Emotions run high on Goodreads. In fact, I tell every author navigating their first book launch to stay off it. They’re not going to listen to me, because who doesn’t want to know whether their manuscript – this precious thing they’ve toiled on in solitude for years – has found its readers? And because I’ve been there myself, I anticipate the spiral that follows. The elated high upon reading the first glowing review. The world-ending devastation of the first scathing review (or even the first lukewarm four-star review). The righteous indignation at the first three-star review. No one understands me. Are these people even literate? Am I even literate? It’s all too much; it doesn’t make you a better writer. Block the site and focus on your work.

Though I find I can’t stay off Goodreads myself. I don’t read reviews of my own work – I have finally reached that improbable, lucky place where I’m no longer very curious about what anyone is saying about me, so long as I get to keep writing. But I love to ramble on about novels I loved, and I love to see what my friends are loving. And when I’m struggling with negative feedback, I find it helpful to reflect on what sorts of reviews compel me to pick up books. It’s rarely about the Goodreads number – 3.2, 4.5, it doesn’t matter. I don’t choose books based on the aggregate rating as if they are skincare products – it’s got at least a four, so it must be good! I’m not looking for unanimous approval, either. Sometimes I scroll past half a dozen critical reviews and decide to buy a book regardless because of a single sentence consisting of, basically, “Ahhhhhh!”

And sometimes I play a silly game of reading terrible reviews of books I loved, or glowing reviews of books I hated. That nonsense puzzle-box romp I found charming, whimsical, and inventive – it turns out others declared it indecipherable and obnoxious. That fantasy novel I put down after the first 10 pages – I guess I’m vastly outnumbered by the folks who think it’s the second coming of Christ. I like advising debut writers experiencing the Goodreads blues to play this game, as nothing else makes it so clear nothing can really define what makes a “good book”. We just know what strikes a chord in ourselves. Right story, right reader, right time.

I don’t think my Goodreads habits are exceptional. We often choose books against the grain, for whimsy alone, or out of pure contrarian spite. I love shouting with friends over the dinner table about authors they love and I despise, and vice versa. Hanya Yanagihara? Discuss. Sally Rooney? Discuss. Part of the pleasure of reading is learning to articulate what we admire in a text and defending it against other interpretations – not in service of deciding who is right, but in chewing through all the ways, all the different contexts, in which a text can generate meaning. What irks me then are not the blisteringly mean reviews (which can be delightfully inventive) but the unimaginative ones – from readers who could not possibly imagine that a novel distasteful to some might resonate with others, who insist not only that the book and the author have committed a great moral or aesthetic failure, but also that anyone who liked the book is guilty of – well, something. What a boring, sanctimonious way to read.

So why has Goodreads become synonymous in some circles with petty drama? We often toss the words “Goodreads controversy” around as if controversy were something frightening, rather than a sign of a lively, healthy reading culture. But we ought to disagree about books. We ought even to get in heated fights about books! I happily get into shouting matches over Nabokov in person; if I had more hours in the day, I’d do it on the internet, too. I find the worst experiences on Goodreads tend to crop up – as with every other online forum – when reductive, bad-faith arguments are amplified over everything else, when all nuance collapses into a judgment pleasing in its ethical simplicity, and suddenly we’ve all decided to hate a book because a reviewer with a lot of followers said we should. Goodreads doesn’t work when we treat it as a crowdsourced authority, wherein reviewing and liking reviews means voting in a referendum on whether a book has value, and whether its readers are Good, Righteous People.

Which brings us to what has been dubbed “review-bombing” by the New York Times – that is, critical pile-ons that can derail a book before it releases. Frankly, authors have been sighing and shrugging about this for years. It’s unclear whether Goodreads can make any meaningful fixes, or whether they have any incentive to. Authors have limited options – it rarely ends well when authors barge into spaces meant for readers. So the duty is left to readers to think carefully about how we write and engage with reviews. I am certainly a naive idealist here, but I retain this faith we could wrestle with online toxicity by taking our own arguments seriously before we post them. What purpose does our outrage serve? Who benefits if this book tanks? Who is making claims about this book? What passages do they cite? Do we agree with their interpretation? Are those passages represented in good faith, or are they plucked out of context? For that matter, how many people leaving these reviews have actually read the book?

