The Anti-TBR Tag (Books I Never Plan on Reading)

I was browsing YouTube the other day, as I so often do, when I came across a tag used by booktubers (YouTubers with book-focused accounts) that caught my eye. Originally created by the channel Nicole & Her Books, the anti-TBR challenge is a twist on the usual TBR (to be read) lists. Rather than focusing on books that you intend to read, the anti-TBR features books which you are probably never going to get through.

Like a lot of people who love reading, I struggle with the fact that I can never possibly read all the books in the world, not even all the ones I want to read. The anti-TBR's charm lies in embracing this fact, allowing book-lovers to approach their reading with the aim of curating their choices, rather than feeling as though you have to read everything. This seems quite a liberating idea to me, and I especially like it since a lot of the books deemed part of the classic Western canon (and thus often considered must-reads) are those written by and focusing on white, cishet, English-speaking men. Embracing the idea of an anti-TBR opens up the possibility of exploring authors beyond the supposed "greats" of literature and allowing us to appreciate authors who have received less attention than they deserve.

While this is a tag that originated on YouTube, I have seen examples of people doing it in blog post form as well, so I wanted to give it a go myself. The challenge includes eight questions/categories, for which you choose one book, author, or series each. I have listed the questions below in bold, with my answers underneath. Please feel free to read through them and let me know how you feel about my choices - I have no doubt some will be controversial!

1. A popular book EVERYONE loves that you have no interest in reading?  

Normal People by Sally Rooney.

If I had taken a shot for every time I've heard someone praise Normal People, I'd have died of alcohol poisoning back in 2019. Even a lot of reviewers and critics whom I respect and share similar tastes with have praised the book, but I still can't manage to muster even a little bit of enthusiasm for reading it myself. Part of this is probably because books focusing on heterosexual, male-female relationships usually seem incredibly boring to me, and Normal People doesn't add enough punch to its plot summary to get me to read it (or even watch the tv series adaptation, for that matter) in spite of that. 

2. A classic book (or author) you don’t have an interest in reading?  

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Answering this question posed something of a challenge for me, since (like the rest of society) I struggle to define exactly what counts as a "classic" in the realm of literature. I eventually decided to restrict my options for this category to well-known books that were published more than a hundred years ago; hence my exclusion of my first choice, Kingsley Amis.

I am choosing Huckleberry Finn rather than Mark Twain here, because I have technically already read some of Twain's work (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as well as a few short stories). Twain's other work didn't impress me sufficiently to motivate me to read more of his writing, nor do I feel compelled to read this book based on its place in the American canon. There is also the fact that this book is sometimes criticised as racist - while I couldn't testify as to whether or not that's the case, I can't help but feel that if we want to read books which do address racism (as this one apparently does), it might be better to read books that are actually by people of colour rather than white men with no stake in the matter.

Also, Twain famously hated Jane Austen and declared that "Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." As a fan of Austen, I take some offence to this.

3. An author whose books you have no interest in reading? 

Ernest Cline.

I have not heard a single positive thing about Cline, author of Ready Player One and its sequel, that could possibly compel me to read his books. Ready Player One sounds incredibly unappealing, like it was created to pander to nostalgic retro gamers while also being a self-insert male fantasy novel. Reading his awful poem Nerd Porn Auteur, which I initially thought was a misogynist parody of incel geek logic, was the last straw for me. I have the exact opposite of interest in reading any more of his work after that.

3.2 A problematic author whose books you have no interest in reading?

Roald Dahl.

This is a sort of conscious rejection, one which I have hesitated to make for a long time. Dahl is something of a saint of British children's literature in the UK, whose books are brought out year after year in attempts to get children into reading. He was also a virulent anti-Semite whose books have also been called out for undertones of racism and misogyny, so not the sort of author I would like to support, even in spite of his having died before I was born.

