The book is hilarious and much better than the movie

Sure. Just a few years ago the LitRPG genre effectively didn't exist. There are a handful of things we could point to that can be retroactively placed in the genre, but it wasn't really a distinct thing until maybe 10 years ago and it didn't really take off until just the last few.

Silent patient… it’s the one where I was really making theories while reading and then… nothing happened.

I feel cruel for saying this, but by the time I was done, the scope of his miserable circumstances made me laugh. I remember closing it and thinking, "This story was really about a chill dude surrounded by insufferable people." Like what if the "yes, dear" meme was a book and encompassed every facet of someone's life.

I can't really say I pick up any books expecting to dislike them, as that would probably be disqualifying for me in the first place. I don't really feel compelled to read anything that doesn't inherently sound interesting or enjoyable to me. So if there were something that seemed dislikable to me, I would likely never start it in the first place.

So that said, I go into every book expecting to enjoy it. I probably give up on 1 in 10 books or so, maybe more, which end up not being enjoyable to read. Most recently I gave up on War in Heaven by David Zindell. I hadn't enjoyed the earlier 3 books in the series all that much, and at this point didn't really see myself getting much fulfillment out of finishing the final book even though I had made it that far.

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I am 4 books in—they get better and better as you go. The 4th ends in a very dramatic way. The hardest part is what you just read. It starts very slowly but after the first 50-100 pp, it takes off.

I took a break for about a year to read other stuff, but I’ll return to the last three soon.

I don't have a fixed list. But do have a general idea about the next couple of books I want to read.

.... Wait what? How am I only finding out today that Forest Gump was based on a book? That's wild!

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Fortunately I was getting then through the library and hadn't bought the whole set or anything like that.

My complaint was a common one, that they're deeply misogynistic. I was prepared for that knowing that some of that is to be expected in that time period and expecting the rest of it to be good enough to get past that. But no, it was awful. I kept going a lot longer than I should have hoping their relationship would settle down, but no. Just a dozen forms of abusiveness in a relationship, repeating in an endless parade and calling themselves love.

I was so mad!

What you have to realize is they are both unreliable narrators. Once you realize that the book becomes much more interesting as you try to figure out where the truth is.

As a Brazilian I feel truly embarassed by Paulo Coelho's books. That is not we have to show the world. I feel sad that from an international perspective Paulo Coelho overshadows magnificent Brazilian authors such as Machado de Assis, João Ubaldo, Ariano Suassuna, Jorge Amado, Guimarães Rosa, among others.

D J MacHale was also the creator of Are You Afraid of the Dark! Multi talented for sure!

There’s at least two more coming that I know of in the next 18-24 months, but I can’t say more than that. Sorry, hope that helps!

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Clarity.
You can be as loquacious as you want if you arrange your words so that the structure, cadence, and meaning of each sentence is clear.
It only becomes "purple prose" when your ornamentation gets in the way of the meaning and flow of the sentence. If people have to slow down, back up, and read through several times to figure out how the hell that sentence was supposed to be read, that's purple.

I think the plot was chronologically impossible? Or maybe I was too dumb to get it

Also the case with my essays as each semester progresses lol.

Thank you for the recs!

Oh shoot, that's rough when you've already planned to read the full series. Was it because of a slow burn, or a different reason? Considering you made it a quarter way though, I'd say that's an accomplishment, considering her books are a trillion pages long, lol!! I used to curse her under my breath when I worked at a bookstore, because her damn books took up so much shelf room!

In The Woods by Tana French. I hated how it ended. A massive mystery left unsolved and just a really unsatisfying outcome.

I read Stoner years ago and, like you, was utterly absorbed by the story. You might want to read “Augustus,” also by John Williams, completely different as it concerns Augustus, Emperor of Rome. The novel is composed entirely of fictional correspondence, I.e. letters.

As a portuguese native speaker, I think Saramago is the only author (at least among those I know) whose books must suffer a very important loss when translated from portuguese to any other language, to the point it really affects the experience. The other authors you mentioned may suffer a little, but no one even close to Saramago IMO. I am not convinced of the exact reason for that, but maybe it happens because Saramago writes like our head thinks (like a deep and continuous thought) and that is more particular to a language than a text designed to be "correctly structured" and to make sense, as most authors do even in their native languages.

Like you say, it of course various.

But unless an author has explicitly said they don't like it, I can't imagine most of them are opposed to fan mail. I know I enjoy reading folk's thoughts on my work.

As long as you're not, like.... harrasing them or something, surely it's fine?

The question doesn't really make sense without some extremely robust objective criteria defining what makes something a distinct genre. See the relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/2518/