I like him, but for me, it’s Stephen King, a lot of his stories he goes off on a twenty page non-relevant rant.
Though, the ones where he keeps that to a minimum, are great.
Then there’s Mr. Marketer James Patterson who markets out his name to other authors making it look like he wrote the book when it was obviously someone else.
by throwmysoulaway12
5 Comments
at risk of being downvoted. J.K Rowling
I couldn’t say any one author is massively overrated, as most have books that I enjoy. I think the term overrated should be replaced with ‘I don’t like this thing and that’s okay’.
I don’t like Murakami (1Q84 is 1 book and 2 overlong, nonsense appendices), but I do like Kafka on the Shore and a few others.
I still look forward to reading Norwegian Wood and Wind Up Bird Chronicles too … despite my dislike of his style.
Bukowski. Not to sound too harsh but… he is absolute trash imo, yet is somehow branded a genius whose fake deep quotes everyone fawns over. All I noticed while reading his work are vulgarisms on every other page. As an author he is average at best
Brandon Sanderson.
I say this because, although I know that redditors probably really enjoy Sanderson in general, the ratings that his books get on GoodReads are just absolutely bonkers. 4.7 or 4.8 / 5.0 for pretty much any book he writes, whereas genuine classic novels that this sub loves will score noticeably lower than that, like East of Eden (4.4) and Count of Monte Cristo (4.3).
Right now Words of Radiance sits at 4.76. I remember seeing that rating and thinking, my god, this is going to be one hell of an amazing book if it can get a rating like that. (I had previously read The Way of Kings, and I enjoyed it a lot) And although the book was more good than bad, it obviously needs to be way beyond “more good than bad” to score a 4.76. He turned a character into a supremely unlikeable person, threw in some YA-esque romance that largely fizzled, and otherwise lacked the complexity of a lot of other fantasy series out there, focusing on a small number of threads but still trying to justify a length of 1000 pages.
Part of the problem is that I’m sure his books aren’t being read by the general public and are probably only being read by people who just love fantasy in general and are predisposed to love any fantasy book at all. If the general public read his books, I doubt he scores these insanely high scores on GoodReads.
King and Orwell are both terrible, racist, ignorant writers, yet they are worshipped like gods by r/books. Nabokov is an excellent stylist with appalling, backward politics (he supported the Vietnam War, and that’s really just the tip of the iceberg with this guy). Tolstoy’s contempt for peasants and women absolutely shines through in his work (the dude was literally a count), and Dostoevsky recycled the openings to his novels and became a monarchist after he was nearly executed by monarchists. These writers are profoundly overrated by people who have never dared to stray beyond the accepted pedestrian norms of liberal civility.
Much better writers are more or less unknown to Westerners and r/books like Chernyshevsky, Sholokhov, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o due to the fact that the Red Scare never really ended in the USA. Thankfully Le Guin and Butler are known here, as is Melville, who (together with Poe and Lovecraft) might be the only genuinely good American authors period.
Particularly in the 20th century, the only qualification for becoming a popular American writer is: “do you hate workers, communism, and the poor?” And for the most part, r/books laps it up.