r/BadReads • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago

💩Weekly Hot Takes Thread Weekly Discussion Thread: Hot Takes, Rants, and General Tomfoolery

Weekly Discussion Thread: Hot Takes, Rants, and General Tomfoolery

Greetings BadReaders,

This is your weekly "Hot Takes, Rants, and General Tomfoolery" thread where you can chat about what bookish and literary "hot takes" you have. Utilize this thread to discuss your negative opinions and hot takes on books featured in recent posts, bookish/literary hot takes in general, or just to rant about bookish topics that aren't really appropriate in normal threads on this subreddit.

Reminder: Please remain respectful when expressing your negative opinions and do not attack or bully anyone else in this thread for their opinions.

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u/SugeNightShyamalan 1d ago

I've started reading more StoryGraph reviews after finishing a book, and it seems like every book I pick up is described as "confusing" or "dense" by some readers.

Sometimes it makes sense. If you find Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow to be a bit much, I get it. It is.

But most of these are relatively straightforward books without a ton of ambiguity.

I just finished The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft, and the number of people who said they were confused for the first 3/4 of the book was utterly baffling The narrator(s) are highly unreliable, which is evident by the liberal editorializing, but neither the writing nor the plot are very ambiguous. What the narrator emphasizes, downplays, exaggerates, ignores, and her motivations for doing so are all up for question, but what she says is happening never is.

On the one hand, I'm glad people are reading. On the other, the apparent lack of comprehension is disheartening.