Pet Peeves of the Bookish Community

I’m not the most active person in most social media sites. I have a queue set up on tumblr, I haven’t written on here in months, and I maybe go on Twitter once a week. With starting college, I’ve barely found time to read anything other than textbooks. But, even with a small part in the bookish community, I recognize that ours is not a toxic-free environment. So, listed below in no particular order, are my top 3 pet peeves.

1) Name Bashing
Let’s get one thing clear: Can some names be super annoying? Yes. Can we make fun of character’s names because they’re just so ridiculous? Of course. My issue isn’t with the fictional name bashing. It’s the bashing of author’s names that gets me. I was on tumblr earlier today and somebody (we’ll call them D) had answered a question regarding his opinion on Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, and in his reply he said he couldn’t, “take somebody with the name Rainbow seriously.” … Really? Maybe that isn’t her given name, but I have an aunt named Rainbow. She has a sister named Echo. I would hope that adults would be mature enough to realize, “Well that’s a different name, but I won’t judge their work ethic/life by just their name.” Maybe Rowell changed her name as a marketing thing. I don’t know. I just found that really shitty.

2) Genre Bashing
This is a big one. I’m 23, so I can still get away with reading YA without people giving me condescending looks. But if you’re 50 years old and you enjoy Harry Potter or Anna and the French Kiss, then you should be able to read it without worry of somebody judging you. At least you’re reading! Honestly, it takes a lot for me to want to read any YA anymore. After the whole Twilight boom where everything turned into a Paranormal-Triangle-Romance, I couldn’t find anything good to read. Instead, I started reading “adult” literature. That doesn’t make me better than anyone who prefers Young Adult. It doesn’t make me worse than people who like Classics. If Young Adult isn’t your thing, cool man. But don’t make other people feel bad because it’s theirs.

3) “The book is always better than the movie.”
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Did you know that Mean Girls is based on a self-help book? If you look up Legally Blonde on Goodreads (because yes, it’s also a book), it’ll probably take you about two seconds to find a two-star review, and more than one of those reviews say how much better the movie is. The Notebook. Yeah. I said it. The motherfucking Notebook. I can’t stand this new thing of romanticizing your “first love”, and The Notebook romanticized the shit out of it. If my 16-year-old boyfriend came back into my life 18 years later, I’d probably slap him for being so mentally abusive (since kids have no fucking clue what they’re actually doing to each other) and then tell him to go fuck off. First loves? Okay, maybe. But first loves who only had one damn summer together?! And who had been apart for more than ten. fucking. years?! No. At that point, y’all need to move on. All I’m saying is this: Some movies, especially now, have the visual effects that books lack. And some authors are just bad writers when compared to others.

That’s all I’ve got for the night, folks. Maybe I’ll pick this thing up more, since my reading goal is about 25 books less than last year, and it looks like I’ll be working in a bookstore again (YAY!) but we’ll see.