#Bad Books

[bisexualchrissycunningham]

Joining a discord dedicated to hating on terrible booktok books was one of the best and worst decisions I've made (but I keep the Casey McQuiston channel muted cause I could never hate them, idc). I am now aware of the term "traumance" AND a book about a vegan PETA activist who rescues a turkey, which then turns into a half-Turkey half-man and she fucks him on top of the vegan Thanksgiving meal she was making.

These things exist. I know about them, and now you have to as well.

[stupidcowboykid]

hate it when the character is like "and i... i don't know what me and (their important person) are yet... but i want to survive long enough to figure it out" and then what they are is always heterosexual monogamous romantic relationship. i want characters who get WEIRD with it

[futurebird]

If you can't stop being ableist because it's mean and gross, do it because it's just bad writing.

It will pull your readers right out of the story. And they will laugh at you.

I tried to read a "Hell House" because (embarrassingly) I confused it with the horror classic "The Haunting of Hill House"... "Hell house" is a very different book. Some of it is very good. But also it's SO DATED.

When trying to show how depraved & evil the people in the house became they are like "he went looking for deviant people like dwarves to bring to the house" Not only ableist but so silly it's immersion breaking. NOT DWARVS (really?)

I ended up posting about my confusion about why so many people liked the book and found out I was reading the wrong one.

I'm a little embarrassed I apparently got these books mixed up somehow. I've returned the knock off and Hill House is great so far... it's a much more sophisticated kind of horror. And ... it's not dated.

How is it that some books don't get as badly dated as others?

I'm still cracking up about this... just imagining the author wracking his poor lil brain for the WORST, the most depraved, more horrible thing he could imagine. He gets some real horrors like being locked in a house with no windows, everyone being controlled, all very creepy.

Then he's like "what if tons of sex and some of the people are really short?"

bruh. ablism is a hell of a drug.

[darkcrowprincess]

(Don't like don't read. Post hate and I'll block you)

[gothcroissant]

Hey! here's some of the music I liked most this year.

[flyingdorito]

Dear friends and family of disabled people. Please, even if our disability is part of who we are, even if we make it a whole part of our personality. Don't buy stuff with a disabled character just because you think we'll love it. Yes, of course representation is important, and it's always a pleasure to see us represented.

BUT. I'll take my own exemple here. I'm a cripple, walking with a cane or crutches. I got chronic pain and joints problem. And I was offered a book about a deaf girl falling in love with a dark and beautiful man who will help her accept her disability. And first of all, it's a very bad book. It's very ableist. More than that, she knows I hate romance books since the day I began to read. But she thought it was a great idea because "the main character is disabled, just like you !"

I know it wasn't offered to me with bad intention, but still, it hurts a bit. Because I'm disabled, no nuance is done. I'm supposed to like everything linked to disability. Of course, reading about someone with the same condition than me, or about any other disability is okay, I love when authors try to be inclusive. But offering this book just because there is a disability in it, it feels off.

I'm not sure if my point is clear, or if it even makes sense, but I needed to rant somewhere.

[weepingfoxfury]

My ears are assaulted and assailed by a girl group massacring Nothing Compares 2 U, I sip coffee through gritted teeth, this too shall pass ... I could turn the radio off but find myself transfixed with the desire to see just how bad this version can get ... like horror films that miss the scare and bump mark but have enough chintz and cheese to make you watch for laughs ... I did try to read Fifty Shades of Grey ... this was a step too far ...

[crow-caller]

The unending racist, furry nightmare of Save The Pearls just doesn't end

The unending racist, furry nightmare of Save The Pearls just doesn’t end

[mental-illness-bingo]

Content Warning: Venting about ableism against ADHD and Autism in a book; mentions of emotional abuse, repeated mentions of elitism within the autism community, "corrective" surgery for mental health disorders, demonizing of medication, encouraging young adults to refuse their medication etc. Note that I haven't finished the book yet, but I intend to, so I suppose it could get better, but what it's done already is abhorrent, and I'm grossed out.

