What's a book you keep putting off because something about it makes you tentative to start?

okay not to be edgy about this but i feel like using a documentary style to build characterization feels more like a writing bypass than a style choice. i think it’s theoretically an interesting storytelling choice but i love a rich character portrait and having a fictional biographer tell me why daisy is the way she is was weird and felt clunky? maybe i’ll come back to this but was not a strong start /:

I'm sad, I thought I would enjoy this read, given the hype around the book and my love for memoirs...Well, I can't get into it. I have a problem with the writing, too childish for my taste and I feel like there are a lot of unnecessary details making the book longer than it should. Hopefully, as she gets older, the writing will improve. If i don't end up DNFing it...

The debate about whether Booktok (or any social media, for that matter) had a more positive or more negative influence on reading has been ongoing. There can be arguments made for both sides: On the one hand, Booktok did get many people back into reading. It helped many to find community and people to talk to about what they read. And if you follow enough different Booktokers, the recommendations you get are actually very diverse. Thanks to Tiktok, I've picked up loads of very different amazing books, books I'd never have read otherwise. On the other hand, it does sometimes feel like Booktok made the book industry into fast fashion. There is always the next over-hyped book you just HAVE to read, and often they really aren't that good (though, bad books have always existed, we just see them more now). It also bothers me that what is popular on Booktok heavily influences how current books are written and advertised. Certain tropes and stereotypes seem to appear in more and more books, and sometimes books seem to be written solely to fit those tropes. I think Tiktok also changed how most people buy books. Of course, more and more people ordered books online even before Tiktok. But I think most people stopped just strolling trough bookstores to see what might catch their intrest. Instead, many readers, me included, seem to suffer some FOMO and order what everyone else seems to be reading. The biggest issue, however, is Tiktok is still a biased algorithm that (1) favours white, male and cis/straight voices and (2) runs on money, meaning that many of the very popular books showing up on our FYP ended up there because publishers paid Booktokers to promote them. I don't think that there is one definite answer to this; booktok has both up- and downsides and I personally think that the positive outweighs the negative. But i'd love to hear other opinions on this!

I'd love to read more romance - or (literary) fiction with a strong focus on the love story - but I often don't like popular recommendations. I think I am simply a bit picky when it comes to writing style, but I think part of the issue is also that popular books are often either rom-coms or erotica and I prefer more character driven, slowly developing love stories. What I like: - the book NEEDS to have good writing and good dialogue - I like queer love stories but more in the vein of "Sunburn" and "Song of Achilles" and less "God of Fury" and "For the Fans" (and the issue here is not the smut but the atrocious writing, no offense to anyone who enjoyed those books) - character driven, slow-burn - it honestly does not have to have much of a plot - I do enjoy some of the more classic romance/rom-com books ("Lost and Lassoed" and "Red, White and Royal Blue" for example) but those are more hit or miss for me Examples/ my own recommendations: - The Trio by Johanna Hedman - Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth - Seven Days in June by Tia Williams (obviously) - A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson - The Dove in the Belly by Jim Grimsley