A dreamer

I love reading books and hating on booktok (if that's your thing: Welcome and let's be friends!)

[vampireprose]

I can't explain it, but reading a book is the most intimate form of consuming art

[vampireprose]

I hate booktok girls so much!! Like I have seen so many videos about how they always imagine every book boyfriend as this Rhysand-Xaden-AI slop-hybrid being and hate when he looks different!!

Like thay "When he's described as having long, blond hair 🤮but I imagined him to have dark hair" mimimi shit.

God forbid, some man in a book actually looks and is unique once!!! My god!!

[sluttypatrickstar]

[vampireprose]

Preach!!!

[daydreaming-effy]

I'm so tired od people in book/reader spaces saying "it's YA" to give a pass to bad writing. People of all ages deserve well written literature

[vampireprose]

That's what I am always saying!

[birdofpages]

Things every reader should know:

1. You don’t have to finish a book you're not enjoying — no matter the price.

2. A beautiful cover doesn’t mean it’s a great book. Many gems are poorly packaged.

3. Reading isn’t a competition. Speed doesn’t matter — impact does.

4. You won’t remember every detail, but the feeling a book leaves behind is what truly matters.

[between-the-pages-ofa-book]

"Can we normalize not remembering anything about the books we read?"

Hey, let's not do that. I'm not saying that we're going to absorb and be able to recall the plot of every single book we've ever read, but if you're not absorbing the books you claim to love to where you can't tell me about the book or what it's about, why are you reading? I know reading is meant to be a fun hobby, but what was the point of you sitting down and spending hours of your life across multiple days to read that book if you have no idea what it's about?

If you forget about the books you read as soon as you put them down, maybe you need to figure out why. Are you actually enjoying the books you read? Did you read it so fast that you didn't comprehend anything?

Normalizing not being able to absorb the media we consume is going to hurt so many people who can't understand tone, foreshadowing, context clues, etc.

Let's normalize interacting with what we consume in a meaningful way so that we know what we like and don't like and actually want to remember it.

[vampireprose]

Exactly!

[hisuncontrollableanger]

🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕 fuck 🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕booktok

[yejifire]

y'all I can't even begin to explain how much more enjoyable reading is when you avoid booktok like the plague

[mysteryofvampires]

I hate when I actually like a song, but it's promoted and labelled as "wait til the booktok girlies hear this song" and associated by bitches with their copy paste abusive romantasy ships

[ladyofthebookcase]

can we have a serious discussion about how every popular book has a male love interest that's like "my name is xyzdnk mcshadowpowers and im 9 feet tall and a wall of solid muscle and i have perfect shrunken dehydrated abs constantly and im so tall and buff and strong and i have darkness shadow powers and im #tortured because my father forced me to eat cement as a child and the burden of being 10 feet tall and super masculine and strong is weighing heavily on my mind and did i mention im 11 feet tall btw ahahaha" and every female protagonist is like "my name is Girl McGirl and im 4 feet tall and sooo petite and i have never had a muscle but if i do don't worry you can't see them and i have perfect curves but only in terms of tits and ass don't worry im not FAT and my boyfriend is sooooo much bigger than me and my eyes are huge and i have no body hair naturally but im not even that pretty?? im also not like other girls ew i hate women but in a #progressive way where i just soo much prefer to hang out with the boys and my boyfriend constantly is super overprotective of me but also im a super badass (despite not doing anything in the narrative lolll)" and then they have heterosexual vanilla maledom sex 17 times and it saves the world

[ladyofthebookcase]

like to be clear my criticism of booktok and its associates is not "oh gross women are reading porn" i fully support women reading porn. but like. 1) girl the heteronormativity. and 2) straight women genuinely need help i fear. we had a discussion in class the other day about the internalized male gaze and patriarchy and increasing misogyny in society lately and i just feel that trends like this are not helping at all! i think. straight women need better porn to read. and also authors need to discover ao3 instead of publishing books with paper-thin plots just to get their porn out there because like ao3 literally has a category for you and it is called "porn without plot". you can just do that. but leave the publishing industry out of it there are enough problems there as is.

there's also something to be said about the decline in critical thinking in media kind of prepping people through pop culture to accept fascism when it arises but i won't get into that here bc i'm literally meant to be writing a paper on that rn. but like think about that. and how all these books are fundamentally the same and what that does to your brain.

[vampireprose]

This!

"Straight women need better porn to read." <- Yes! YES!

[mynowherenothing]

Some of the book recs I see online.. id rather be reading the back of my shampoo bottle

[grrwoof-woof]

"but the text never explicitly stated it!!!" hey, so that's actually what they tried to teach you in those english classes you barely passed 😁

[lilcowgirl7-deactivated20210223]

[mysteryofvampires]

Don't talk to me if you buy all your books on Amazon and huge bookstore chains

[miseria-fortes-viros]

do publishers realize that advertising books using fanfic tropes spoils the experience of reading an original story. stop telling me it’s enemies to lovers and there was only one bed and unrequited love hurt comfort golden retriever black cat timeloop major character death. why do i give a fuck if i don’t know any of the characters and now plus i already know the entire plot of the story. that’s what ao3 is supposed to be for

[mysteryofvampires]

Please help a girl out!

What is a book that got you out of a reading slump?

Reblog or reply to this post or drop an ask in my inbox! (All genres)

[ofinsectsandsteampunkstarwars]

Hi before y'all from the booktok crowd flock to here (my blog), I want to make you aware of the fact that even if you put a gun to my head I will not read anything by sjm or anything by Rebecca yarros.

And if you think about being annoying in my inbox or comments about it, there's a block button. Block me. It's not twitter, so I don't care if you block me.