Book in question: The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily by Laura Creedle

This. Book. Is. Killing. Me.

I saw this recommended as a "really good book about autism and ADHD" from someone but I *really* hate it so far (I'm on Chapter 27, about 2/3 way through the book) and it's honestly just blatantly ableist in so many ways. I do not know if Laura Creedle is autistic or has ADHD, but if so? Internalized ableism everywhere. If not then yet another neurotypical asshat who wrote an ableist ass book.

Context: Lily is diagnosed with ADHD and Abelard is diagnosed with "Asperger's".

And let's start there. This book was written in 2017, years after the switch from that N*zi doctor's name to Autism Spectrum Disorder. This is problem #1, and the reason is not that they use that word for it. I can and have enjoyed books while suspending my disbelief around the fact that they maybe didn't know because a significant number of people still don't in 2023.

However, Abelard is the poster child for elitism. He is this super smart kid who just so happens to have trouble with verbal conversation, being late, and sometimes being touched. He is worse than the savant trope because he is literally talked about like a genius. He is inhumanly good at chess, robotics, old literature, video games, just everything he touches, really. In fact, despite him supposedly having serious communication difficulties, when he is texting, he is suddenly able to communicate just like anyone else, with occasional long pauses between texts being the only issue he shows.

And his sole meltdown that has been shown is honestly so toxic and borders abusive to Lily. She is late to their date due to her ADHD, something any of us with it can relate to, and Abelard knows about her ADHD in advance as well as having had seen her symptoms multiple times in person. There is 0 way he didn't know about her having ADHD. Anyway, she's a little late (I think 20 minutes or something but I can't remember tbh with you) and he is visibly angry with her, and she immediately apologizes, explaining that her ADHD causes her issues being on time. Rather than be understanding of his girlfriend's disorder the way she has tried to be with his, he pretty much ignores her. His mother babies him about it, working on setting up everything for him and getting them into the movie wherein he seems to relax (but only after forcing his mother to go get popcorn right this instant because they're watching a movie and he needs popcorn). Then, after a bit, his father is trying to explain the movie to Lily and its history and Abe does NOT like people talking during movies. He yells at his dad, who continues to try and talk, and then has the meltdown in question. Lily tries to touch him to help comfort him and realizes immediately she shouldn't have when he makes a noise as though he is in pain. He begins slamming his head off the table, which is reasonably off putting to Lily, and she asks his father for help. His father mentions his mom would usually be here and that Lily "shouldn't have been late", basically accusing her of causing the meltdown even though he kept pushing when his son told him they were watching a movie. Lily panics and exits to the kitchen because she feels helpless and upset that she can't do anything for him.

All of this is relatively understandable behavior, I guess. I don't really love that he yelled at his father and mother both in this scene for normal things because it paints autistic people as unreasonable and irrational, but it is true that sometimes meltdowns are caused by people continually doing normal things that happen to really get under our skin. His parents should know his triggers and avoid pushing them because they are his parents. Lily, on the other hand, is a child and one with her own neurodivergent struggle, and should never in any way have been strapped with the blame both because it is not her job to tiptoe around a boy she has been dating for a few days with triggers no one warned her about, and because the issue at hand is a symptom of her own disorder and is equally as in her control as Abelard's reaction to her being late is in his.

BUT THEN while panicking in the kitchen, Lily breaks something on accident as she often does and tries to leave and Abe's mom makes a whole thing out of it. She becomes physically intimidating to Lily, smashing a glass on purpose to "help" the situation, which obviously makes Lily uncomfortable, and half-threatens her to go back into her son's room even though she wants to go. Throughout the entire next scene Lily mentions in her narration wanting to go home and while I think it's important that Lily learns coping skills outside of running away, it is equally within her right to be too stressed by Abe's reaction to her being late and choose to break up with him. Lily is not required to stay with Abe just because she's the only girl he has brought home, and intimidating her into staying is disgusting.

