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So my question is this: am I just becoming an elitist snob? Is that normal? I know books like The Da Vinci Code break real rules, but these seem simply to be style issues which I disagree with, not necessarily "rules."

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No, you're becoming a writer. A better one, that is. You've developed the critical mind.

The one real benefit is that now I am even more in awe of certain authors who write so well it makes me dispair ever being that good.

It's human nature at work, essentially. We spend a large amount of time reading and writing and thinking about writing and talking about writing and writing about writing. As we become more adept at the craft, we have more and more trouble distinguishing between rational criticism and personal preference--that is, we become more prone to clothe our unfounded opinions in the garb of whatever expertise we may have obtained.

The effect when we read is profound. We attribute poor writing both to writing that is actually poor and to writing that doesn't suit our own preferences. This is the essence of being 'picky.' For examples, read any thread in the F&F section.

That being said, I think the tradeoff is worthwhile. A little self-awareness and humility, besides being generally healthy, go a long way to curing pickiness. And balanced against the pitfall of pickiness is the benefit of critical reading. We can all agree that critical reading skills are a priceless gift.

Edited to add that the Runelord series is a highly original and entertaining story, but is very poorly written--and that ain't being picky.

Maybe with enough effort, I can learn to write as poorly. If Runelords is poor writing, I don't won't to be right.

Of course, when I read it, I can't see the writing, because I am experiencing it. I did catch two typos.

i won't even TOUCH Harry Potter, i was forced to read an excerpt of it once, and was profoundly struck at how unprofound the writing was, and i do not like the unprofound.

my reading material grew from mainstream contemporary to mainstream mystery to the speculative in a matter of just two or three years, and since then, within the speculative, i've moved on to deeper and deeper writing. has anyone read Crown of Stars? i'm certain most of us here have read Dune and Foundation. those are all three examples of the kind of writing i'm quickly growing to expect, and i won't accept anything less...

actually, there are two series that people here repeatedly flame for being too derivative which i actually rather enjoy. i find that Wheel of Time and Sword of Shannara are actually rather intriguing, definitely not on par with Crown of Stars (i'm using that as my example because it is a highly original and extremely deep fantasy novel, rather than sci-fi), but not nearly so bad as many people seem to think it is

as long as a story is passably intriguing, no matter the originality, i enjoy it, but the moreso for those wonderful ones that only seem to come once every generation of authors

Really, I've always been a somewhat picky reader. I've never felt the awe that a reader is supposed to feel for writers, so I always found myself spotting examples of poor writing, stupid concepts, bad structure, melodramatics and placeholders, and all that stuff.

Beginning writers tend to go through phases of extreme rigidity when it comes to the so-called "rules of writing" or the "rules of fiction." You might have an idea of what consitutes good description, or good dialogue, and when a writer goes against our own notions of how these things ought to be, we cringe.

Sometimes this rigidity is on a more abstact level. We might have an excessive rigidity to some notion about POV. Or about how a story should be structured. Or some other rule of technique.

This very thing happened to me. The more I read, the more I wrote, the more I studied fiction, the more I developed some ideas of what good fiction is. Ideas of description and character. But as I kept reading, writing, and studying, I started seeing other possibilities. This doesn't mean that I LIKE these possibilities--we are what we are, even as writers, and we can't do much about it--but I'm no longer throwing out anathamas.

But I also have had to learn that my style isn't the only style. Some writers are sparce, while others are highly descriptive. If written well, I can deal with both. One of the things I have found helpful is the different writing books I read. After many different examples that explain various ways to accomplish writing a story, I understand that true enjoyment comes from knowing there is no set way to write.

I find that when I critique someone elses work, I am more observant of what I would concider a mistake. This is more because I am reading the story looking for what could be improved, over just reading the story. When reading a book, no one really is concerned with my opinion of how well it was written. If I don't like it, it is doubtfull I will buy more of that author's books. So for me, I look at the two in different ways. A book only requires me to read it, while reading for a critique requires a response. Of course, switching modes is something I have to do while developing software. Databases are delt with differently than the language used to write the software. Never though that those learning patterns would be usefull elsewhere.

I've learned to cook quite a bit. Things I cook really well, I suppose I can say I've gotten more picky about. But there are certain junk food aromas that I crave nonetheless. The just the frosting from a Hostess cupcake. Or a Big Mac. I like knowing Charlie can identify my by my Big Mac stench a mile away.

One or two is okay, but reading numberless How To Write guides tends to produce readers who don't read and writers that don't write.