Sometimes the book really is that bad. Sometimes the book has been badly – wilfully, maliciously – misunderstood. More often it’s something in the middle – the novel swings a little too wide, as any ambitious project should, and readers are split on whether it succeeds. Whatever the case, I suggest we think less about aggregate ratings and more about that off-the-cuff, indecipherable, inside-joke-laden review by that random account we only follow because they have the same unlikely favourite novel that we do. Goodreads functions best when we don’t let Goodreads tell us what to read.

I don't really know how to write this one as I am not really one of those who report on books.

Just wanna say to y'all who didn't read the book you should really go get it. It tells the story of a very dark world, where each uniqueness of our world is exaggerated and shaded, where all is inspected, monitored and controlled by a central authority. a centralized world, where nothing is beautiful but one thing - the common truth. How does living in a world like this feels? How far fetched is this world from ours? What is the nature of truth, and freedom?

These are my thoughts. hope that's working for you.

Very curious to know about it 😎 Do not be shy, just share it (no judgement).

I want to read a recent(ish) fun fantasy series with an eighteen year-old male protagonist, that has immense worldbuilding and greatly-written characters. Any suggestions?

I was watching the tv series on Apple TV and got hooked. The pace was a little slow though and some parts of the plot seemed over worked and drawn out. Nevertheless, the premise for the show was so intriguing to me that when the first season ended on a cliff hanger, I opted to jump into the books instead.

I’m half way through the second book and I can say that I find the books much more gratifying that the tv show. It moves at a much healthier clip. I find it hard to put down.

I just wanted to recommend it to anyone else who likes sci-fi.

And I absolutely loved it. It is honestly one of my new favorite books. I am going to tag basically this whole post as spoilers because the thing that truly makes this book amazing does not start until almost 100 pages in.

SPOILERS

FOR THOSE ON APPS THAT CAN'T HANDLE THEM

SPOILERS

END SPOILERS

So, have you read this one? What did you think?

I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and take enjoyed it. Read another book, then started reading Devil and the Dark Water by the same author. I got about 25% through and just decided to drop it for something else. I'm not an avid reader so i never know if I should stay committed or not.

I'm a big fan of the movies and I've know for a while that the character is based off a series of books, but I've never gotten around to actually picking any of them up.

Last year, all of literature’s big prizes went to small publishers. In a risk‑averse climate, edgy debuts and ‘tricky-to-sell’ foreign titles have found a home at the likes of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Sort Of Books – and the gamble has paid off.

Gift link, read freely :-)

I don't really understand how new books or new authors get their works to wider audiences nowadays. How exactly do you find new books, or if you write how do you get them out to people with how much content is put out every day?

https://bookwyrm.social/book/146971/s/what-is-to-be-done

Playing about with Obsidian lately as a note replacement app and started treating a portion of it like a books list, read, currently reading, notes etc and I just think it’s neat.

What About Men? by Caitlin Moran review – bantz gone bad A tendentious take on masculinity that takes unoriginal thoughts and confirms them in the echo chamber of Twitter Stuart Jeffries Wed 12 Jul 2023 09.00 BST

“By the time you’re 40,” Caitlin Moran tells any men who’ve made it to page 73 of this book, “your T-shirt collection is, to you, as your wife’s lovingly collated wardrobe of second-hand Chanel, designer jeans and Zara brogues is to her.” Not for the first or last time while reading this book, I wrote in the margin: “No”.

In the next paragraph, Moran tells us what that T-shirt collection looks like. “Band T-shirts, slogan T-shirts, colourful T-shirts, T-shirts with swearing on, T-shirts that you can only buy from the back pages of Viz like ‘Breast Inspector’ or ‘Fart Loading – Please Wait’.” Again I wrote “No” in the margin, wondering what this stylish-sounding woman was doing with such an obvious plum duff.

