I Love to Hate It: The Joys of a Hate Read

 

And #1 on the Hate Read list goes to......

I'm not a glutton for punishment, I swear.  I take great pleasure from reading - it's my literal escape (see what I did there?) so it doesn't make much sense that I'd devote time to reading things I don't enjoy.  I'm an adult now, so I'm not obligated to read anything I don't want.  I DNF books on Kindle Unlimited with abandon; if I have the misfortune to purchase a physical book that just isn't doing it for me, I usually don't bother to return, but I will donate.  I am never, ever, EVER going to read the Great Gatsby again.  Ever.

Why then, do I persist in reading books like the ACOTAR series, which I think it's clear from past entries here that I'm not the biggest fan of.  This question has been repeatedly echoed by fans more enthusiastic than I on various forums across the internets.....if I had a dollar for every time someone asked why I continue to read a series that I don't enjoy, I'd have more money to buy my favorite books.

I've often been accused of "ruining the fun" for people that are "real fans" of books.  Where these folks are getting things completely wrong is in the belief that you can't be critical about things you enjoy, i.e. if you're critical of something, you can't possibly count yourself a fan of it.  I disagree with that, and for a few reasons.

I enjoy taking a critical eye to various things, picking them apart, and examining and thinking about them.  I enjoy mindlessly going along for the ride when reading books and watching movies too - I think that's how A Court of Mist and Fury passed muster for me the first time around.  I kind of just plowed through the whole series without pausing too long to really think about what I was reading.  No matter what I think about that book and the series as a whole now, I'll forever be grateful to them because they opened up a whole new world of literary wonder to me, and even if I don't view them as favorably as I did the first time around, without them I would never have come to read other books (like the Folk of the Air) that I hold very close to my heart now.

There are certainly aspects of the ACOTAR books that I find pleasurable - not every character is an insufferable tool (Lucien I love you), and the stories are largely entertaining, but right now their place in my life is mainly as fuel for exercising my critical thinking muscles.  I think people are oddly possessive of things that they love (art, not people), so they get easily offended when someone says something negative about something they love, which always struck me as odd.  Everybody's experience with art and entertainment that they ingest should be deeply personal, despite the fact that communities of people often spring up around these things.  

Another person's opinion shouldn't change that, because everybody's takeaway from a book/movie/song is different.  Try talking logic like this to an over-emotional adolescent though - it's an exercise in futility, and I get that, but that won't stop me from pointing out the things I don't like about something.  I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything, or to change anybody's mind, it's purely for my own edification.  Reading a book is only one part of the experience for me, understanding it is another, and that's where being so particular about a book comes in to play for me.   

Never mind that heckling is a long-standing tradition in entertainment (and has really become its only little sect at this point), going all the way back to Vaudeville.  It's somewhat of a cottage industry right now with works devoted to the act of heckling an artistic endeavor (look at Mystery Science Theater 3000, or all of those special viewing of "The Room") more than said artistic endeavor itself.  So the act of loving to hate something is hardly something new, or designed to rain on the proverbial parades of other people - it's a form of entertainment in itself.

It might seem like I'm putting myself through torture by continuing to subject myself to Rhysand's idiocy, or Feyre's enabling, but at this point it's like a fucked up drinking game - take a shot every time Rhys purrs, or gaslights someone; I'm surprised I still have a liver at this point, tbh.  Reading SJM for me now is how I felt watching the Surreal Life or Flavor of Love on VH1 a million years ago - it was a fucking disaster, they were all a mess, but I couldn't look away.  

SJM has some truly abhorrent ideas about romantic love and relationships (to me anyway) and in so many ways she's feeding that machine of distorted self-image that is probably so ingrained in society now that I feel like we'll never get to a point where we're not unhappy with ourselves, and on that level at least, I balk at continuing to support her monetarily.  I suppose if I wanted to really practice what I preach I'd at least wait till her books were on sale or buy them second hand or something.  I could definitely do that moving forward, and I probably will - Crescent City isn't going in any kind of direction that I like, so there's really no point in plunking down $30 for a book and having it take space on my shelf purely for the joy of deconstructing it at some point and crushing the hopes and dreams of American teenagers by showing them what a misogynistic pig Rhysand is.  If anything bothers me about hate reading, I'd say it's providing monetary support to someone allowing them to further advance notions I find abhorrent - I have no problem with other people who aren't turned off by what she writes throwing all their cash at her, but it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me to keep doing it myself.  So while I can say I won't stop reading stuff that I hate, I can certainly stop buying it (or at least paying full price, because I'm not one to advocate stealing...most of the time).

So while I can't advocate devoting time to reading something you don't really like to everyone, if a book hits the right notes and doesn't cross the line into the truly offensive, sticking with something you don't 100% enjoy, and then really looking at why you don't, picking it apart, and talking about it with others helps not only keep your brain from turning to jelly (and offset the otherwise deleterious effects of reading 473 pages of Feysand fucking each other senseless), it makes you appreciate the stuff you really do enjoy getting mindlessly lost in even more.