A league of extraordinary standards

Why are book endings so hard? So often I'll be reading a book, happily exploring the world that the author has created, and then some rogue plotline comes tumbling out of the underbrush and plows through everything and then we're sliding down a scree of bad dialogue and awkward coincidence and it's just...frustrating. This book I just stopped reading held a lot of promise, and it's done well commercially, but the ending is just a shambles. Very disappointed.

I don't claim to be any kind of solution to this. People contact me to say they're X far through the book and gosh they love it and I would really have to jump off a bridge to ruin the book. And so far those people have been happy with the ending of HoV, but I want to be clear. A book is a complete package. If you like the whole thing but didn't like the ending, you didn't like the book. In the same way, you should never force your way through a book you're not enjoying just because the ending *might* justify it. Toss it. Tell your friends to not read it. It's the only way to get authors to write better books.