To be honest, I never read Dahl's books as a child (much too scary for my young self) and I never felt any great enthusiasm for them as an adult, but it's always hard to reject an author seen as so important to your country's literature - especially given that Roald Dahl was from Cardiff, thus possibly one of the most famous Welsh authors of all. Still, what little of his work I have read has felt lacking in empathy at best and outright cruel at worst - just reading about his short story collection Switch Bitch was enough to turn my stomach. Combining that feeling with my knowledge of his bigoted beliefs, and I find myself unable to read his books anymore.

4. An author you have read a couple of books from & have decided their books are not for you? 

Jeffrey Archer.

I have read far more Jeffrey Archer books than I should have, specifically books 1-4 in the Clifton Chronicles series. For all Archer seems to have a reputation as a "master storyteller", I found his writing boring and predictable. His characters are either one-dimensional villains or utterly-faultless heroes, with no in-between. It doesn't help that Archer himself is a tax-dodging Tory, either. In any case, I won't be purchasing or reading any more of his books.

5. A genre you have no interest in OR a genre you tried to get into & couldn’t? 

Travel writing.

I used to think that the main thing which appealed to me about reading was being able to mentally travel to places I'd never been in real life, so I thought that travel writing was exactly the kind of genre I'd love. Actually, it turns out that what I enjoy about reading is experiencing different perspectives from different worlds, not the perspective of one person as they travel to different countries and experience them from an outsider's perspective. The general air of privilege and fetishism in much travel writing also doesn't endear it to me. I've tried to get into the genre before, but I'm not sure I'll ever manage to find an example I like enough to counter my dislike of the category as a whole. 

6. A book you have bought but will never read? (this can be a book you have unhauled/returned to the library unread)

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Back when I was studying World Literature in high school, I was tasked with finding a book from each continent to read and write about for the module. The Shadow of the Sun is one of the books I bought for the Africa section of the course. I didn't use it in the end, discarding it in favour of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's excellent novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and I have never picked it up since. I used to tell myself that someday I'd come back to it, but now I have no intention of doing so. I have gone off travel writing in general, and as someone who specifically seeks out books written by authors from the areas they are set in, reading a book set in Africa by a Polish journalist doesn't really appeal to me. Kapuscinski has also been accused of racism and gross generalisation in his writing about Africa, most prominently by Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, making me even less inclined to read his work. I would much rather read work by authors who are actually from Africa, such as Wainaina or Adichie, than spend my time on Kapuscinski's.

7. A series you have no interest in reading OR a series you started & have dnf’d (didn't finish)?

Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Unlike a lot of the other authors I've chosen for this post, who I either strongly dislike or avoid due to problematic beliefs, J. R. R. Tolkien is an author I feel thoroughly apathetic about. I have no problem with the Lord of the Rings books; I just have no interest in reading them. I did previously read Tolkien's earlier book The Hobbit, thinking it might finally reveal to me the Tolkien appeal which had always eluded me, but I ended up finding it incredibly boring - hardly the best quality in an adventure book, of all things. The reputation of the Lord of the Rings books might be enough to convince me to read them in spite of all this, if it weren't for the fact that they seem so interminably long. As things stand, I have no intention of attempting to slog through them anytime soon.

8. A new release you have no interest in reading?

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

I'm not entirely sure this counts as a new release since it won't actually come out until April this year, but I think it's close enough that it works for this answer. Once upon a time, I would have eagerly anticipated a non-fiction John Green book. I used to adore his writing and his whole persona in general, reading as many of his novels as I could get my hands on and keenly following his and his brother Hank's exploits on their shared Vlogbrothers channel. Around six years ago, after being thoroughly disappointed by Green's fourth book Paper Towns, I became disillusioned with his writing as a whole. It started to seem pretentious and maudlin, and I quickly lost all enthusiasm for his work. 

