Books
Here are 40 spicy and sacrilegious opinions about books
Is James Joyce overrated? Is the Harry Potter series actually terrible? Writer and professor @ryanaboyd opened the floodgates when he asked people to share their most unpopular opinions about books.
Is James Joyce overrated? Is the Harry Potter series actually terrible? Writer and professor @ryanaboyd opened the floodgates when he asked people to share their most unpopular opinions about books.
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Give me your spiciest, maddest, most sacrilegious Book Opinion.
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I’ll go first: Hemingway’s novels (not the stories) get lamer every year I age.
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Hemingway is the Wolverine of US Literature: only exists to play on men’s power fantasies and their deep fear that their actually cowards; however, due to this attachment, folks decided to add depth and beauty to his characterization so as to make them inescapable.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Harry Potter is really, really bad. In like every way possible, from all standpoints, the entire series is awfulhttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Harry Potter should have married Luna Lovegood.
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I started The English Patient 3 times before I realized I had no moral obligation to wade through the monotone voice that novel was written in. Pretty sure Ondaatje doesn't need my good opinion.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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There's no good reason why The Catcher in the Rye is taught in schools. There are far better books, with way more interesting characters. That book bored me to tears.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Holden Caulfield is THE WORST and not in a way that’s even fun to read about.
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David Foster Wallace’s essays are exploitative, pedantic, and self serving and his deification is a goddamn mystery to me.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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I used to adore David Foster Wallace b/c of his masterful command of language + optimal proximity of words, but I got older and wiser and fell in love with brilliant WOC authors-- realizing that command of language can't mask an inability to humanize anyone other than White men.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Ulysses is garbage and there are too many (white) men who are heralded as literary geniuses who write myopic, barely digestible novels about men like themselves who run through peoples lives destroying everything and eveyone in the name of "realness."https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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The Road is bad. I wanted them to die on p.15. There is no way they could keep happening upon canned goods. The mother character is incomprehensible. Nothing stylistically, at the level of the sentence, made up for those story & character flaws bc the language was also boring.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Jane Erye was boring as fuck and every character was unlikablehttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Dickens was a bad writer. He was paid by the word and it shows. “My Christian name being Phillip and my given name being Pirrip” insert 700 more words “... thus it was I came to be known as Pip.” Gag me.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Forcing kids and teens to read centuries-old “classic literature” about a very slim subset of the population, living experiences they can’t relate to, is the most surefire way to kill the future of books.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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A lot of the white male "canon" writers are not all that good. Their work is mostly boring, flat and not relatable to anyone except other white males. We tired of that shit.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Romance novels are one of the best and most vital, quality genres—yet romance is consistently and wrongfully demeaned as unimportant.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Books are meant to be read. Not worshippedhttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Kids are going to hate every book they are forced to read in high school regardless of how old or new it is. Insisting young people be allowed to read whatever they want so they “learn to love reading” misses the point of these classes.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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I have no patience for the parents who opt their kids out of reading books that confront racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Teens are fucking smart. You’re doing them no favors by “shielding” them from narratives that will make them examine their own privilege and biases.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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“Historical accuracy” is not a good enough reason for putting graphic and gratuitous violence against women in bookshttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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The idea that being well-read can make someone a better person is a lie that's more of a way for readers to assign some moral quality to what they like. Compassion for fictional characters is not compassion for real humans. It doesn't require as much work and sensitivity.https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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If you don’t like a book, you don’t have to finish it. “It gets better later on” is a symptom of poor craft & a terrible reason to be miserable for +100 pageshttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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Fanfiction counts as proper reading
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Paper sucks. It cuts you, it collects dust, absorbs smoke, it's heavy. I hate it. I prefer reading books in digital form. Fuck, paper!https://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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The book printing process should be totally inverted so the entire page is covered in ink and only the words are whitehttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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The words in a book should all be in alphabetical orderhttps://twitter.com/ryanaboyd/status/1075845664150577158 …
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