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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