I used to devour books of certain authors like ice cream on a hot summer’s day. These days though, I could pass by a remainder bin with one of their books on sale for $1.99 and I’d walk on by. Who are these authors and what did they write that made me stop reading them?
In the case of Suzanne Brockmann, I have two words for you: Sophia and Deck. These are two characters from her novel Flashpoint that had such powerful, explosive chemistry, such a wonderful and profound effect on me as a reader and as a writer, than when subsequent books later Brockmann failed to deliver on their HEA, it totally soured me on her stories and, sadly, on romance novels period.
With Brad Thor, it was his novel Blowback. In that book, there was a scene involving a powerful, high-ranking female senator getting down on her knees and giving one of her staff members a blowjob to reward him for spying for her. Ugh. My reaction to that scene was visceral hatred, not because I’m a prude, but because it just seemed completely unbelievable (can you see Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada doing this?), totally unnecessary (said staffer was willing to spy for her without the sexual payoff), and utterly tawdry (the senator didn’t seem to be having a good time, the language was completely robotic). I got the feeling that Thor wrote that scene to humiliate and disrespect his character, and from then on, I stopped reading him.
Clive Cussler. I started reading Cussler in my early teens because my parents read them and the books were all over the house. Cussler’s books were my first introduction to the world of adult action-adventure novels. And this genre is still my first love. But I stopped reading Dirk Pitt books when he turned 60 and when Cussler himself stopped writing them.
Anna Maxted. During my chick-lit phase (roughly around the early 90s), I devoured Maxted’s first two books, Getting Over It and Running In Heels. But when my sis handed me Maxted’s third novel, Behaving Like Adults, with the warning that [SPOILER ALERT! Although this book is seven years old—should I still be posting alerts?] the heroine gets date raped, it stopped me cold. To this date, seven years later, I still haven’t picked up this book that’s been sitting on my TBR shelf all this time.
Speaking of chick-lit authors, I’ve also stopped reading Jane Green, Amy Sohn, Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella and a whole host of writers of this genre because, well, reading them one after the other transforms them all into an indistinguishable mass of pages. Although I might pick up Helen Fielding’s latest one because it involves a spy.
TOMORROW: let’s talk about the authors I continue to read and why I love them book after book after book.