It’s hard to find any of this relatable. I have no slogan T-shirts but if I did, one would say: “I’d rather be reading Ivy Compton-Burnett, instead of whatever [imagine me holding this volume at arm’s length while reclining on a chaise] this is.”

What About Men? is the kind of will-this-do book whose last chapter actually begins: “This, then, is the last chapter of this book.” Then continues, “I will admit – a lot of my motivation for writing it was a very petty urge to be able to say, ‘Well no man has got around to writing a book like this, and so, as usual, muggins here – a middle-aged woman – has to crack on, and sort it all out.’”

It’s an ironic remark, no doubt, but captures the self-importance and presumption that suffuses the whole exercise. “I will admit” – as if Moran is being tortured rather than feeding the beast of her brand by adding to an oeuvre that, so far, has focused on women’s experience. That brand involves a literary style captured in the phrase: “When it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz.”

The germ of this book came when Moran was on a panel and a woman in the audience invited her to tell boys what they should be reading. “And I couldn’t think of anything. I couldn’t think of any book, play, TV show or movie that basically tells the story of how boy-children become men.”

That is a disappointing admission. And yet it’s one that embodies the blinkered perspective Moran brings to this book. I can think of hundreds of just such books. Here are two: The Boy With the Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera, and Toast by Nigel Slater. I mention these not just because they are excellent but both, coincidentally, were written by men from the same city in which Moran and I were born, Wolverhampton. Where’s your civic pride, Caitlin?

By contrast, women are spoiled for choice when it comes to literary advice on how to be happy and proud, Moran claims. She cites Jane Eyre. But Jane Eyre, last time I looked, is about a woman who winds up married to a controlling dick who literally imprisons his first wife in the attic and winds up a symbolically castrated invalid cared for by our heroine. If that’s a role model for women’s happiness, or for how women and men might get along, we’re more screwed than Moran supposes.

I read novels differently from the sex-specific, reductive way she suggests here, and I’ll bet Moran does too. But this is the thing: the whole project reeks of bad faith, and comes off as a moneymaking scheme pitched by a plucky intern at an editorial meeting. “Guys? How to Be a Woman, but about dudes. Can I get a kerching?”

The Times columnist spends a great deal of time, with good reason, indicting the dum-dum misogyny of men’s rights activists, incels and the manosphere’s leading thinkers, Jordan B Peterson and Andrew Tate. The former, in 12 Rules for Life, enjoins men to emulate male lobsters’ unremittingly proto-Nietzschean aggressiveness. The latter, Moran tells us, spreads what Greta Thunberg drolly called Tate’s “small dick energy” around the world from his Romanian lair where, until recently, he ran a business employing 75 women working sex cams. Moran notes the trend of Tate-corrupted, spiritually and emotionally inadequate boys writing “MMAS” at the bottom of the essays they hand to female teachers. Which stands for? Make me a sandwich. Little sods.

The whole project reeks of bad faith, and comes off as a moneymaking scheme pitched by a plucky intern at an editorial meeting But What About Men? is committed, if not to the cheerlessly masculinist biological determinism of Peterson and Tate, then to a rhetorical essentialism that lucratively pigeonholes men and women even at the risk of misconstruing both. It’s an old formula, as in John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Tendentiousness, it seems, makes money.

Most of the material is culled from interviews with male mates, mates’ sons, venerable sex-based prejudices and Twitter polls. True, there is also a fine chapter on how pornography is corrupting men and making them miserable, based on a young man’s harrowing story of his addiction. But much more often, Moran’s method is to have a far from original thought – Why do men wear boring clothes? Why don’t men go to the doctor? Why won’t they talk about their problems? – and get those notions confirmed in the echo chamber of her Twitter feed. “Being intelligent was irrelevant,” one young man recalls of his school days. Well maybe at your school, or in your peer group. At my school, among my peers, being clever was more than relevant. It was the way to leap, as it is for many men unheard here, through a closing door.

