A book so bad it ruined other books for you?

So have you ever encountered a book so awful, whatever "awful" means for that book, that it ruined reading other, mostly-unrelated books for you?

I have just had an epiphany that I am especially nitpicky and expecting to be disappointed when I encounter books written by two authors with dual protagonists because I hated Sorcery and Cecelia so much 10 years ago. (I wanted to like it! It's a very popular book! And that probably turned a "this isn't for me" feeling to "this is bad and the authors should apologize for it".)

I'm trying to think if there are any others like that for me - I'm fairly sure I don't read certain nonfiction topics because of terrible books back in the day, but can't recall any specifics right now.

I'm curious what others' sour books might be. Please share yours, and I may take it under advisement to avoid them, too. :)

I got turned off of most young adult (especially science fiction/fantasy) after reading (or trying to read) several that were awful. Incarceron, Divergent, Beautiful Creatures, The Iron Thorn, and Delirium all come to mind. Since then I've eased myself back into the genre, because I've become much better at picking out books to read that I will enjoy, including YA.

I'm positively done with sparkling vampires.

>1 keristars:, maybe try Good Omens as a cure for the two-authors, dual-protagonist blues.

>3 Cecrow: sparkling vampires - first thing i thought of. Although i wouldn't say that ruined all YA for me, just faux-romance YA, which was ruined long before i got there.

I think Good Omens is an exception to the two-authors rule. Maybe i'm wrong. Good two-authors suggestions please?

>3 Cecrow: Okay, I'll admit to being in the minority and Disliking Good Omens. Though I'm not sure how much of it was because I disliked one of the author's writing styles. I just couldn't be shiny about that book.

>1 keristars: Oh, a book that ruined an author for me... Spider Legs with Piers Anthony attached. Oh it was horrible, like the coauthor wanted to flaunt his knowledge of a specific subject and Piers just tacked his name to it to help it sell. I stopped reading Piers Anthony for a long time after that.

Tend to avoid the James Patterson Coauthored stuff too.

>2 norabelle414: Ooh, I think Matched by Ally Condie turned me off the YA dystopia/romance before some of those were big, but that was a very conscious choice on my part, not the subconscious distrust of dual author/dual protag books. :D

>3 Cecrow: and >4 MrAndrew: I have definitely read Good Omens and own a copy! But I don't think of it as a dual-protag. I guess, dual-protag POV would be more accurate for what I mean? It's the switching off of POVs accoding to who's writing the scene that tends to make things less good. You see it a lot in dual-author romances.

Other two author books may be picture books and graphic novels, where the text and the imagery work together. So often, each half has to pull enough weight that both creators are equally the author. (And things can go badly wrong there, too.) But that's again different...

I'm trying to think back for more, and I have been avoiding them so thoroughly that the one besides Good Omens that comes to mind is a YA space fantasy I'm reading now...and it's also not very good. I was trying to pinpoint why I dislike it so much when I had my epiphany. (I also dislike it because it's not fantasy enough, but also not space-science enough.) Other books in my catalogue with 2 authors are mostly non-fiction, comics, or picture books.

String of very bad YA books turned me off YA too - the last one was Graceling.

Think it's not the YA genre specifically, more so the way the online hype machine approaches YA books.

>6 keristars: Matched was one of the next ones on my list when I burned out.

>7 Settings: the way the online hype machine approaches YA books.
Yes definitely, now I am extremely suspicious of books that seem to be well-advertised. I recently got burned again that way with The Paper Magician and They Both Die at the End.

I think Cinder was one that got me away from YA dystopian...

Having read a few New York Times bestseller list duds I tend to distrust any book in the list. Even knowing that bestseller doesn’t mean good, it just means frequently purchased, I still sometimes get carried along with the wave of expectation.

