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".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 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 and, along with being the most controversial 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...
TM
To unsubscribe from the FICTION_L list, click the following link:
http://ccpllists.cuyahogalibrary.net/scripts/wa.exe?TICKET=NzM4NzA1IGpqb3JnZW5zb25ATUFESVNPTlBVQkxJQ0xJQlJBUlkuT1JHIEZJQ1RJT05fTKsaSqKXU8Gr&c=SIGNOFF
To unsubscribe from the FICTION_L list, click the following link:
http://ccpllists.cuyahogalibrary.net/scripts/wa.exe?TICKET=NzM4NzA2IGtsZXNsZXlrQEdNQUlMLkNPTSBGSUNUSU9OX0wgIOUT7VYXWFKA&c=SIGNOFF
---- Lesley Knieriem
Rogers Public Library
Rogers AR
Nunc adeamus bibliothecam, non illam quidem multis instructam libris, sed exquisitis. -- Erasmus
To unsubscribe from the FICTION_L list, click the following link:
http://ccpllists.cuyahogalibrary.net/scripts/wa.exe?TICKET=NzM4NzA2IHNoZWlsYWhhbW1vbmR0b2RkQEdNQUlMLkNPTSBGSUNUSU9OX0wgIFQigjN27xMC&c=SIGNOFF
To unsubscribe from the FICTION_L list, click the following link:
https://ccpllists.cuyahogalibrary.net/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=FICTION_L