Really, you find hers the dullest? I actually prefer J.K.'s because the exclamation point and its brevity makes it truly feel sudden! J.R.R. Tolkien's bores me to tears. I like her storytelling because it feels vivid and real, like someone describing something that actually happened to them.
Definitely agreed on Adams and Snicket being the funnest/most unique, though.
Whilst I agree with you, I still feel dulled by her style, mostly for cultural reasons, I guess. Certainly, personal reasons anyway.
The thing with each of the other styles is that I have feelings that come from the style as a whole. In Tolkien’s case, some of my precious early memories involve my dad reading me The Hobbit so I always feel like I’m being read to whenever I’m reading any passage of his stuff. For me, there is a comfort to the whole idea of writing have an atmosphere as well as the scenes themselves.
There is also that Rowling’s is the most similar to my own writing style and not by choice. I’m too much of a wuss to try anything like Adams or Snicket. I tend to write everything out getting down as much plot and character in the characters I can then adding atmosphere in later. Only I get fed up during editing. If I edit too much I often find the story as a whole feels weaker because I get tempted to edit the wrong things. Even though I doubt that Rowling is doing the same thing and I know that continuing to write more and more the less I’ll have this fault, the similarity is something that could be said to subconsciously bother me. It’s not something I’ve really thought about until now.
Snicket and Adams I didn’t really come across until I was an adult. I can vaguely remember my sister reading Hitchhikers but not anything in terms of style. So when I came across it it feels new and fun. Even though I don’t have the same nostalgia as I do with Tolkien, I like again that there is a feeling that the whole style is more personal. Of course Adams and Snicket have an advantage over Rowling and Tolkien in that they aim towards comedy where there it is more acceptable to be personal. It’s not impossible to find serious works that do use personal styles but it is more accepted at least in English speaking works to be less personal. To not admit the sillyiness of the idea that people would call Voldemort ‘he who must not be named’ instead of something silly like ‘Voldy’ which lets be honest people would do. Often realism is surrendered for the sake of ‘not being silly’ and works as a whole are weaker for that.