Sherri Tepper writes brilliantly imaginative and highly entertaining novels.
Unfortunately, they all seem to be about how loathsome and deserving of being ruthlessly killed off humanity is.
There are a few moments where she veers into frothing rad-fem/TERF/homophobia territory, like
Gate to Women's Country, but for the most part she's a very good writer and well worth reading if you can avoid the homophobia/transphobia (and occasional brush with misandry) in her later works. The best of her work that I've read so far is the Arbai trilogy. It's a shame that some of her works veer into that anti-LGTBQ biological-essentialist territory in particular, because she's otherwise one of the better feminist writers out there. Of course, I tend to share some of her misanthropy, so...
Back on topic. My nomination is Foucault's Pendulum It's the first book I read that I failed to finish; due to being absolutely as dull as watching paint dry.
Personally, I thought it was fascinating, and had trouble putting it down. But I'm weird, so...
One SF novel I'd add to the list though is Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast. If you read Stranger in a Strange Land back in the day, stop there.
The Number of the Beast was when Heinlein started writing his own fanfiction. That's the problem with a lot of his later work,
Friday being another good (bad) example.
Two classics I've read (or reread) in the last couple years --
The Catcher in the Rye
A Separate Peace
-- makes me wonder why anyone would want to read these without having been assigned to. Well, I guess I did, but it was only to find out why they are considered so important in literature. I didn't.
I was well into adulthood before I realized the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye being a smarmy little jagoff who needed to grow up was the entire point of the book. Seen in that light, it makes more sense that they'd assign it to kids who stand to learn the most from it, but they really ought to lead with that moral instead of assuming the kids'll catch on. At the time I was too busy being a smarmy little jagoff to possess that level of self-awareness.
IIRC, he wasn't intended to be a seen as a smarmy little jagoff, that Salinger fully intended his audience to identify with Holden. Salinger was also a disaffected nutcase ephebophile, so his own maturity issues and other mental problems were fully on display there.
There's a limit to how much of one's life one should spend reading Stephen Donaldson, and I hit the threshold in the middle of the Gap series. As a result, I can only advise you not to read the first two and a half books of this, along with the first two Thomas Covenant trilogies.
Personally, I love most of Donaldson's work. I thought all the Thomas Covenant books were great, and that the unsympathetic main character was a large part of the reason for that. It was effectively the "anti-Tolkien", and the point was Covenant's redemption and the recovery of his humanity. I also really liked the Mordant's Need duology. The Gap trilogy, however, is about where I draw the line. It's essentially a retelling of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and is unrelentingly brutal and dark. I managed to get all the way through it (I hate leaving things unfinished, even if they're crap), but that's about it.
For books not to read, that's generally going to be a fairly personal list (although there are a few that will be more or less universal, like the Twilight books and spinoffs like
50 Shades of Gray, the Wheel of Time books, most of which are sheer filler, and anything by Terry Goodkind, which are train-wreck fascination material at best).
One of my favorite fantasy authors is Louise Cooper. I loved the Time Master books and their spinoffs, and Mirage is one of the best dark fantasy novel's that I've read. But the Indigo series is
not worth reading. That one struck me as more of a "paying the bills" thing aimed at teen-age girls.
Speaking of which, no one over 14 should read Mercedes Lackey.
Orson Scott Card had some great books, and some utter and complete crap, with a disturbing air of paedophilia underlying a lot of them.
Anything and everything written by Piers Anthony are best avoided, with the exception of the Aton books, and Of Man and Manta. Incarnations of Immortality starts well, but ends up just being repetitious and dull after the first couple books, and the less said about the writing quality of Apprentice Adept the better. Xanth started out vaguely misogynistic, and ended up being nothing more than an excuse to spew bad puns provided by readers. Everything else of his that I've read (most of it) ranges from disturbingly misogynistic to violently misogynistic. Bio of a Space Tyrant in particular seemed written as an excuse to string together violent rape scenes, and in the Cluster series, he managed to invent an entirely new form of sex
and create a rape scenario for it. Then there was
Pornucopia, which was all about rape as comedy. On the other hand, Mode not only was fairly dull for most of it, with profoundly stupid characters, but even managed to write a profoundly dull rape scene. The guy has some serious issues.
