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You can read more of my reviews at haphazardlyreading.wordpress.com
A while ago I heard someone talking about how he really doesn’t get why people read books they know they won’t like. He couldn’t imagine any reason why someone would hate-read a book when there are so many other books, and they have to like some of them. He even said that he wonders if people secretly like the things they’re hate-reading.
I don’t think that I’m really hate-reading this series, but if you came to that conclusion, that wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable. I’m seven books into a seventeen book series that I don’t like, and yet I’m still reading them. Why would I choose to suffer like this if I wasn’t hate-reading them? There are several reasons for this.
The first is possibly the most shallow, and it’s that I can read these books really quickly so the number of books in my goodreads 2017 reading challenge will be higher without that much effort on my part. You could argue that I could just read manga, and that I would actually enjoy that, AND it would probably take less time to read than this, and you would be completely right.
The second reason is that I need to know how it ends. I’ve started it, and now there’s no going back. I need closure. I could just watch the TV series, but I know that there are differences between the books and TV, so I want to read the books, and watching a TV series doesn’t help my reading challenge or give me anything to write a blog post about.
The third reason is that I feel like I’ve committed to reading this entire series, so now I can’t not read it. Despite the fact that I can’t commit to a hairstyle for more than a few months, I can commit to reading a seventeen book series without a second thought. I’m not worried that I would disappoint people reading my blog if I stopped reading the series, but I know I would kind of disappoint myself, so I want to finish it.
The timeline in this series is really weird. Like, I think everything works out, and I don’t think that there are errors with the timeline, it’s just that so much happens in such a short amount of time that it feels like more time has passed than the book indicates. So many things are happening to these four girls simultaneously that it almost seems like more time has to pass for all of this to happen. I don’t know if this is a complaint or not. It may just be a comment? I don’t know. Maybe including dates at the beginning of every chapter would help? There were either dates or numbered days at the beginning of Made For You, and I think that worked well. (Also, each chapter in The Night Circus starts with a date. There’s a book worth reading. Possibly three or four times.) Maybe the author could call the day they first met Ali day one, and then just keep going from there? Or maybe the day Ali died was day one, and every flashback from before that could just be called “Before” or something. I’m not really picky about this, so nearly anything to indicate the passage of time would make me happy.
I was irritated by the cup-size shaming in this book. The girls in this book put a lot of effort into looking attractive and to having the perfect body, so they seem like the kind of girls who would be very jealous of, and horrible to, girls who happened to have a cup-size bigger than theirs, so, even though it’s not surprising or unexpected, it’s irritating. I’ve heard nasty comments about my cup-size from people I considered friends and from relatives since I was twelve. Yes, that’s right. Relatives. It’s ridiculous because people will shame girls both for having a bigger cup-size and then shame other girls for having a smaller cup-size. There’s no winning. The only reason that girls shame girls with bigger cup-sizes is because of jealousy, and it’s horrible. Even though I expected nothing better from these characters, and even though this is incredibly realistic, it’s not necessary. It just perpetuates hatred between women. It’s not okay.
Right now, it’s really upsetting me. Women are finally being heard about sexual harassment. Society is finally realizing that the rape culture is a real thing, and they’re ready to change or at least acknowledge it. Yet, female writers still write characters that shame each other for having different types of bodies. When a woman is shamed for having large breasts (“You know how those large breasted women are, it’s not surprising when they turn up pregnant”, as my relative told me.) you remove them from the larger conversation about women’s bodies and personal space. Like the simple fact of biology that determined breast sizes also dictates that women with those breasts are the playthings of men and the scorn of other woman. It’s gross and unacceptable. It’s true to life, but it needs to stop in books and the real world.
Stepping off the soap box now.
There’s still a lot of exposition, but not for the things that I think matter. There’s plenty of stuff about how Aria found her dad cheating on her mother and how Ali knew this secret, but there wasn’t that much information about the events that happened in the last book. I remember that Aria’s dad cheated on her mom, but I don’t remember all of the details from the last six books. These books are pretty easily forgettable, and we’ve gotten to the point where exposition is going to be important, but the author just keeps bringing up the same things again and again. Is it to represent that these secrets are things that these girls frequently think about? Because that would make sense. In the book, “A” is always threatening to reveal their secrets, so the girls having these secrets on their mind constantly makes sense, but without any exposition about the other details from the other books, it becomes confusing.
I don’t understand why all the characters in this book will have serious discussions in public, within earshot of other people. I’ve had plenty of somewhat serious conversations while sitting in a car in a parking lot, but I’ll have all the windows up, and no one in that car will be talking in a voice loud enough for anyone outside to hear. These girls will be talking about serious family things, and about things they seem to want to keep secret, but they do this in places where literally anyone could hear them, and then they wonder how “A” knows about their lives. There’s something kind of exhibitionistic about this. It’s almost like they want everyone to know just how dramatic and horrible their lives are.
I really don’t know how to go about rating this book. I didn’t like it, but I’m reading the entire series, so a one star rating almost seems unfair. On goodreads, I gave it one star, so I guess I’ll go with that.
