What kills a book for me:
- When the main character physically resembles the author's photo on the back of the book
- Multiple, explicit, gratuitous sex scenes that do not advance the plot
- Excessive descriptions of the landscape the characters are merely passing through
- Obvious and frequent foreshadowing
- Mary Sue characters
- Forgetting that air is a commodity on a space station and that there has to be some means of generating gravity
- Dragons
- Books that start off with a poor peasant boy taken under the wing of a magician/sorcerer/seer
- Handsome, smart, police detectives who are inexplicably attracted to scatter-brained heroines in cozy mysteries
- Non-fiction books where the footnotes take up more of the page than the actual writing.
- Multiple spelling mistakes
- Characters whose moral code does a 180 midway in a series when the author's personal life changes
- Centaurs
- Mysteries where the villain is clear by the 50th page due to the process of elimination
- Books in which children are tortured and murdered in the first chapter
- Books that begin with the tragic ending of the book
- Characters that prefer to live in poverty rather than touch their trust fund money