What will you not read?

[nemesis]

I will not read romance genre. Those who like Catherine Cookson and Mills and Boon prints are welcome to keep them. I want my boundaries to be pushed not contracted. A topic starter.

[scifimoth]

Yuck...romance novels....
*hiss*
You got that right....there are definetly things I will not read.
You had to talk about romance novels...how could you ? LOL

[brian]

I've never actually read any, so I don't know if I'd actually dislike them or not. How many have you read, Nemesis?

[scifimoth]

I know enough about them and enough people that read them....
I also have to admitt to having tried to read one at least once.....but the heaving bosoms, glowing skin and shining eyes were too much for me LOL

[brian]

I think I read a Jilly Cooper once. All I remember was lots of sex stuff and something about vaginal deodorants. I remember nothing of the plot or characters. I presume they were there.

[scifimoth]

LOL....I am sure there were characters....after all there wouldn't be sex without them...but that does not mean that there actually was a plot that was deeper than a petri dish......

[chronicles]

There were horses and horse-riding - must have been "Riders". The horses were good, I think.

[X Q mano]

I think there are few books I won't read out of principle...

But a lot of books I'll never read out of disinterest. And lack of information... Those kind of things...

[scifimoth]

I have found that the way certain writers write can cause the book to be an impossible task for me...LOL

[nemesis]

It is the themes I cannot read. I do not care for formulated love themes. If they were dealt with in a less repetitive manner I may read them. Love triangles are too predicatble. Predictable destroys reader care.

[Foxbat]

I don't believe there is such a thing as a bad genre of writing....only bad writers. Even a romance can work if it is written well and has a taste of originality about it. I agree that writing to a formula is about as bad as it can get. Unfortunately there's a lot of it about in every genre.

[littlemissattitude]

I will not read westerns. Well, I read one Louis L'Amour, but it was called The Haunted Mesa and was not really a western, but a pretty good fantasy novel.

I will not read anything by Tom Clancy. I tried to read one of his novels and couldn't get past the third page. It was all techno-jargon.

I will not read Charles Dickens, aka King of the Run-on Sentence. I've tried. I've really tried. I've never gotten past the third or fourth page of anything Dickens wrote, either.

I will not read novels by certain people who are considered to be "important" writers - John Updike comes to mind immediately. I've never noticed, when I've tried to read authors in that sort of contemporary literary fiction genre, that they have had anything relevant to say to me.

I mostly will not read romance novels. I definitely will not read any romance novels that come in numbered series'. I used to read them, and quite enjoyed a few of them, particularly some of Victoria Holt's gothics, but I was about twelve or thirteen years old at the time and pretty much grew out of them a long time ago.

Other than that, I will read pretty much anything. Or, I guess I should say that I will give pretty much anything else a try - if an author has not got me drawn into the story (in the case of fiction) or into his subject (in the case of non-fiction) within fifty pages, I will generally not continue with it. There are just too many books to read to waste time on those that I do not find interesting.

[brian]

Never read romance, but maybe I really should read a few. I'm feeling guilty that I've excluded the genre. At least if I'd read something I would have earned the right to be critical! (Assuming I didn't actually like what I read in the first place )

As for Tom clancy - never read one either. Never seemed like towering classics, which at one point is what I sought out - luckily we did Dickens in school, so I've never felt a need to go back.

[littlemissattitude]

It's really funny...I've liked the "classics" I've had to read for classes, for the most part. But I do not seek them out. Never have.

I really like the ancient Greeks. A lot of the Greek plays are more contemporary in theme than a lot of things being written today. And I loved Dante's "Inferno." I really like some of Shakespeare. And I really loathe some of Shakespeare. I have no patience for "Othello" at all, for example (and have had to read it twice for different literature classes). But I love "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet" (which, I think, is not about true love at all, which most people seem to assume as a given). A bit more toward the present, I love The Metamorphosis - how can you not like a story in which the main character wakes up one morning to find that he has turned into a cockroach? I like having read Madame Bovary, but I hated actually reading it. Of the modern so-called classics, the one I truly cannot abide is Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. I know there are people who love it, but it just did nothing for me.

[brian]

Heh, I remember having to read some of those Greek plays! Not enjoyable. I did actually read some Shakespeare by myself - The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, and a couple of others (I forget which). I've only read Marlowe's "Faustus" (and the other much later version - was it Goethe?) of the Elizabethan age. Never touched Ben Johnson.

Which reminds me - there's a thread I have to create.