A while ago I heard someone talking about how he really doesn’t get why people read books they know they won’t like. He couldn’t imagine any reason why someone would hate-read a book when there are so many other books, and they have to like some of them. He even said that he wonders if people secretly like the things they’re hate-reading.
I don’t think that I’m really hate-reading this series, but if you came to that conclusion, that wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable. I’m seven books into a seventeen book series that I don’t like, and yet I’m still reading them. Why would I choose to suffer like this if I wasn’t hate-reading them? There are several reasons for this.
The first is possibly the most shallow, and it’s that I can read these books really quickly so the number of books in my goodreads 2017 reading challenge will be higher without that much effort on my part. You could argue that I could just read manga, and that I would actually enjoy that, AND it would probably take less time to read than this, and you would be completely right.
The second reason is that I need to know how it ends. I’ve started it, and now there’s no going back. I need closure. I could just watch the TV series, but I know that there are differences between the books and TV, so I want to read the books, and watching a TV series doesn’t help my reading challenge or give me anything to write a blog post about.
The third reason is that I feel like I’ve committed to reading this entire series, so now I can’t not read it. Despite the fact that I can’t commit to a hairstyle for more than a few months, I can commit to reading a seventeen book series without a second thought. I’m not worried that I would disappoint people reading my blog if I stopped reading the series, but I know I would kind of disappoint myself, so I want to finish it.
The timeline in this series is really weird. Like, I think everything works out, and I don’t think that there are errors with the timeline, it’s just that so much happens in such a short amount of time that it feels like more time has passed than the book indicates. So many things are happening to these four girls simultaneously that it almost seems like more time has to pass for all of this to happen. I don’t know if this is a complaint or not. It may just be a comment? I don’t know. Maybe including dates at the beginning of every chapter would help? There were either dates or numbered days at the beginning of Made For You, and I think that worked well. (Also, each chapter in The Night Circus starts with a date. There’s a book worth reading. Possibly three or four times.) Maybe the author could call the day they first met Ali day one, and then just keep going from there? Or maybe the day Ali died was day one, and every flashback from before that could just be called “Before” or something. I’m not really picky about this, so nearly anything to indicate the passage of time would make me happy.
I was irritated by the cup-size shaming in this book. The girls in this book put a lot of effort into looking attractive and to having the perfect body, so they seem like the kind of girls who would be very jealous of, and horrible to, girls who happened to have a cup-size bigger than theirs, so, even though it’s not surprising or unexpected, it’s irritating. I’ve heard nasty comments about my cup-size from people I considered friends and from relatives since I was twelve. Yes, that’s right. Relatives. It’s ridiculous because people will shame girls both for having a bigger cup-size and then shame other girls for having a smaller cup-size. There’s no winning. The only reason that girls shame girls with bigger cup-sizes is because of jealousy, and it’s horrible. Even though I expected nothing better from these characters, and even though this is incredibly realistic, it’s not necessary. It just perpetuates hatred between women. It’s not okay.
Right now, it’s really upsetting me. Women are finally being heard about sexual harassment. Society is finally realizing that the rape culture is a real thing, and they’re ready to change or at least acknowledge it. Yet, female writers still write characters that shame each other for having different types of bodies. When a woman is shamed for having large breasts (“You know how those large breasted women are, it’s not surprising when they turn up pregnant”, as my relative told me.) you remove them from the larger conversation about women’s bodies and personal space. Like the simple fact of biology that determined breast sizes also dictates that women with those breasts are the playthings of men and the scorn of other woman. It’s gross and unacceptable. It’s true to life, but it needs to stop in books and the real world.
Stepping off the soap box now.
There’s still a lot of exposition, but not for the things that I think matter. There’s plenty of stuff about how Aria found her dad cheating on her mother and how Ali knew this secret, but there wasn’t that much information about the events that happened in the last book. I remember that Aria’s dad cheated on her mom, but I don’t remember all of the details from the last six books. These books are pretty easily forgettable, and we’ve gotten to the point where exposition is going to be important, but the author just keeps bringing up the same things again and again. Is it to represent that these secrets are things that these girls frequently think about? Because that would make sense. In the book, “A” is always threatening to reveal their secrets, so the girls having these secrets on their mind constantly makes sense, but without any exposition about the other details from the other books, it becomes confusing.
I don’t understand why all the characters in this book will have serious discussions in public, within earshot of other people. I’ve had plenty of somewhat serious conversations while sitting in a car in a parking lot, but I’ll have all the windows up, and no one in that car will be talking in a voice loud enough for anyone outside to hear. These girls will be talking about serious family things, and about things they seem to want to keep secret, but they do this in places where literally anyone could hear them, and then they wonder how “A” knows about their lives. There’s something kind of exhibitionistic about this. It’s almost like they want everyone to know just how dramatic and horrible their lives are.
I really don’t know how to go about rating this book. I didn’t like it, but I’m reading the entire series, so a one star rating almost seems unfair. On goodreads, I gave it one star, so I guess I’ll go with that.