I recently finished the memory police and a good portion of the comments were very positive but I got a little annoyed at how familiar some of the less positive comments felt. They were all about how slow or confusing the book was, and I mention this here and not the forum because I’ve also seen it with a ton of other books recently (handmaidens tale, the house of sprits, ten thousand doors of January, the vanishing birds and the book eaters among others).

So hot take 1, a slow book does not necessarily mean a bad book because pacing is dependent on the kind of story the author wants to tell. When the point is to show the passage of time or build up an atmosphere it’s actually better.

Hot take 2, soft world building is often better than hard world building because you don’t have to know everything about everything in order to understand the plot or sympathize with the characters. In fact confusion in small doses can be good because it forces you to learn.

Idk if I’m alone here? Just had get that out.

It seems like a lot of people here seem to prefer one of the other and I’m curious what y’all’s thoughts are 👀

Trigger warnings are very important for a lot of people. We need to put them somewhere so people who need them can easily find them. I think we need to careful about them though.

This didn’t happen here and it’s not important who said what where but someone just gave me unsolicited trigger warnings for The Favourites, a book I was looking forward to reading cold, and now I know more about the themes of the book than I wanted to know. They were basically spoilers. I’ve managed to watch 3 reviews of The Favourites on YouTube without anyone mentioning some of the themes and spoiling it.

I like how TheStoryGraph does trigger warnings. You only get to see them if you click the arrow. We need to be aware though that dropping trigger warnings into reviews and discussions can be spoilers.

I’m probably more upset about this than I should be but I can’t unsee what I read. I don’t read reviews very often because this has happened before when someone’s written a review, added trigger warnings and hasn’t used spoiler features.

Just to reiterate, I’m not saying we should get rid of trigger warnings. We just need to be careful about them.

I was looking through some nonfiction books on here and noticed a fair number of people reviewing them without giving them a rating. I would understand this if it was fiction, as it is sometimes hard to rate a book when you know tastes are so subjective and dependant on life experiences. But I think nonfiction needs ratings and reviews way more than fiction!

Non fiction is really hard for many people to get into. There are many books on basically any topic you can think of, and we don't have time to read them all. This is why ratings are actually important indicators that help people make decisions on what to spend their time on. Nonfiction is for education, and most people don't want to waste time with bad books.

Also, if you don't give ratings, then your review doesn't affect the general book rating on the website you're on. If you're giving something a shining written review, why not give it 4 or 5 stars so it can be reflected in its general rating, and make more people want to read that book? Also, if a book has bad information in it and your review is overall negative and addressing this, why not give it 1 or 2 stars and lower its overall rating, so people are aware it's not the best resource on a specific topic?

If anybody here does this, more power to you, I'd just love to know what the logic is behind it.

LOL I can’t believe they didn’t test this on mice or something first. Though, to be fair, mice with superpowers would be a whole other can of worms

this is a reread and i’m still just confused and a bit bored but im set on reading the whole series ig

I'm surprised there are no posts at all...It's kind of a bummer, ngl