All that is to say that John Green's new release, an essay collection based on his podcast of the same name, now holds little to no appeal for me. I don't enjoy Green's writing, nor do I care to read another unqualified white man's perspective on climate change (see also: Bill Gates' new book). In short, I have no interest in this one. 

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So that's it! Those are 8 books/series/authors which I have no plans to read anytime soon. If you read this far, let me know: do you agree or disagree with my choices and reasoning? What do you think of the idea of an anti-TBR in general? I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.

Breaking Down the Homophobia Problem with Netflix's "Behind Her Eyes"

For the last couple of weeks, since its premiere in February, Netflix has repeatedly recommended the new series Behind Her Eyes to me. Billed as a psychological thriller revolving around a single mother who gets involved in the lives of a mysterious married couple, the six-episode series sounded right up my street. When I first watched episode one the other day, I wasn't sure it would live up to the hype Netflix had seemingly created around it. Then, as I watched the second episode (and the third, and the fourth, in a rapidly developing binge), I became hooked. Yet even while I kept speeding through the episodes, excited to find out what mind-blowing twists would be revealed next, I started to grow uneasy. I had a sense of foreboding, and not the kind the series wanted me to have, surrounding its representation of its one gay character. Having now finished the series, I am sad to say that Behind Her Eyes ultimately resorted to harmful homophobic tropes in its plot, albeit not the ones you might initially expect.

[WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW]

Behind Her Eyes is a series that is largely driven by twists and mystery, so be aware that if you haven't watched the whole thing yet and you still decide to read this, the story may well lose a lot of its punch. Up until the final episode confirmed my worst gay fears about the show, I might have warned you more strongly, but now I can't bring myself to recommend it like I would have. So I now have no qualms about giving you a detailed rundown of the plot, spoilers included. If you've already seen the series and so don't need my explanation, feel free to skip to the asterisks below.

As I mentioned before, Behind Her Eyes focuses on Louise, a young single mother to an adorable son named Adam. One night, she hits it off with a handsome but painfully uncharismatic stranger at a bar, only to discover the next day that not only is this man (Dr David Ferguson) married, he's also the new psychiatrist at the clinic where she works as a receptionist. In spite of these minor obstacles, the two begin having an affair. Meanwhile, Louise strikes up a friendship with David's wife, Adele, who she literally bumps into on the street on the way home from her son's school. While Louise is drawn to and enjoys the company of both husband and wife, she soon begins to suspect something darker is going on. David and Adele's relationship seems full of paranoia and jealousy, with David actively controlling Adele by confiscating her phone and bank card, monitoring her location, and prescribing her drugs in spite of her protestations. 

We begin to learn more about Adele's backstory when she gives Louise a journal that supposedly belonged to her old friend Rob, a gay, working-class Glaswegian boy who she met during their stay at a rehabilitation clinic. Rob was in rehab for heroin addiction; Adele was there to recover from the trauma of a fire on her family estate, a fire which killed her parents and which she only escaped from at the last minute thanks to the help of David, her then-boyfriend. Adele gives Louise the journal to help with her night terrors, a condition which Rob also suffered from. With the help of the journal, Louise learns how to lucid dream her way out of her night terrors, becoming able to change her nightmares into whatever imaginary scenario she wants. We soon discover that Adele is able to use a similar technique to astral project, allowing her soul to temporarily leave her body and travel through the world in her sleep.

Around the same time, Louise's curiosity about Rob leads her to discover that he disappeared after visiting Adele's estate post-rehab. Adele says she believes David killed him, and it's clear from their interactions that she does indeed know a secret which David is afraid of people finding out. Flashbacks reveal that Adele is lying: David had nothing to do with Rob's death. What really happened is that Rob tricked Adele into swapping bodies during an astral projection outing, which Rob then took advantage of to force his original body into a heroin overdose. The result is that Adele's soul died in Rob's body, leaving Rob in possession of Adele's. Rob!Adele (as I will now be referring to Rob-in-Adele's-body) effectively took over Adele's life from this point onwards. He gains her wealth, her beauty, and her fiancé, all while retaining the ability to astral project which he learnt from Adele. This ability is put to use to spy on David throughout their marriage, allowing him to (among other things) witness David's affair with Louise first-hand. 

