Sometimes I run into people online wondering whether they gave a book enough of a chance.

These people are often writers, and I think there’s a component of “I want people to give me a chance, or, if possible, an infinite number of chances” in this reaction. But there’s some sense that if you don’t like a book (or even just don’t love it) and quit ( Read more... )

I used to make posts about why I quit reading the books I quit reading, and a couple people have poked me about doing another one, so here we are! Why I have quit on various books lately!

1. Stereotyping of thin big-breasted women as stupid. At least, I think that’s what he was, like, saying? I dunno. He, like, used some kinda big words? and ( Read more... )

Okay, here is my new rule which is actually an old rule ( Read more... )

I quit reading five different books yesterday. You'd think this would be fodder for another "I can in fact quit you" tagged post, but most of it was just tired stuff--poor prose, sexism, stuff I've ranted about before and do not need to do another chorus of ( Read more... )

Now supplied by both the library and WFC! I am alarmed by how many of these apply to more than one book.

1. It turns out there is no one single "way black people talk." So you can't throw in Southern Urban African-American, Louisiana Creole, Caribbean, and I Swear I Heard A Guy Say This On The Bus into one character within four pages without the ( Read more... )

Dear people writing books that have anything to do with war, fiction or nonfiction ( Read more... )

I have put another library book into the return pile without reading it, and there were several reasons. (Oh, several.) But there's a particular prose tic I've seen from underedited works before, and I wanted to speak out against it ( Read more... )

I have just quit reading a Native American history published in 2010, because in the first five pages, it directly equated civilization with white people at least five times and referred to the First Nations people in question as "primitive" at least twice ( Read more... )

Sometimes when I quit reading things, I have little pithy snarky posts about it. This time I wanted to highlight a factual error so that none of you will repeat it, because I've read this wrong, wrong thing more than one place:

It is, in fact, possible to remember and/or imagine a smell.

No, really. It is. I checked with timprov, who doesn't have ( Read more... )

1. If you want to write a memoir, write a memoir. If you want to write a book about something else with memoir bits in it, you have to make sure that the memoir bits are roughly on a par with as interesting as your topic, or else really really short. Or else I will run away and read some other book on your topic whose author is not convinced that ( Read more... )