To Abe's credit, he mentions that his mother used his sob story to make Lily stay. Then he loses 100% of that credit in the most entitled scene I've read in a long time where Lily is pressured to not only stay in that house and in that relationship, but also promise to NEVER be late again even though it is a symptom of her own disorder. She mentions that this seems to be the only way to make him happy and that "promising to try harder is not enough". So, more or less, she is in a relationship where she cannot ever show symptoms of her disorder without him giving her the silent treatment, yelling at everyone around him, and smashing his head into a table.

No one ever mentions at any time during this or after that Abelard also should be learning positive coping skills or teaching her how to help with his meltdowns or anything like that. She should just be expected to never show a symptom of her own disorder so that he doesn't react in a very toxic/honestly kind of abusive way. Cannot stress enough that he does not treat her kindly again until she promises she will literally never be late ever again. Not try - NEVER late again.

Abe strongarms multiple people like this throughout the book. His mother with the popcorn, his father with talking during a movie, his robotics teacher where he literally stands there and repeats "I invited my girlfriend to robotics" over and over again until, despite safety concerns, the teacher gives up and allows Lily to stay if she signs a waiver (which she doesn't read and is not the legal age to sign anyway), and Lily when he wants to tell her something but tells her she is not allowed to speak until he has finished then gets visibly angry (as noted by Lily) when she answers a question he asked her out loud. His meltdowns are used as a threat of sorts to the people around him and a manner of controlling them. It is worth noting I have only in my entire life met one autistic person who did this and surprise surprise, they were abusive and had a history of using meltdown threats to R word multiple people. That is not autistic behavior. It is abuse being hidden behind the excuse of autism, and it's gross in every context, including this book.

So, onto Lily's ADHD. Lily is constantly breaking things, constantly late, runs out of any even slightly uncomfortable situation, does not care about the emotions of her mother or her sister, and is overall a really gross ADHD stereotype. But that's okay! Why? Because she will be fixed via corrective surgery. Yes, you read that right. But let's go into why medication didn't work for her first.

Lily lists throughout the book her hatred of her current and all past medications, of which there is a number she lost count of. Because the author treats this ADHD character like a goldfish who was just given access to a human body for the first time and therefore cannot remember anything (or walk two steps without smashing something valuable), that number could still be relatively small. The book doesn't treat it as a small number though, so we're going to assume she's tried most ADHD medications, and is currently taking an antidepressant as a manner of treating ADHD which is so far in the past as far as treatment goes that I don't even know which medication they're talking about.

The typical antidepressants (SSRI's) are not used to treat ADHD at all to my knowledge, and SSNRI's are only really used if every other form of ADHD medication has failed you and even then are rarely used as far as anyone I know with ADHD. Why? Because there are actual medications that help ADHD, and a good amount of them. Realistically, the concept that 0 of them worked for Lily is statistically improbable. The only antidepressant really used to treat ADHD actively is Bupropion, but the emotional blunting the surgeon Lily sees says is a side effect of her medication is not a side effect associated with Bupropion. In fact, Wellbutrin/Bupropion is often used for people either in combination with or as a replacement for other antidepressants to counteract the emotional blunting they cause.

The demonizing of medication in this book is dangerous. Lily hates every medication because all of them have stripped her of her ability to feel anything positive. The book does not mention any other ADHD character that tolerates medication well, or even speak about it as though it is just not working for her. It does not explain that if Lily went to the doctor and told them her side effects, that they would *immediately* taper and remove a medication that is causing emotional blunting and sui thoughts. The book doesn't mention that this is an abnormal side effect - in fact it's says it's a common side effect of antidepressants. It also treats medication as some sort of weird muzzle that is put on people with ADHD so their loved ones (in this case Lily's mom, sister, and teachers) can tolerate them. The book does not mention any positive effects of any medication for ADHD at all. I hate to think how many kids were made afraid of or resentful of their meds by this book.

