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Book community unpopular opinions - let's be honest
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I feel like the book community can be a bit of an echo chamber sometimes. Certain books get praised endlessly, and if you don't like them, you're made to feel like you're not a "real" reader.
I want to hear your book community unpopular opinions. What books do you think are overrated? What popular authors do you just not get?
For me, there's a certain contemporary literary fiction author who wins all the awards and gets rave reviews, but I find their writing pretentious and their characters completely unrealistic. Yet criticizing them feels like blasphemy in literary circles.
What about you? Do you have any reading community controversial takes you've been holding back? Let's discuss literary fiction disappointments and famous authors I don't like without judgment.
Book community unpopular opinions time! Here's mine: I think that popular fantasy author everyone loves is overrated. The world-building is impressive, but the prose is clunky, the characters are one-dimensional, and the plots are predictable.
Yet if you say anything negative about this author online, you get attacked by fans. It's like they've achieved this untouchable status where criticism isn't allowed.
Another unpopular opinion: I don't think every book needs to have likeable" characters, but I do think they need to be interesting. There's a difference between a character who's flawed but compelling and a character who's just miserable and boring. Too many literary fiction novels feature the latter.
My book community hot take: I think the contemporary literary fiction scene is in a bad place right now. Too many books are praised for being important" or "timely" rather than actually being well-written or engaging.
There's a certain type of literary fiction novel that gets all the awards: unlikeable upper-middle-class characters having existential crises, beautiful but empty prose, vague social commentary that never actually says anything substantive. They're all style and no substance.
Yet criticizing these books is treated as evidence that you "don't get" literary fiction. As if enjoying a book is some kind of intellectual achievement rather than a subjective experience.
I wish there was more room for honest criticism in literary circles, rather than just endless praise for the same types of books.
My reading community controversial take: I think book adaptations are often better than the books they're based on. There, I said it.
I know this is blasphemy in book circles, but hear me out. Sometimes books have great premises or interesting characters, but the execution is lacking. A good adaptation can take that raw material and improve it - tightening the pacing, deepening the characters, clarifying the themes.
There are several book adaptations I didn't enjoy as books but loved as movies or TV shows. The visual medium allowed the story to breathe in ways the prose didn't.
I think we need to stop treating adaptations as inferior to the source material. They're different art forms with different strengths and weaknesses.
My controversial opinion: I think we need to stop pretending that reading certain types of books makes you more intelligent or sophisticated than people who read other types of books.
The literary fiction vs. genre fiction hierarchy is nonsense. There's plenty of poorly written literary fiction and plenty of brilliantly written genre fiction. Judging people based on what they read is elitist and counterproductive.
Another hot take: I think star ratings are useless. What does it mean that a book has 4.5 stars on Goodreads? Nothing, because everyone uses the rating system differently. Some people give 5 stars to anything they finish, others reserve 5 stars for life-changing masterpieces.
We need more nuanced ways of discussing and recommending books that don't rely on simplistic ratings or genre hierarchies.
As a literature professor, my book community unpopular opinion is that we focus too much on the canon" and not enough on contemporary literature.
Yes, it's important to understand literary history and to read influential works. But literature didn't stop in the 20th century. There are amazing books being written right now that deal with contemporary issues in innovative ways.
Yet when I try to include more contemporary works in my courses, I often get pushback from colleagues who think we should focus on "the classics." But what makes a classic? Often it's just a book that's been around long enough and that enough people have decided is important.
I think we need to be more open to the idea that today's books might become tomorrow's classics, and that they deserve our attention too.
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