I was doing a purge of my drafts, all 50 of which had obvious reasons for never being published, but I hesitated over jettisoning this one. Is it more negative than I want to be in public? Yes. However, I recently fell down a rabbit hole of reviewers who make hours-long reaction videos to atrocious books, which left me thinking that no matter how much money they’re making from ads, it’s inadequate compensation for the psychological damage sustained by spending so much time engaging with garbage.
Life is too damn long for self-inflicted commitments to books that make you regret being literate. Therefore, I chose to publish this post as advocacy: DNF early, DNF often, and find a better book to read!
In response to a challenge to engage with readers as a reader, this is a chronicle of my recent reading, which should swiftly demonstrate why talking about what I’m reading won’t actually make me any friends.
I am constitutionally incapable of lying about how much I love everything I read. Some of the things I kvetch about below are personal preferences. Others—from my perspective as someone who is paid to write, copy edit, instruct in both those areas, and read slush—fail on a technical level that will seem nitpicky to readers vibing with other elements that don’t move me. Different things are important to different people, and I’m not interesting in convincing anyone I’m right and they’re wrong about what’s important to them.
I’m not going to “name and shame” lest someone who holds one of these books or authors in high regard take my dislike as a personal attack because capitalism has succeeded in its mission of supplanting identity with products.
Book 1: “She’s not like other peasant girls, who are all literal whores.”
Men who hate all women Except That One cannot be trusted. They tend to get violent the first time the one they’ve installed on a pedestal fails to adhere to their fantasy. And if you, as a writer, have bought into “love is when a man who loathes women makes an exception,” I’m not interested in seeing how your idea of “romance” plays out.
Book 2: Chapter 1: The Infodump
If a book opens with 7 pages of first-person backstory, that had better be the most entertaining backstory in the history of backstory to convince me this character is going to be a blast to tag along with for 300 more pages. If you give me the protagonist’s entire life history up front and it’s boring, I don’t believe they’re going to magically become more interesting.
The problem isn’t that the character has had an uneventful life prior to the start of the book. The problem is that the author, with infinite possibilities to begin the book in a way that makes readers root for this poor drudge, instead chose 7 solid pages of dull. (Perhaps more! I quit at seven.) If you’re telling someone a story about your weekend, do you begin it when you were born? Of course not, because it’s not relevant to the story you’re telling and you’ll lose your audience. That doesn’t change if you type the story.
Multiple books in this batch suffered from this affliction.
Book 3: “My husband died, and I’m very sad about it.”
When you summarize a tragic backstory, you sound like a serial killer. Do even the most cursory research and make the character experience grief; don’t just type “sad” with zero evidence to that effect.
The entire point of first-person POV is unrestricted emotional access, so why are you subjecting readers to a vague, bland, toneless summary of trauma the character should be feeling, even if not outwardly displaying?
Book 4: “It’s bolted to the floor. Try to lift it.”
And then they tried!
My gut feeling is this was an attempt to “show” the thing was bolted to the floor, when a character making that observation and the other characters simply not disputing it shows readers the same thing in a non-absurd way.
This is what happens when people are left to believe character thoughts and dialogue are “telling” (when authorial intrusions are the real problem) and only visible physical action is “showing” (which applies to actors, not novelists).
The only way this could have been salvaged with the subsequent attempt at lifting intact:
“Weird. It’s bolted to the floor.”
Johnny McAlphamale tried to lift it.
“Did you not just hear me say it was bolted to the floor?”
Anyway, this came after letting me believe they were college kids based on behavior until it was mentioned they were empty-nesters (and even then, the only physical description provided was comparison of body shapes to types of fruit, including a bunch of grapes) but before the 6-page gap between inserting a key in a lock and (insert life-history infodump here) revealing the key hadn’t worked. (I confess, the latter got a few extra pages out of me for the sheer WTF Are You Doing.)
Book 5: Pics or it didn’t happen
This one was a mystery involving amateur investigators questioning people. The story would get right up to the point of questioning the people, chapter break, and then cut to the investigators reporting the results of the interview to people who weren’t present during it.
The first time it happened, I thought Well, that was a bad choice but persevered because I wanted to know who was killing people and leaving body parts around like Easter eggs for people to find.
And then it kept happening. Summarizing the investigation of a serial killer was the whole bit.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t believe these interviews took place. I didn’t believe these amateur investigators were credible reporters. I need these interviews to be dramatized so I know these investigators did a thorough job and the witnesses weren’t just blatantly lying their asses off while standing in front of a pile of mutilated bodies, bloody hacksaws still in hand, while the investigators nodded along and took their word for it that they were completely innocent.
There’s no credibility in telling me something you had the opportunity to show me.
Still Book 5: And then Deadpool popped out of a cake and confessed
Because I wanted to know who was killing people and leaving body parts around like Easter eggs for people to find, I persevered almost to the end.
You know that investigation that allegedly took place throughout the entire book? Entirely irrelevant because the killer had absolutely no role in the book prior to having a meltdown and confessing to the entire killing spree. (Off-page again. Good thing the person reporting it has been described as a dingbat throughout the book so we can be confident about her accuracy!)
There were reasons to suspect several people—most of which were dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons. There was NOTHING implicating this guy. He was a complete non-entity right up to the moment he spontaneously revealed himself to be the villain.
Yes, in real life (even now, but especially in historical periods lacking things like DNA tests and security cameras), killers often simply get away with it unless overconfidence leads to them getting caught in the act or they brag about it to the wrong person, but THAT’S NOT HOW YOU WRITE FICTION. If you don’t set up things that are going to happen, the “story” is just a grab bag of unrelated vignettes. Don’t waste readers’ time with a quest and then have a solution they never could have arrived at because they have no relevant information.
Book 6: Female “lead” left blank for easy self-insertion
I got almost 20% into this contemporary romance because the prose was fine. Then, at a chapter break in this evenly distributed alternating POV book, I noticed something.
We know everything about the hero’s job, his Army Reserve service, his relationship with his teenage daughter, his history and current status with his ex-wife and her new family, his multiple brothers AND THEIR JOBS AND HOBBIES, his parents, his position in his community, his sex life, and how he feels about everything that happens.
The heroine… has a job.
She’s in her 30s and has no friends, family, pets, hobbies, belongings to which she is attached, exes, emotional baggage, or any other sign of a life that she gives any thought to leaving behind when she moves to this guy’s small town for the job that is her sole defining characteristic.
We know more about the hero’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend, who has never put in an appearance, than we do about the woman who is ostensibly co-headlining this story. She is a flawlessly blank canvas onto which a man and readers can project any image they want. No danger of being “an unlikable heroine” if the full extent of her characterization is delivering babies!
Meanwhile, the hero is allowed to snap at everyone, make underlings at work cower in fear, and have thoughts about parenting that, frankly, I can relate to but would never say out loud because it would traumatize my child for life, and his daughter knows all about it! What a prize worthy of such rapt authorial attention.
Well, put like that, maybe there’s just not enough imagination in the world to write a woman with literally anything going on who would be interested in romantic involvement with this hot mess.
At some point after consigning this to drafts for being overly negative, I said “fuck it” and started using Storygraph, where I mostly complain. I occasionally rate 4 or 5 stars if I feel particularly positive when marking a book finished, but most of those don’t get text reviews because books I like don’t leave me with a need to vent and I disbelieve “I liked it” is helpful to anyone perusing reviews.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Goodreads where random strangers can’t easily issue death threats because you dislike their fave, check it out.