Which authors' success is a complete mystery to you?

[emkana]

Tony Parsons

Jodi Picoult

you are all mad

agree with dhl a bit tho and now I think of it, oscar wilde and dickens - never liked either of them

Dan Brown: I read the Da Vinci Code expecting some marvel of literature and instead found a badly written pile of cack, with one-dimensional, predictable characters, and a laughable 'plot'. I kept thinking "it's not going to be the Holy Grail, surely it's not..." and when it was I threw the book across the room. Indiana Jones did it first and better.

Jodie Picoult: To be fair she does have a unique talent - she manages to write novels which have different plots and different characters - yet are so incredibly samey you can't actually remember which is which.

Any of the "My Life Has Been SO Much Worse Than Yours" books (I wasn't just abused by my parents, I ended up a prostitute, my leg fell off, my dog got run over, my house fell down, I never got what I wanted for Christmas, and all my clothes are made of Crimpelene)

Any chick-lit, Aga-saga type bollocks.

LOL at Indiana Jones!

that is a good point about indiana jones, and he had a WHIP which is much better than a ?cilice?

Not Oscar

Jack Kerouac even worse than Hemingway

Ian McEwan - dull dull dull

I agree about Kerouac. Not only was he a prick but also he was a shite writer.

no no kerouac and hemingway do not belong on this thread

I love Jack Kerouac- reminds me of travelling and all the chracters to meet when you wander

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yes, they do, Vacua.

they were shite writers and arseholes.

i hate hemingway so much, if i went back in time i'd have given him a gun for Xmas.

yeah ok then

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he had a cool house in Florida, though.

wasn't the same gun used by other members of the hemingway family for same purpose?

Tolstoy??

You are nutters!

now i don't know about that.

only about being forced to read 'a farewell to arms' and 'for whom the bells toll' and some short stories about whales and the sea and i just tried to block it all out.

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Not Ian McEwan please

I like Kerouac and Tolstoy!

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lol at this thread.

I wonder if non-parents have quite so much vitriol for shite authors? I suspect not. I hate it when mediochre authors intrude on my precious reading time. It makes me feel used and cheap.

But anyway. I dislike lots of the authors names here but am not mystified by their success. T Hardy was a victorian, Hemmingway may be a mysoginistic alcoholic, but his prose is great, J K Rowling hit a real nerve I think, and possibly got lucky too.

But then I haven't actually read any Alice Sebold/marian keyes/jodi picoult books. perhaps I should keep it that way.

I am quite mystified by Dan Brown's success though. there are so many authors who've written similar, but less patronising novels.

I'll tell you who. I can't remember his name but my SIL gave me a book to read last year and it was about this woman from South America who became a prostitute in Geneva or somerthwre and had a romantic and spititual awakening with one of her punters.

God it was shite. I didn't know what to say to her when she asked me if I'd liked it.

Paul something I think

might sound a bit like cello

Henry James