Having actually read Twilight, I still have to say Meyer. However, that is just because she has been rewarded for her pile of mediocrity. There are hints of a good writer in Twilight, they are just covered up and aren't the parts people obsess over when they like her books.
Now moving onto something not repeated every other post. Terry Goodkind. There are many reasons I do not like this writer. Part one is that the man doesn't know how to shut up. I can't recall seeing a single one of his books that was shorter than 700 pages. This would be fine except for the fact that part two is that he writes stereotypical fantasy. He has a couple of unique ideas (or rather, one unique character idea called confessors) but that doesn't excuse the fact that the main character is a guy running around with a sword and his father figure is a powerful but old wizard on an adventure to a new and strange country trying to save the world from a megalomaniac out for revenge. Many of his plot ideas have been done in significantly less pages and better. Part number three though, is the pompousness he carries around for these books. One time on his website he went into a long discussion about how he feels that a game could not be made based off his books because they were true works of art in literature and unadaptable in any media, much less video games. That didn't stop him from making a TV series out of the first book. Another post says that he is trying to be the next Ayn Rand in terms of philosophical and political literature with the Sword of Truth series. Its schlock fantasy. You aren't overthrowing anyone as the best modern anything writer. Part five is that the man does not know the meaning of the word subjective. He spends the first 200 pages of Wizard's First Rule (the first book of the Sword of Truth series) talking about how good and evil are subjective and that just because the hero thinks he is the hero and doing the right thing doesn't mean that everyone will think he is doing the right thing because the bad guy has followers. This is fine and good and actually one of the better parts of the book. Then around page 250, we are introduced to the villain. Who is busy plotting the kidnapping and murdering of children because he needs to complete some magic ritual again and his best friend who is doing the kidnapping needs to be instructed not to molest the child he kidnaps. This after he kills or threatens to kill (I don't remember which) a servant because his daddy's grave doesn't have the right number of candles lit. So our subjective villain is a tyrannical murderer and kidnapper whose best friend is a child molester. Those are all the reasons I hate Terry Goodkind.
Edit:
I noticed many people were asking in earlier pages whether any of the people who responded Stephanie Meyer read Twilight or were just hating her for the sake of hating. I have read Twilight, as I said earlier, and still mostly disliked it. I am posting my the majority of my thoughts on it when I read it that I posted on a different site:
Before I get into the full blown opinion of this book, I feel the need to give Meyer honorable mention because while she still presents vampires as having powers equivalent to Superman, the ridiculous overpowering of her vampires did not bother me as much. The vampires in this novel were compelling for me because they were equally hindered as they were powerful, not by some biological defect but by Edward's love and need to protect Bella. It is not really a long term weakness, but for a one novel approach, it actually brought vampires down to a level I could not hate. I have long harbored a vendetta against vampires because, as stated earlier, they are generally given Superman-esque powers without a real kryptonite. This generally deters me from vampire anythings, but the crippling of the Cullen clan by their need to protect Bella oddly worked for me.
This, however, is not enough to save the novel. While she may have handled vampires amazingly well for me, she handled her novel horribly. The first 200 pages or so are absolutely murder for me. All of the characters have no depth whatsoever and the plot has little originality. The big suspenseful question for the first 2/5 of the book is, "what is Edward Cullen?" making those fifths very annoying because we already know what Edward is. He is a vampire. And this was not the kind of ruined suspense that is caused by knowing that the series is about vampires. This is the kind of suspense that is ruined by the back cover. Stephanie Meyer, you want a mystery? Do not announce the solution on the place most of your readers will look before they read the novel. For all the suspense, Bella was really quick to accept that Edward was a vampire, so I really do not see the point in those 200 pages. Why could not you just say, "Edward was a vampire" on page 1? Why drag it out for 200 pages? It was just a long and boring section of the book for me. What annoys me most about it is that most of the plot succeeding that section was not half-bad. There is one scene around page 350 where we are introduced to more vampires and a conflict that was actually fun to read and my thoughts going through it were, "If the book just told us upfront about the Cullens and started hear, this would be awesome." Instead it started 350 pages earlier and dragged me through 200 of the worst pages of recreational reading of my life.
The plot was not the only thing miserable about this book. The grammar in the narration sucks. It is just that bad. Why? Because it is written in a casual, spoken manner complete with colloquialisms and slang. Narration is not written this way. It is written in standard American English that carries itself with some amount of properness, not slung out of the mouth of some slovenly speaking teenager. There are a couple of artistic ways to justify doing this, like stating in a prologue that Bella, the narrator, is telling the story to someone, so it is all spoken to someone. But it is not presented in that manner. The only reason I can think of writing it like this is for the benefit of her targeted audience, 13 year old girls, to which I will say, "Give 13 year olds some credit and do not feel the need to bring down your writing." Honestly, the style of the narration only harms this novel in my opinion because it gave me the feeling that Stephanie Meyer is not capable of writing on a scholarly level.
Lastly, I just would like to take a moment to rant on the characters, in that there are none for a while. There a people named in the novel, but none feel like they have any sort of personality, or even feeling like they are not reading off of a script of a bad Degrassi knock-off and that they are being played with the emotion of Ben Stein. Most of the people in the novel and bland a derisive. The only decent characters are the vampires who get very little time for a long while in the novel, but it is rather clear that they are the only people in the novel that she spent time thinking about who they are. Even Bella, our kind narrator, is an empty headed teenager who reminds me too much of the Disney Channel most of the time. This is not a case of bad characterization, but a case of no characterization. We have no idea who they and are given no reason to get inside their empty minds.
My final assessment of Twilight is that it is bad with a silver lining at the end that redeems it from being god awful. However, the silver lining alone is not enough to save what is, in my opinion an awful novel. I do feel bad because I did see true potential for an excellent novel in Meyer's writing, but that is not likely to tease its way out anytime soon because she has not been reprimanded for these truly awful writing mistakes but has been rewarded. Handsomely. I would not blame her for not improving a thing and just ocming out with more twilight related novels until she either dies or people wake up and smell the poop that she wrote. .