The book details specific ways to avoid taking your medication, and even how to hide it so you can (tw sui mention) take them all with vodka to hurt yourself. This is not something Lily attempts in the book, but was just thinking about, and therefore did NOT need to be described in detail. The book even acts like sui watch is stupid and unnecessary, and does not detail the dangers if Lily were to take all of these medications at once with alcohol. So basically they wrote in a non-precautionary sui method for kids with ADHD that also involves months or years of medication non-compliance. Great. /sarcasm

But like I said, that's not the worst of it. What upset me enough to write this whole rant is the next part. Lily's mother finally giving up on the neurologists (which... weird because everyone I know with ADHD was treated by a psychiatrist not ever a neurologist), and going to a literal brain surgeon for some sort of electrodes to be placed in her brain that is supposed to permanently change how her synapses fire.

This is the ableist buffet, and for a while Lily feels the same and by a while I mean 2-4 pages. Then she decides that she will see the doctor if her Mom does something for her, and forgets all about the upset of having her mother feel the need to cure her.

In fact, when Lily meets the doctor, it takes him almost no time to convince her that she not only needs but also wants the corrective surgery, spouting about how she could go to college right now if she does it, when college would not have even been an option before.

It is gross on every single level and I looked up this surgery and ITS FAKE ITS NOT EVEN REAL. This author literally made up a fake corrective surgery for ADHD, I wanna puke.

I literally do not even want to read this for the story anymore I just have to know how much worse it can possibly get. If it's bad maybe I'll reblog and add on to this.

Edit: HOW could I possibly forget Lily's Dad? A total deadbeat who cheated on her mother and ran off to Portland, who was only able to interact with his daughter while actively drinking when he still lived with them, who is constantly switching what he wants to do in his life to the point that he can't hold a job, and who refuses to talk to let alone see either of his daughters in the years since he's been gone because he "can't keep a phone". And why is he like this? As the books tells you very explicitly about 2/3 of the way in, he is like this because he also has ADHD. Lovely. He had this apparently entirely inspired, amazing, never-been-done idea for his dissertation in college. But then he more or less got bored and overwhelmed with the idea so he just dropped it, left college and his family, and ran away to Portland. All because he has ADHD, because the author thinks that's what this disorder is - an inability to have any responsibility or finish anything ever no matter what it is or how important. The author treats ADHD like it's a lobotomy and I hate it here.

Maybe don't read The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily.

Edit: see reblog. It got so much worse, not better.

[cordeliav7]

HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY book review

*bf's name* I'm sorry baby. I really wanted to like this book but it made it very difficult for me.

To start off I give it 2/5 stars and I'm being generous. Like, this book had everything that needed to be an actually good and enjoyable book but decided not to take advantage of them(?!) This book was a page turner in all the wrong ways.

I do not recommend this book. It's worth reading only if you don't mind bad endings and poorly written characters.

⚠️ Spoilers ahead ⚠️

The entire plot is wonderful "a girl trying to take revenge for her mother's death so she's killing everyone for her dad's side of the family". Amazing! *chef's kiss*!

The way she described each murder is amazing. How she made them look like an accident. I especially loved the chapter where she killed her uncle. So classy.

But alas, to no avail. She wanted to take revenge ever since she was, what?, 7 or 10, and she started actually killing at 18. She was goal orientated and very cold blooded. BUT STILL she only had antisocial tendencies. And not psychopathic/sociopathic like she should. Everyone's saying that she is extremely unlikable but I'm arguing that she should be even more unlikable. Because she's too funny and kinda relatable to a point, and it should NOT be like that. She should be a full on sociopath, scary to the core, but FUCKING STILL.

I strongly believe that the author wrote the book, read it through, realized she had no character whatsoever and just decided to slap the subplot of her liking her childhood friend just because. Tf is that

Also WHAT THE ACTUALLY FUCKING FUCK was the last few chapters with the secret half brother. I was reading it through and I was praying it was him that killed their father. And it was but he hired fucking KELLY to blackmail her so she won't kill him/ steal his new money?!?! WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCKING FUCK whY did the author choose tHAT as the ending of the book?! How many braincells did you kill to write something like that?