The climax of the film comes when Rob!Adele - through a convoluted scheme with another overdose and a house fire - gets Louise to astral project into Adele's dying body, while he takes control of Louise's. Louise's soul dies in Adele's body, leaving Rob now in the body of Louise. Rob!Louise continues Louise's relationship with David, becoming his new wife. The series ends firmly in horror territory with them driving off on their honeymoon, a miserable Adam in the backseat. 

***

Some of you reading might not immediately see the homophobic (and indeed transphobic) problems with this storyline, so I would like to explain. But first, let's talk a bit about perspective, a topic Behind Her Eyes incorporates so extensively. As a queer person, I always view media from a queer perspective. As someone who also knows a bit about tropes in media, I'm especially sensitive to depictions of queer characters that fall into LGBT-phobic clichés or stereotypes. 

Knowing this, you can imagine how Rob immediately caught my eye when his sexual orientation was revealed. My mind began spinning the roulette of gay clichés, wondering which one he might fit into. My first thought was that he was your classic gay best friend, perhaps not as offensively camp as your usual type but still a gay male character who exists solely to further the character development of a straight female one. Then, as flashbacks with Rob began to take on a more foreboding tone, I began to suspect he might be of the Bury Your Gays variety: a queer character is killed off with significantly more ease than a straight one because they're simply seen as more disposable. In the end, Rob turned out to be a perverse but equally cliched twist on both of these. He was a Depraved Homosexual, an evil gay whose sexuality seems to coincide with a total lack of morality (almost as if being gay were seen as immoral and thus serves as shorthand for showing us a character is fundamentally wicked - funny that).

Now I would like to stress that Rob simply being evil and gay at the same time doesn't make him a homophobic cliché (although if all your villains are gay and/or queer-coded then that's still a problem, but we can talk about that another time). The problem with Rob's character is that his evilness is specifically connected to his sexuality, with our anxiety over his potential to commit harm being tied to societal anxiety about queer people. His villainy is built on and supported by homophobia.

To show you what I mean by that, let's first look at Rob's relationship with Adele. For all he claims to love her, his actions are ultimately motivated by extreme jealousy towards her. In contrast to Adele, who is a heterosexual girl from a wealthy family with a loving boyfriend, Rob is gay, poor, and lonely. It's heavily implied that his depressing home life is the primary reason he uses heroin, even going so far as to say he'd rather stay in rehab with Adele than go back to live with his sister as he was before. He never mentions having any friends besides Adele, and the closest thing he has to a love life is exchanging sexual favours with a nurse for drugs. He even seems jealous of Adele's beauty, mentioning it frequently and saying he'd happily trade his life for hers. Thanks to combined astral projection and body snatching, that is exactly what he is able to do.

Pictured: Rob and Adele, Rob reaching desperately for a non-homophobic storyline

The way that Rob's motivations are presented here is extremely concerning as well as frustrating. A gay character being defined almost entirely by their relationship to straight people was always going to be dodgy, but having that definition come in the form of his being violently jealous of them is... a choice, at best. Rob's fascination with and eventual replacement of Adele brings to mind the idea that gay people are really just straight people trapped in the "wrong" body, secretly wishing they could be the gender that would make their attractions heterosexual. While this idea of queer people having the psyche of the "wrong gender" has previously been used in early gay rights movements (such as in the use of the term Uranian or Urning to describe gay men), it's now rightfully seen as outdated and offensive.

