madbaker | I'm obviously in the minority

I've been a SF/F reader for a very long time. I date my start to seven or eight, when I discovered Heinlein and Bradbury and Vance. It's fair to blame my dad for reading The Hobbit as a bedtime story when I was five, though.

This is possibly heretical, but since it's on LiveJournal no one will actually read this and flame me. So here goes:
I don't understand why Connie Willis is a popular writer.

I've read a couple of her books. I thought they were okay - nothing world-shaking or engrossing, certainly nothing that made me want to read more of her work. The couple I read were, in fact, among the many ones she's written that have won many awards. But they were far from the best things I read that year. I only vaguely remember one of them, and that was getting to the end and going "So... nothing actually happened."

Taste is a funny thing. I'm not limited to one genre; I sometimes like space opera, sometimes guns and monsters, sometimes heroic (or anti-heroic) fantasy. I adored both Ancillary Justice and City of Stairs and those two have nothing in common. Except excellent writing. And... I just don't think Connie Willis is an excellent writer.

The rest of SF/F fandom disagrees. And that's fine. But I don't get it and I don't see that ever changing.