I'm sure I have more shit to say but, again, I don't remember anything else but I would love to hear your opinion on the book so feel free to comment or DM me^^

[dude-the-ancient-dragon]

Worst book you ever read go!

[vanilla0chinchilla]

So, there's a book called "The Kaiju Preservation Society". I read it for a book club and was kind of excited since the name sounds cool. Seriously, think about the premise, just give yourself ten seconds to come up with what the story could be about...

Okay, ten seconds are up.

I grantee your idea was a million times better then the actual book.

The MC works for a delivery app, which we spend 50 or so pages with, before he delivers to a friend who offers him a job with the titular company. MC goes to an alternate dimension where Kaiju real! MC does things like "observe kaiju from air ship", "drop hormone spray onto kaijus so they bone, from an air ship" and "watch Pacific Rim with the team because LAWL! We R self aware!" Then a bad guy pops up, tries to steal a kaiju to use it as a atomic generator, but gets thwarted.

The problem with the book is that the writing is just bad. All the characters are just "Snarky asshole" with little variation. One guy likes to talk about 'firebombing' and sticks it into every one of their lines. Another character is a hard ass, but don't worry, she's still a smart ass. The MC says "I lift things" in every chapter. It gets tiring.

I also hope your imagination muscles are strong, cause you're also going to be doing a lot of lifting as the author hates describing things. You'd think that'd be important, since you're making up your own cool kaiju and this is a high concept sci-fi novel, but the most we get is "The kaiju was the size of a mountain and had wings".

The book also relies on action scenes, which are just as bare bones as the characters and the kaijus. This book is famous for:

It's not to say everything was bad. When we got some actual science it was neat. I liked it when they talked about this alternate world's environment and how the kaijus played into that. Sadly, it was just a tiny nugget of interest in a big ol nothing burger. It reads like a first draft that the author just went "Good enough, I'm already a best selling author, they have to publish it!" and sent out.

So, me and my wife live in an apartment with a lobby. Often, people with put things they don't want in the lobby. That was were Kaiju Preservation Society went, a few months ago. While I was walking with my wife, I said I kinda wish we'd kept the book so I can do a riff/spork/MST/review/what ever term we're using for when we want to tear something apart and be funny about it.

Yesterday, when we came home from a trip, someone had put out more books. And one of them was, you guessed it, Kaiju Preservation Society.

Who wants me to go ham?

[conza]

“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.… And why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music?” — Ludwig von Mises

[greatrunner]

Every time I read or listen to a description of Colleen Hoover’s books, I’m just like, “Yeah, this asshole used to write fanfiction and was definitely one of those dweebs who thought she was hella progressive for writing “dark fic” online.”

[demi-shoggoth]

2022 Reading Log pt. 21

101. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte. This book covers mammalian evolution throughout synapsid history, starting in the Carboniferous and ending in the present day. There’s a lot of good information in here, both about the species themselves and the history of their discovery and discoverers. But I found the authorial voice consistently off-putting. Brusatte writes about evolution alternately like a war or a poker game, and there are constant references to dominating, beating or tricking other lineages, particularly dinosaurs. After crowing about how mammals survived and thrived in the Mesozoic by exploiting small body sizes and niches like eating seeds and insects, he dismisses all of bird evolution (which in the Cenozoic did the same thing) in a paragraph, and never talks about Cenozoic animals other than mammals at all. What’s weird is I don’t remember his previous book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, being so mercilessly jingoistic about its focus clade. Maybe the publisher told him to write more enthusiastically about a “less exciting” group; maybe it’s the zeal of the newly converted (Brusatte was primarily a dinosaur paleontologist until relatively recently); maybe the first book was this annoyingly written and I have forgotten.