Another disastrous trope involves announcing a conclusion as though without premises. “We can see it’s a fear of being called ‘gay’ that stops straight boys being positive about their bodies,” she writes. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. It’s not just homophobia that makes boys worried about showering with their coevals. Trust me.

Like the brains behind heteronormative patriarchy, Peterson, Moran enjoys issuing edicts. Her Rule Number Two, for instance, states: “The patriarchy is screwing men as hard as it’s screwing women.” “Nah,” I wrote in the margin. The patriarchy does have its downsides for men, but its most terrible consequences such as raping, underpaying, genitally mutilating, harassing both at work and on the street are overwhelmingly things that men do to women. Or is there a memo I didn’t get?

As Truman Capote wrote of something else, this isn’t writing, it’s typing. Sometimes Moran doesn’t even type. She cuts and pastes. For instance, she prints Hollywood star Mark Wahlberg’s loony daily fitness regimen. Perhaps the point here is to show how men are tyrannised by unrealistic body images, but how refreshing it would have been for Moran to cut and paste, say, Proust’s questionnaire. “My favourite occupation: Loving. My dream of happiness: I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it. What would be my greatest misfortune? Not to have known my mother or my grandmother. What I should like to be: Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.” That’s a real man with relatable experiences beyond Moran’s philosophy.

Then there are the space-filling listicles. Good things about men? Non-judgmental, trusting, up for anything, brave, joyous. “Then I realised I was basically describing dogs.” Why is it easier to be a woman than a man? Women have all the best songs (nonsense), don’t get embarrassing erections in public (true), while periods are an “absolutely failsafe excuse” (interesting take).

In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby skewered male shortcomings with a protagonist who couldn’t help but make lists about stuff. Hornby’s point there and in About a Boy was that men don’t grow up because they don’t need to. Moran writes like one of Hornby’s manbabies.

If women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, then men need this book like Andrew Tate needs another reason to shut up. Women need this book even less. But if it turns up in your Christmas stocking don’t act surprised, gents. Just put it on the pile with the Viz T-shirts.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1964350

I had an interesting thought yesterday. I was pondering, what if some of the archaic literature we relied upon to document past events was actually fictional accounts intended to be read for leisure?

This prompted me to ask what ancient or medieval (preferably before the 15th century) do you know of? Some may describe The Iliad as historical fiction, what do you think.

P.S. Regarding fictional accounts mistook as historical, I found this enlightening discussion on reddit, libreddit link.

We got our copy today and my kids LOVE it and I figured it was worth sharing

I have a pretty bad memory when it comes to remembering the appearances of characters in books, usually because it’s mentioned once or twice and then mostly just briefly throughout the book again.

I was wondering if anyone knew a site that had like just the descriptions of characters from books, lifted from the text even without spoilers.

I’d like to start making notes going forward for myself when reading but I’m so far into The Way of Kings now that it’s quite difficult to backtrack for character descriptions.

Any help is much appreciated, don’t even know if what I’m looking for exists but it sounds super handy, to me anyway.

Cheers. ^^

I am your average 37-year-old woman. I game, I read, and I have cats. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Azariah Kyras' glorious speech about the Blood God Khorne, and I started quoting him at least once every day when my boyfriend and I were talking about random everyday things. He suggested I look into the Warhammer Universe.

My God!

It started out with some lore videos about the Chaos Gods and The Emperor, and down the rabbit hole I went. When I found out they are doing a series with Mr. Handsome Henry, I knew I had to go deeper. It's been three days of almost no sleep, and I've finished the first two books in The Horus Heresy saga. They have no business being as good as they are.

If Warhammer has the power to infect even the most basic, whitest woman of all time, we are all in trouble!"

Pray for me

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD !!!! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!!!

PS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbmDLVFAaec

I’ll start, for the moment mine are

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• All Systems Red by Martha Wells, and the series itself
• Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller