#no bad books

[ragana62]

Also. Just saying. There is no such thing as a bad book.

There are books you personally don’t like, there are books written at different reading levels or in different prose styles or with different degrees of editing or world building or character development, but that doesn’t make them bad. It just makes them not necessarily for you. And yes, we can sit here and say “something something, this dialogue is absolutely terrible and unrealistic”, or “blah blah, inconsistent characterization”, or “if you had a good vocabulary you wouldn’t make up words”, or “this is just pure smut, not a book”, but you know what? That doesn’t make it inherently “bad”.

Want to know how I know? Half of the canon of ‘great classic literature’ would be considered “bad” by those standards. James Joyce never met a semicolon he didn’t love and immediately ask for four more of in a technically run-on sentence. We all know Shakespeare just made up words when he felt like he needed a different way of expressing something. Inconsistent characterization is a common element in a lot of stories that come from oral traditions because they got mashed together into an official version and sometimes different people saw different characters in different ways, not to mention anyone who has spent any time studying Greek mythology will tell you that the reason the gods all seem so different story to story is it depends who told the story you’re reading and how that area/group related to that deity. Hemingway shoved plenty of gratuitous smut into random places regardless of whether it really did anything for the plot or was just self-gratification for his often self-insert character.

We really only start talking about books being “bad” when they are catering to or written by minority groups. Are a bunch of women enjoying this? Suddenly shlocky prose and a slightly too perfect protagonist aren’t just a genre convention or style choice, they’re a moral inditement. Did a writer of color write their novel in a manner that directly referenced community based speech patterns whether that’s mixing languages or just using a non-academic dialect? Stop making up words and get an editor to fix your bad grammar, you clearly don’t know what you’re doing. Did an autistic writer write their dialogue in their own voice, even if that means not abiding by allistic speech patterns and etiquette all the time? Nobody actually talks like that, you need to fix your dialogue.

Stop calling books “bad” when you just mean you don’t like them or they weren’t written for you or they just don’t come naturally to you. Start trying to read books/genres you’ve previously written off as “bad” because sometimes tastes change and sometimes you’ll still not like them, but it helps your brain to expose yourself to things you don’t seek out everyday. You can get new perspectives, you can develop your own writing by experiencing other approaches to expression, you can just mentally check out and have a little mindless fun, you can do a lot of things. They’re all good. A few grammatically incorrect, slightly clunky sentences about a Mary Sue every now and then won’t kill you. Writing off every perspective and creative expression that isn’t perfectly catered to you just might.

It's all fun and games and laughing at BookTok until you can't get on AO3 anymore, as someone who likes both romance and fanfic.

[charlikesalmon]

space oddity

[soimse]

“He wants me so bad he just doesn’t know it yet” -Bill Cipher probably

[maibeloved]

Guess who is back in their gravity falls phase! (After it being dormant for almost a decade!)

[wanologic]

sorry danny, sam will never think you’re cool

[gampix]

Guilt.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

meditations on first philosophy (1641) - rene descartes

"who give a shit"

[bixels]

me too, luna.

[daily-spooky]

[knockknockwhosthereartistism]

The biggest fumble of the century

[paintedcrows]

Thinking about that old man

[studprincesa]

Making Out: The Book of Lesbian Sex and Sexuality, photography by Laurence Jaugey-Paget (via dykedeviance)

[pangur-and-grim]

alright, this one's a little more silly

[cammy-mcspammy]

My interpretation on how human bill came to be, ig? (ALSO SORRY, I MEANT DD&MD.. or idk how to abbreviate it)