Types of dislike

Maternal health issues are once again preoccupying me, so the post that I’d planned for today is proving elusive. So instead, following Monday’s “types of goals,” here’s a look at different ways to dislike books (or movies, TV shows, comics).
•”This book has a serious flaw, which is—”
This is an objective argument that a book is bad. There’s something wrong—flat characters, a gaping plot-hole, objectionable moral undertones, dreary dialogue, tedious info-dumps. of course, since all these require subjective assessments, it’s not really an objective judgment, but it’s closer than most of the others on this list.
•It just didn’t work for me.
There’s nothing I can pinpoint that’s “objectively” wrong. I just didn’t care for it or in some cases, actively disliked it. This is one I get a lot in rejection letters.
•I don’t like that kind of story/genre.
This ranges from genres I generally hate (Westerns, serious modern literature [yes, I do count that as a genre]) to some I’m only “bleah” about (epic fantasy). It doesn’t rule out liking one in the genre (Raymond Feist’s early works, LOTR, Red River, Silverado) and it doesn’t rule out that the book is also badly written—I read one epic fantasy a few years ago that worked pretty well for me until we got a two-or-three chapter info-dump in the middle. But I try to keep in mind that if I don’t like the book in a bad genre, it’s not necessarily a bad book.
This also applies to certain non-genre types of books. Ones where everything’s death and suffering and misery and futility is not usually going to fly with me.
•The dog-whistle.
These are creators I don’t think are bad, they’re just pitched at a frequency I don’t pick up. The main difference from “It doesn’t work for me” is that I feel as if it should work, but it doesn’t.
Examples: Robert Heinlein, Chris Carter (of X-Files fame), Martin Scorsese. I cannot for the life of me see why they get the acclaim they do, but I feel it’s more likely me than them. But I still don’t care for them.
•I saw something else first.
As I’ve noted before, there are some books that I think might work with me fine, except I saw one in the same genre, so everything else looks like a copy. Once you’ve seen one gritty urban paranormal investigator or accursed haunted house, you’ve seen them all—or at least I have.
This ties in to some extent to not liking genre. I have, after all, liked lots of mundane hardboiled detectives, barbarian adventurers and domestic comedies. It’s only in particular genres where I feel once or twice is enough.