Hear, hear.
On Mon, Jun 5, 2023, 12:04 p.m. Lesley K <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> There is nothing more tedious than someone explaining how someone else is
> doing reading "Wrong" - unless it is someone explaining how someone else is
> doing *living* "Wrong".
>
> Tropey romance, fanfiction, comic books, whatever - stories are what make
> us human, and there is no way to human "wrong".
>
> On Mon, Jun 5, 2023 at 12:03 PM Jorgenson, Jane <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I think she has some points – but it’s also kind of not anything new? And
>> not anything I’m concerned about (as a reader or a librarian). Like teenage
>> girls have always gravitated to a certain kind of melodramatic/plot heavy
>> book? And publishers have always tried to piggyback on successful ones with
>> similar tropes. There was Lurlene McDaniel and then the Twilight phenom,
>> etc. And romance readers have always talked in terms of tropes. Heck the
>> All About Romance site (which has been around for many years) has extensive
>> trope-based lists explicitly because romance readers like to read their
>> favorites.
>>
>> “What’s most alarming is not having to witness conservations between
>> adults and teenagers using the word “seggs,” or even to see writers
>> advertising by listing tropes, it’s that the books they’re doing all of
>> this for are thoroughly, catastrophically bad.
>>
>> I am a woman of my word, and I didn’t want to write about these books
>> without giving them a fair shot, even if they’re not to my taste at all.
>> There are a few main categories, outside of the “trope lists” — sports
>> romance, office romance, fantasy romance and regular romance with socially
>> relevant undercurrents. It has been a genuinely miserable week of my life,
>> trudging through as many of the most popular books from each genre as I
>> could.
>>
>> The last category, despite seeming the most normal on the surface, is the
>> most worrisome. The subcategory has a champion, of course. Colleen Hoover
>> <https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-2022/colleen-hoover-popularity.html>
>> is to TikTok industry-generated romance as John Grisham and James Patterson
>> are to airport novels. Her most popular novel, “It Ends With Us,” has sold four
>> million copies
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/books/colleen-hoover.html> and,
>> along with being the most controversial
>> <https://msmagazine.com/2022/09/07/it-ends-with-us-book-review/> of the
>> books popularized by TikTok, is one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
>>
>> Without entering too much into the plot, it’s about domestic abuse. This
>> book is meant to be a harrowing, melancholic analysis of how devastating
>> violence is when it comes from someone you love. Shockingly, it does not
>> manage this, instead taking what is a frequent, devastating experience and
>> turning it into a soap opera.”
>>
>> The alarm about “bad” books being popular and ‘oh no, this is bad for
>> publishing’ recycles itself every ten years or so. There was alarm with the
>> rise of Goodreads and with Twitter and with YouTube.
>>
>> I get a lot of BookTok content in my “for you” feed on TikTok and I see a
>> wide variety of books discussed by a diverse group of people (mostly women,
>> but a few men). Yes, there is more fantasy and fantasy romance, then other,
>> but I also see a lot of litfic and thrillers/mystery. It’s far more than
>> what she talks about.
>>
>> If I have a concern about TT or other social media is how it affects
>> attention span, but given that a lot of the booktok’ers I see are reading
>> many books, and many that are chunky, that is likely more a ‘me’ thing than
>> anything else.
>>
>> Jane
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Fiction Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
>> *On Behalf Of *Todd Mason
>> *Sent:* Sunday, June 4, 2023 12:46 AM
>> *To:* [log in to unmask]
>> *Subject:* On "BookTok", a critique
>>
>>
>>
>> Caution: This email was sent from an external source. Avoid unknown links
>> and attachments.
>>
>>
>>
>> Courtesy Anna Biller, and perhaps a bit collegiate, but not necessarily
>> wrong as a result...
>>
>>
>>
>> https://pittnews.com/article/177256/opinions/opinion-booktok-is-a-mistake/
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__pittnews.com_article_177256_opinions_opinion-2Dbooktok-2Dis-2Da-2Dmistake_&d=DwMFaQ&c=byefhD2ZumMFFQYPZBagUCDuBiM9Q9twmxaBM0hCgII&r=PgZGf0msvD01DFE8NzO3oBljh-snuayCkeTfH0Xd08i8wSlPnWDvMO_VTADN55Ac&m=EMhS6-mTzvtteRwPsR5bBjmuFZ13WAd-7meFzNb1P6LXUnJ2SahVsZi53tuvP6-k&s=uKUllEtWA7qVBR3B9pTPLASeXAfkIww2oQ7r6-mUVRM&e=>
>>
>>
>>
>> TM
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> -- Lesley Knieriem
> Rogers Public Library
> Rogers AR
>
> Nunc adeamus bibliothecam, non illam quidem multis instructam libris, sed
> exquisitis. -- Erasmus
>
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