I stayed away from Guy Gavriel Kay for a loooong time. The first books I read by him were the Fionavar trilogy and while I can enjoy some rather heavily Tolkien-derived books, this one had just too many direct matches in characters & scenes, with the extra aggravations of the portal fantasy with modern day North American students as protagonists (instead of the in-world characters that I usually prefer), and the IMHO not necessary Arthurian love triangle subplot.
Yet Tigana was one of my favorite books as soon as I eventually got around to reading it.

I stayed away indefinitely from Terry Brooks after I read Sword of Shannara for identical reasons, and unlike Kay who I eventually got back to, the absence of anything about some characters or the writing that hinted I might still enjoy something else by that author.

I've never been much into YA, though I can enjoy lovely books that just happen to be suitable for younger audiences as well like the Last Unicorn and such. By the time Harry Potter was a thing in my neck of the woods I didn't find it all that exciting, I was already happily devouring adult SFF and when the bandwagon started barrelling I found too many of the offerings to be over-hyped weaker renditions of better-done-elsewhere themes with 'mandatory' romances hogging way too much plot & page real-estate.

>11 Jarandel:, almost the same feeling about Kay, except I stubbornly went straight to Tigana. Not sure I would have risked it if that wasn't a standalone, I figured "it's one book, not a big commitment". Glad I did. I've fallen away from him again lately after not much caring for Under Heaven, but I'm sure I'll cycle back. I've appreciated the Fionavar concept more in retrospect; the idea was for it to be the template world upon which everything else fantasy had been based, thus the direct matches problem. Lions of Al-Rassan and the Sarantium duology are not to be missed.

I feel like I've "outgrown" Terry Brooks (with no slight intended to his fans), he reads too YA to me now. I revisited Landover in Princess of Landover and regretted it, I'm sorry to say. I suppose it was never too wonderful a series to begin with, but teenage me didn't know it as I enjoyed it then.

In the same vein as Last Unicorn, I strongly recommend The Neverending Story. If a kid can read that and understand its message, I'm deeply impressed because I'm not sure I've grasped it all.

there are a few that were so off-putting that I gave up on the specific author (Piers Anthony I'm looking at you here), but the only one book that put me off of reading for a short while is Cloud Atlas. I know a lot of people just love it but I found it so impenetrable that I just didn't read anything for like TWO WHOLE WEEKS after.

I loved Piers Anthony's Xanth series...at least the first 10 books or so. I then read his auto-biography, maybe it is better to enjoy the author's writing and not really get to know them better.

More recently I read The Gutbucket Quest which was one that he similarly had his name attached to as mentioned in post 5. I didn't hate it, but wasn't overly impressed either.

I've never read anything that completely turned me off reading any particular genre entirely.

>13 Darth-Heather: Oh wow, that's quite the anti-recommendation for Cloud Atlas!! I'm a little bit impressed that it was such a bad fit for you to put you off reading entirely.

I haven't got around to it yet, but I'll make extra sure I'm in the right mood for it before starting, since it sounds like the wrong reading appetite could completely torpedo it.

>14 Jenson_AKA_DL: I love Anthony's Incarnations series, although a couple of them are slow. I agree with you about the Xanth books, and I also liked the Adept series and some of his collaborative efforts - all of this left me completely unprepared for Split Infinity, and Firefly which I didn't finish. I'm leery of picking up Anthony books now, for fear of what I will find.

>15 keristars: Cloud Atlas made me feel like my imagination was stalled; it just didn't work for me, but I might try the movie and maybe a different one of Michell's books.

>16 Darth-Heather: I fairly well enjoyed The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which at the time I read it, I was given to understand was in a very different style from Cloud Atlas. It's been so long that I'm fuzzy on the details of how it differed from Cloud Atlas, but I believe it is a more straightforward narrative and more interested in the depth of writing than any narrative trickery. You might enjoy it better! I love historical fiction that cares a lot about evoking the epoch and daily life and not so concerned about Big Plots, so it was right for me.

>17 keristars: thank you for the recommendation - i love historical fiction with lots of homespun details too, so that might suit me well. Duly added to the gigantic wishlist! :)