He writes like a man who's being paid by the word.
Almost halfway through "Stranger in a Strange Land" and seriously questioning whether it's worth putting myself through this agony. What the man has is at most a 50 page story that he's stretched to 400 pages narrative filled with superfluous conversations that don't go anywhere (which can either be dropped altogether because they add nothing or can be handled by a sentence or two), not to mention his diatribes ("Starship Troopers" was the same, and I've heard that on "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which is on my to read list for now, has 20+ pages of lectures on libertarianism that makes the reader wonder if he's ever going to get back to the story). So that's my verdict. It may be a bad habit he picked as a pulp writer (I'm sure that's how he got started, like other sci-fi writers of his generation).
Some of these people make you realize how good George RR Martin is as a craftsman.
My next book is going to be Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, which I read many many years ago, and I'm looking forward to revisiting it. (By the way, "Mote in God's Eye"? Not bad. It took a while to get into that world, it was a nonstop action with some creative world building. Not awesome but worth the time.)
(Creating this as a separate thread because it's decidedly apolitical post, though I'm sure our resident Troll will try to inject politics in it just to get some reaction.)