I don’t mean the good hate. Think Joffrey from Game of Thrones. That’s good hate. It feels good to hate him. You watch the show or read the book just so you can see what he’s going to say or do next so that you can get angry and want to strangle the poor kid.
I’m talking about the other hate. In this circumstance, I can’t stand a character. It started happening with Harry Potter circa The Order of the Pheonix. Harry became whiny and annoying and acted like the whole wizardly world was against him and that made me want to reach into the pages and give him a smack across the face. Now, in that situation, I didn’t stop reading, but it definitely slowed my pace down. I was happy when he stopped being such a suck in the subsequent books.
Where’s the Plot?
I understand the lack of plot for artistic reasons (think Catcher in the Rye), but unless you’re JD Salinger or F. Scott Fitzgerald, you best have a point. I can’t stand getting halfway through a story and realizing that it isn’t going anywhere. It’s like seeing a car crash happening in slow motion. You know what’s going to happen, but you trudge on thinking that you’re wrong, and then you get to the final scene and–
Nothing. There’s just a whole lot of nothing.
And the worst part is that I sometimes don’t even see this coming until it’s too late. I’m invested in the characters, and I just need to know. But if I had some foresight or if I had bothered to read reviews of the book on Amazon or Goodreads, I would put the book down.
[Need help editing your book? We can help.]
Three Words: TOO MUCH DESCRIPTION!
This is the number one culprit. If I decide halfway through a book that I don’t want to read it anymore, ninety percent of the time it’s because there’s too much description and I’m bored: too much description of the setting, too much description of objects. And the worst: too much description of past events and back story.
Too much description has sealed the fate of quite a few books that I’ve decided not to read: Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson, Across the Face of the World by Russell Kirkpatrick, and most recently A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin. That’s not to say that I won’t return to these books.
This happened to The Lord of the Rings Trilogy at first, and I ended up finishing all three eventually and loved them. This is just to say that I won’t read these kinds of books right now. I need time to engross myself, time that my life just doesn’t have right now. I’m too busy a person for a book to spend hundreds of pages describing trees and rocks and lineages.
Maybe I’ll make reading these books my retirement task.
The Writing is Full of Errors
This one is self-explanatory, and this often leaves a book unread before I even start reading. Most of the time, this doesn’t happen to big name authors, but a lot of indie authors that have piqued my interest have sealed their fate with spelling and grammar errors. Sure, they happen, even with a professional editor. But when it’s clear to me that there has been no editor, none at all, I’m out. I won’t buy.
The Writing is Just BAD
Thankfully, I have yet to read a book where the writing was so bad that I stopped reading. There have been cases where the writing isn’t my cup of tea, per se, but I normally trek through, especially if it promises to be an easy read.
However, bad writing has stopped me from buying a book outright. Think the Twilight Saga or the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (Gray? What country is this?). I picked up the books in a bookstore just to see what the hype was about. At around five to ten pages in, I would decide the writing was crap and the books wouldn’t be for me. I know sometimes this is an unpopular opinion (sorry Twi-hards!), but as my mom always says: Life is too short to read a bad book.
So, with that in mind, I extend my apologies to A Clash of Kings. This isn’t working out for me, and I’m thinking I should leave before one of us gets really hurt. Maybe we can try to make this happen some other time. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.
Michael Cristiano works in editing and acquisitions for Curiosity Quills Press, and his freelance work has appeared on websites such as Nexopia, FluentU, and BlushPost. Check out his blog for more of his work.
Ryan Lanz 
The biggest sins in a book for me would be:
– Not interesting
– Tortures the characters
– The characters do silly things to tie the plot
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My pet peeve is when I’m reading a really good book with a really good plot, (for example, a mystery), and the writer suddenly puts the brakes on and inserts a “hot” love scene which has absolutely nothing to do with the plot but which he/she seems to feel is expected! I page through said scene, missing nothing, get back to the real plot, do the same with the next insert, and eventually finish the book. BUT–I don’t buy another book from the same author, which is really sad.
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Good points, all of them. For every reader, it’s probably a little different. I loved that you kept this article, short, sweet, and to the point.
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All good points, however I would like to point out the criticism on the spelling of certain words. It’s worth keeping in mind that not every country spells things the same way as the US. So while “gray” might be preferred spelling in the US, “grey” tends to be preferred in other countries such as the UK (which is where E.L. James is from).
FWIW, I’m not saying the series is any good, because I agree the writing and the story in general is just bad, but my decision on that isn’t based on my preferred spelling of a word. So perhaps the OP needs to consider that there are other versions of English spelling that authors can use such as British English or Australian English, and not use that as a reason to say a book is bad.
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Excellent points!
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Absolutely!!! These points are well chosen. And Harry did get whiny-and almost always relied on others to help him out. So many plot holes!!!
I’ve got one book I’ve read most of the way. It is a great book, grand author, but…..it isn’t like Tad Williams The Dragonbone Chair. Seriously, 3 pages to climb a flight of stairs????? The one I’ve got partially read is Kristin Hannah’s The Women. I’m still in Vietnam…and there I stopped.
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I can definitely relate with The Order of the Phoenix. I especially hated that Sirius’ fate. I got the reason behind it, but it made me not want to finish the book. Especially considering Harry’s disposition, Molly over-extending her parental hand with Harry, and Ginny being a brat. All of it read poorly to me. Probably the only thing saving it for me was the presence of Sirius and Remus. Did they give Harry a reality check? Not really, but it definitely felt like they were stepping into the role of mentors and co-parents for Harry. I would’ve much rather seen a Harry that stood his ground and learned from Sirius and Remus rather than a Harry that acted like he was 12. Molly and Ginny were insufferable, as well, as I read them as enablers to his behaviour.
I’m definitely a big person for characters and characterization. So I know that if I usually put a book down, it’s the characters. I either loathe them, am bored by them, or see them as disconnected from the story. Just as bad are the ‘canon fodder characters’. The ones that get sacrificed for poor reasons like: author hated them, make a point or decision for the protagonist (Nico Sparks did this to me and I wanted to slap him for it), and the author wanted to make a point (such as Rowling’s justification for killing so many characters). It was one of the reasons that I’ve avoided Game of Thrones… I’d rather not have to mourn character after character that I love.
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