Rob's interactions with David are possibly even more worrying, seeing as they feed directly into the idea of predatory gays. From when he first meets David, it's clear that Rob is attracted to him. The feeling is not mutual, however, as David is straight and in love with Adele. Rob shows a blatant disregard for David's consent in this situation, even before he takes possession of Adele's body. He uses his astral projection to spy on David and Adele having sex, then does the same later on with David and Louise. The fact that he has sex with David in Adele's body is equally creepy, since David thinks he is consenting to sex with Adele rather than Rob. 

For those who aren't explicitly familiar with it, the predatory gay stereotype is based on the idea that gay people are such sexual deviants that they are willing to disregard consent if it means they get to have sex with the people they want. We are all just roaming would-be perpetrators of sexual assault, unable to control ourselves around people of the same gender. It is this idea which makes straight people afraid of sharing changing rooms or other same-gender spaces with queer people, having queer people near their children, or going into situations where the majority of people are gay and the same gender as them. Straight people think that gay people simply can't keep their hands to themselves and often believe that they, as heterosexuals, are somehow especially desirable targets for such perverts. It is, I hope it goes without saying, an enormously prevalent and harmful stereotype. It also appears to be the main basis of Rob's characterisation in Behind Her Eyes.

If I said that gay people are predatory, morally bankrupt people who destroy traditional (straight) families and can't be trusted around children, you could rightfully accuse me of peddling homophobic stereotypes. If I said that about Rob, the only gay character in Behind Her Eyes, I'd simply be describing him accurately. Therein lies the problem.

So Rob is a gay man who envies straight women and lusts after straight men, to the point of using manipulation and deceit to get what he wants. Clearly the depiction of Rob leaves a lot to be desired, but I would argue that when viewed from a thematic perspective, the homophobic implications of Behind Her Eyes get even darker.

Towards the end of the series, the tone shifts from that of a thriller to an outright horror story. It is important to note that horror stories frequently express anxieties that the audience can relate to, often societal anxieties, so that the story has greater power to disturb. Perhaps the greatest horror of Behind Her Eyes is the idea that you can never truly know someone, that a person who you love could really be somebody completely different to the person you thought they were. In Behind Her Eyes, this conflict leads to the destruction of a marriage (via Adele) and a family (via Louise). Somehow, the writers thought it was a good idea to make the destroyer of these two great institutions of heterosexual normalcy a gay character - the only gay character, at that. The hidden menace of the homosexual infiltrates pure straight life and corrupts it for their benefit... it's so blatantly problematic, it sounds almost as if they took inspiration from retro anti-gay propaganda.

Yet for all its implicit homophobia, Behind Her Eyes gives surprisingly little attention to Rob's identity as a gay man. The word "gay" is never even used, as far as I can remember. We only assume that Rob is gay based on references to his sex life - the first time he reveals his sexuality, it's when he declares himself to "prefer cock". All other mentions are similarly oblique and/or coarsely sexual. More than any other aspect of it, I thought that perhaps the isolation and loneliness which can come with being gay might at least come up, given how well it seems to fit into Rob's motivations for what he does. So why didn't they mention it?

My theory is that while devoting more attention to Rob and his LGBT+ identity would have possibly made the role less homophobic (simply in that it would make him a more multi-dimensional character whose sexuality goes beyond background casual sex), it would also have made the homophobia that was still part of his storyline more apparent. I imagine the writers were trying to create a character whose sexuality was incidental to their characterisation - if they drew more attention to his gayness, then it might seem like they were going out of their way to make the gay character the villain, thus making them more vulnerable to accusations of homophobia. Being homophobic is fine, of course, as long as you don't get called out on it.

But if Rob's character was indeed meant to be incidentally gay, why was he a man at all? Why didn't they make his role into that of a straight woman? I can think of very little that would have to change, plot-wise, for that to work. The female Rob would still be friends with Adele and be attracted to David. She could still come from a poor background, perhaps be less conventionally good-looking, and want to steal Adele's life from her. So why would the writers make the conscious choice to make this body-stealing villain not a straight woman but a gay man?

