Holy Mother - we have so many more important things to be alarmed about -
get a grip - it's fiction. Suggesting people should feel guilty about what
they enjoy reading is SO VERY wrong.

Debbie

On Mon, Jun 5, 2023 at 3:00 PM Sheila Hammond-Todd <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Deborah T. Walsh

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