For me, shitty style / lazy writing make me put a book down immediately. I was raised on the worship of style you find in writers like Flaubert or Nabokov (who also happened to have deplorable political views) and I can’t shake it.
Others commented here recently that making every female character in a story into a sex object is a bad thing.
What are some reasons you’ll put a book down after you’ve spent at least a little time giving it a try?
Any detective novel written by a comedian or politician who thinks they're funny. I only made this mistake once in reading some dross Hugh Laurie wrote. They all want to be P.G. Wodehouse but seem to forget that Wodehouse is humor strictly for the worst sort of self-sucking nerd, and isn't actually that funny at all if you were born after 1970 or unless you like a very specific kind of camp.