I can think of only one good reason why: Rob being male and gay is part of the horror. If you think I'm being uncharitable, remember what I said before about horror and social norms. Deviation from gender norms is commonly used in media to disturb, shock, or unnerve, such as in the case of the Unsettling Gender Reveal, the Creepy Crossdresser, or the Sissy Villain (read the TV Tropes pages for those if you don't know what I'm talking about). The Rob reveal is used similarly, to prompt viewers to say not only "Can you imagine if your wife was secretly someone else?" but "Can you imagine if your wife was secretly a gay man?"

This is what really drags the whole storyline over to transphobia as well as homophobia, as the horror the series is designed to evoke so strongly mirrors the fears bigots have about trans people: that they are deceitful and will "trick" cisgender, heterosexual people into sleeping with them. As a trope, this fits into Unsettling Gender Reveal, but it also recalls something known in real life as the "trans panic defence". This is a legal defence, based on the "gay panic defence", which a defendant can use to justify violence against a trans person if they had been sexually active with them before finding out they were trans. The idea behind it is basically that finding out that someone you've been with was not assigned the gender at birth which you expected can be so shocking that it can send someone into temporary insanity. It has been used, both in court and outside of it, to get away with violence against trans people (especially trans women of colour) time and time again.

I don't mention this to suggest that Rob is a transgender woman. I do not believe the writers intended him to be read in that way, nor did I interpret the series that way. However, intent isn't everything. Whether or not the writers intended it as such, Rob's queerness is fundamental to his villainy. In the anxiety he creates, we can see reflected societal anxieties about gender and sexuality, about the threat that gay and trans people pose to social norms. The story might be solidly fictional, but the real-world implications are not. 

Once again, I have no doubt that everyone involved with the production of the show will claim that it was not meant to be homophobic and that Rob's sexuality and gender were purely incidental. Yet on every level, the plot and Rob's involvement in it seem intensely problematic as well as cliched. The story's horror is propped up on homophobic stereotypes of predatory and dangerous LGBT+ people. If those involved in the creation of this show want to claim some part in the success of it, then they also need to claim responsibility for the harmful tropes it exploits. 

5 Video Essays I Love

Hello and welcome back to another weekly Wednesday post, which I completely forgot I was meant to post until literally a few hours ago (for reference, it's almost 6pm on the day this post is meant to go up). After spending those first few hours panicking about what on earth I could possibly write a post about at such short notice, I finally hit upon a topic: video essays.

I watch quite a bit of YouTube (probably more than is entirely healthy), with my absolute favourite type of video to watch being video essays. These are usually long, persuasive videos that combine facts and analysis. If that definition seems a little vague, that's because video essays are a medium that has only gained popularity relatively recently, so there doesn't seem to be one single definition everyone can agree on. All that is to say that my definition is the one I'm working with here and if you think I'm wrong about my categorisation of any of the videos below, feel free to argue with me in the comments.

Now, let's move on to the videos. Here are five video essays which I have found especially excellent and memorable, in no particular order:

The Bell Curve - Shaun

I have a special place in my heart that is reserved for hating IQ tests. I hated them before watching this video, and I hated them even more afterwards. Besides IQ tests generally being eugenicist, elitist nonsense, this video specifically addresses an infamous book called The Bell Curve, which has been accused of advocating for judging people's intelligence based on race (an entirely racist and unfounded concept, just for the record), with IQ tests as their supposed evidence for the idea's validity.

The Rebranding of White Nationalism - Kat Blaque (currently unavailable)

Kat Blaque is my all-time favourite YouTuber, who I have followed for about 6 or 7 years now. During that time she has produced a range of content, varying from unscripted True Tea videos to video essays like The Rebranding of White Nationalism. I hesitated to include this video on the list, since it has seemingly been privated for the time being. However, it was such an informative and important video that I wanted to mention it anyway. If Kat Blaque reuploads the video on YouTube or elsewhere, I will edit this post to include a new link. In the meantime, I would also recommend watching the second part of her video essay series: The History of Monetization, Demonetization and How it Changed Youtube.