102. The Accidental Ecosystem by Peter S. Alagona. This book is a short overview about how wild animals have moved into American cities, why American cities developed into places where animals can thrive, how humans are reacting to these and how we should in the future. The tone is generally optimistic but realistic—that cities can serve as oases of biodiversity during climate change and extinction events, but a world with only rats, crows and sparrows would be a depauperate one. Most of the book is organized around an incident of some charismatic megafauna making the news (like Pedals the bipedal bear of New Jersey, or a nesting pair of bald eagles blithely feeding their chicks fresh kitten), and then talking about that species in greater context. I’ve read several other books recently about human/animal interactions, and this one did the best job at being inclusive, talking about how parks can and have been used as agents of gentrification, the impact of economic decisions on the fate of cities and animals alike, and existing biases within ecology and evolutionary studies. Highly recommended.

103. Travels to the Otherworld and other Fantastic Realms, edited by Claude and Corinne Lecouteux, translated by Jon E. Graham. This is a collection of medieval European fantastic literature, although not all of it is necessarily fantasy in the modern sense. Some are religious visions, others historical fantasies, others excerpts from novels and folk tales. All of them are wild. Both as a look into the medieval mindset and for their various bizarre creatures and occurrences. Some highlights include multiple versions of the adventures of Alexander the Great, the Vision of Tundale, a German journey through Hell that’s much gnarlier than anything in Dante, and the adventures of Marcolf, the Sherlock Holmes to King Solomon’s Watson (!). Also highly recommended; this might be the most fun I’ve had with a book this year.

104. Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow. Just what it says on the cover. The book starts with trepanations of cavemen and progresses to the modern era. Rutkow follows the Great Man school of history, and many of the chapters are biographical sketches of a surgeon who was important in developing the field. It feels somewhat incomplete—not only are non-surgical advances in medicine basically ignored, the development of the modern American insurance state is glossed over, even as the book discusses how hospitals became prestigious institutions and surgeons very wealthy. The book also uses weird kennings, as if it were written by an Icelandic skald—surgeons are “scalpel wielders” or “students of the knife”, etc, as often as they’re just surgeons. I definitely learned stuff from this book (like the quack “orifical surgery”, which posed that all diseases could be cured by cutting out irregular shapes from the mouth, nose, anus and genital openings!), but found the book rather less than the sum of its parts.

105. Monster Anthropology, edited by Yasmine Musharbash and GH Presterudstuen. This is a collection of academic essays about monsters as cultural signifiers and participants. After a very good introduction (the Works Cited of which will keep me busy a long while), the bulk of the book looks at particular cultures and particular monsters. The book was published in Australia, and several of the essays are on the same group of Indigenous Australians, the Warlpiri, and their monsters (most of which have not penetrated Western consciousness, but the pankarlangu is starting to make some inroads). One minor note I found interesting—there’s an actual folkloric monster that fits the D&D concept of a rakshasa! The tepun of the Eastern Penan people in Borneo is a shapeshifting hedonist that has aspects of humans and tigers.

106. Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance by Elise Vernon Pearlstine. Gave up on 50 pages in. The book purports to be a natural history—what molecules are made by what plants, why, and how those plants live. The actual contents contain some of that, but much more cultural histories. I’ve read and enjoyed several books about the cultural history of plants recently, so I’m not inherently opposed to the concept. But the book is incredibly poorly organized. The narrative skips back and forth through time and space and species, words are used and then defined several pages later as if it’s the first time we’re seeing them, concepts will be repeated multiple times to the point of redundancy, and the preface and introduction contain the exact same sentences, twice! The fact that this book was published in this state is frankly embarrassing.

[crow-caller]

Hot Balloon Kidnapped To Jesus Jail: The God-Killing Vaccine Book

The Commandment By Anna Kitrell is weird. Or. Sorry. Looking at the cover, The Command………… Ment is weird. Yes, this is a Christian book about a vaccine that kills god. I don’t have a lot more to say as an introduction than that. A long time ago I saw this book on Netgalley and saved it because the kerning on the cover was funny- and years later I realized it was a crime I hadn’t read the actual…