Novels
At any point in my life, I am reading a novel. It amazes me that so much of this material turns me away in the first encounter.
Describing a character/landscape in detail that I have no reason to be interested in - why don't you first tell me why I should care?
Distorting the timeline or character interactions so that it is clear that a huge part of the story is me figuring out what is going on - these are puzzles, not stories.
Chapter one should make me care about the rest of the story and the characters and landscape. This is where ebook sample downloads come in very handy. I have read many free samples that led me cross the book off of my list.
Then there are the characters. There must be someone that I care about. Otherwise I don't care what happens. They don't have to be heroes or even good people. But there must be some spark in the character that makes me care.
I don't want to see another story of murder, drugs, disease. I don't want to be grossed out. And I don't want to be preached to about social justice.
In fantasy novels - don't spend pages describing a system of magic. The magic is clearly fantasy - keep it simple so I can accept it and get on with the story.
Faster than light travel qualifies as magic, so don't waste my time trying to justify it.
Backward time travel - first, special relativity does not predict that faster than light travel reverses time. It predicts that faster than light travel makes time an imaginary number - the square root of a negative number. And if you could travel backward in time, how would you travel in space to match? Everything in the universe is moving in space. If you traveled back in time six months, you would be on the opposite side of the sun from the earth, IF you tracked the motion of the solar system.
Red Moon, by the author of Red Mars, Green Mars, etc. is a novel about the life on the moon? After the initial incidents on the moon, it moves to China. And becomes BORING. I don't know how it ends or if it ends - I suspect that the last half of the book is a lot like moving half the distance to the finish line in each sitting - you never get there. I gave up.
Murder mysteries - when are the people who solve murders going to realize that they are causing the murders? How else can you explain how many they have to deal with.
Dreams - there is nothing more boring than reading about (or listening to) people's dreams. Dreams can't be accurately described in our language because they are not real and are not internally consistent. And they don't mean anything.
Game of Thrones - book one 1996, book five 2011, was at the top of my list of fantasy series. No more. Stop in the middle, put the whole thing, including an ending, on television. Why should I read the last two books? Or maybe there won't be any more - it's been eight years.
The Kingkiller Chronicle - book one 2007 and two 2011 are done, book three has now passed eight years in development. The Slow Regard of Silent Things 2014, a side story, is possibly the most boring book that I have ever tried to read, and contributes nothing to the trilogy's story.
Christopher Moore's latest book, Noir, is awful, as far into it as I could read. Read the Amazon 1 star reviews.
Terry Pratchet, Michael Crichton, David Gemmell gone. Sigh.
Oh well, I usually find something.
