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?
"Tension without release. One of the trends I see in fanfiction over 200k words is a tendency to not be able to allow pressure off of the story for a little while before bringing it back. Arcs are either not fully resolved, leaving no downtime to the story or the author can’t help but continue escalating. This is a bit like grinding misery, but not the same. I find it exhausting. If I wanted to deal with an unending grind where things never get better, I’d go outside."
This one is why I gave up entirely on anything related to Halo a number of years ago. Maybe things changed, but I doubt it, and I can't help but assume the series is perpetually locked in a series of unresolved cliffhangers and side stories where nothing changes except Cortana gets more and more fanservicey.