Administered by:
: Indigenous Terror 
™ supreme goblin 
@coriander@elekk.xyzI'm still so fucked up by "we skip long paragraphs in books because they're probably bad"
™ supreme goblin @corianderLike, the big argument was "We know all the cliched writing, tropes, and descriptions and just want the plot" and like
I get that people on booktok are mostly not reading high literature, they're not skimming Finnegan's Wake (which is also, I think, a problem, but a different one), so the level of artistry in just writing prose isn't, on average, going to be as high but books are SO MUCH MORE than just their plots!
Do you know why Patrick Rothfuss came out the gate with one book and became one of the hottest fantasy authors? It wasn't because Name of the Wind had a groundbreaking plot nobody had seen before. It was because the base prose he was using was so fucking beautiful. He could have written ANY story and everyone would still have hailed it as one of the best fantasy books of all time simply because of HOW HE WROTE IT.
When you just skim books, only read the dialogue, you are genuinely robbing yourself of potentially experiencing something like that. You're not giving the author the credit they (hopefully) deserve. You're saying their actual writing, the thing you're ostensibly reading the book for, isn't worth your time. Just give me the dialogue, just give me the plot, I don't need anything else.
And if you don't see how that's a fucking insult, you're lost.
™ supreme goblin @corianderI heard someone read a single random paragraph of Name of the Wind and literally THAT DAY went to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy, that's how fucking good Rothfuss writes. And booktok wouldn't even give him a chance.
@lapis@coriander it wounds me.
it will haunt me til my dying day
@coriander Love to pretend I'm reading the abridged version of a book
@coriander I'm just gonna sit on the Catch-22 of "we know it's probably bad, so we skip it"
@coriander how would you know if you were wrong, assholes??
™ supreme goblin @coriander@IntrepidVector The subtle telling on themselves there too
™ supreme goblin @coriander@IntrepidVector Why are you reading books you know are probably bad?
@lapis@coriander @IntrepidVector in my opinion you should only read books you know are probably bad if you are hosting a bad book podcast
(and even then some like worst bestsellers have convinced me to read fun sounding "garbage" )
@coriander "the silence was in three parts..."
Inject it into my veins!
@coriander actually in my experience it’s usually the short paragraphs which are bad
™ supreme goblin @coriander@Lady See this is the part nobody is saying
@coriander maybe i just hang around too many autistic people but i’d rather read your five page infodump than your shitty derivative dialogue
™ supreme goblin @coriander@Lady This is why Moby Dick is a classic