The Rise of the Pick Me Girl Meme - Tara Mooknee

Tara Mooknee (pronounced moo-nee) is a YouTube I've only discovered recently, but she's quickly becoming one of my favourites. Her videos are a great combination of informative, persuasive, and funny, and her Pick Me video is a great example of this. Whether you've already had the misfortune of encountering pick-me's or if you have no idea what I'm talking about, her video is worth watching. It explains what pick me girls are, the forms they take, and how we should deal with them. It's also just a very witty video.

Shame - Contrapoints

Ah, the queen of video essays herself. While Natalie Wynn, who runs the Contrapoints channel, has done so many amazing video essays that you could probably just pick one at random and it would be worth the watch, my favourite so far has been Shame. Wynn made this video partially to come out as a lesbian, but there's also a lot more to it than that. She goes into her own story of discovering her sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and the shame that internalised homophobia can bring to even those of us who are usually so proud of our identity. Some parts were so relatable that I had to pause the video for a second just to take in the impact of what she was saying. If you're also queer (especially a queer woman), then I think there is also a lot in this video that you might relate to. 

The Political Implications of Talking Dog Movies - Jack Saint

I know, I know. The title of this video probably makes it seem like some satire of over-analytical film studies essays, but I can assure you it's actually 100% serious. Okay, maybe not 100% because there is definitely humour in the video. Still, the topic is a genuine one! I'm always fascinated by the messages of children's movies, even more so by those that are seemingly unintentional. Jack Saint does a great job of breaking down these deliberate and accidental implications in films with talking animals, some of which take a surprisingly dark turn. 

That's all I have for you this week! If you enjoyed this post, let me know and I can see about doing something similar again in the future. I'd also love to know if you have any video essays to recommend, because I'm always looking for more - the longer and more analytical, the better. Please feel to let me know either through the comments or through contacting me directly, as always. 

Why I Don't Use Star Ratings

Last week, I published a post consisting of five short reviews for books I'd recently finished reading. The eagle-eyed readers among you may have noticed that while each book came with a short "verdict" that summed up my feelings about it in one sentence, I refrained from using a star or otherwise numerical rating when evaluating the books. In fact, I have a personal rule against using such ratings for books (as well as movies, tv series, or any other form of art). I have broken this rule in the past, most recently in my review for American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (a decision I will admit was mostly driven by spite), but in general I stick to my principles on this. 

The term "principles" may seem a bit strong here. Review ratings are hardly considered an area of ethical problems generally, much less a subject on which one would have a principle of using them or not, but that is the case for me. In this post, I'd like to explain a little bit about why I have such strong feelings about star ratings and why I refuse to use them in my reviews.

First of all, I would like to be clear that my dislike of star ratings (or any numerical rating really) only applies to things that I would consider as coming under the umbrella of "art". While of course this naturally includes fine art such as paintings and sculpture, I would also define films, books, music, and other forms of popular media as belonging to this category. 

The reason why I feel star ratings work for other products but not for art is essentially due to ambiguity of purpose. Let's take an example of a non-art product, in this case a water jug. Generally speaking, if someone is looking to buy a water jug, they are evaluating potential options by standard practical criteria: is it sturdy, is it a good size, will it last, is it easy to use, and so on. Some people will value certain aspects of it more highly than others (e.g. some people want a larger jug while others want one that's drop-proof), but the things that constitute a good water jug are broadly universal. We know what a water jug is supposed to do; we know its function. When we give a water jug a star rating, such as the ones on Am*zon, we are judging how well it performs this function. A 5-star water jug can be expected to do its job well; a 1-star water jug, less so. 

The function of a water jug is sufficiently well-defined that there is a limit to the impact of personal preference on assessing one. Some people might care more about how it looks, for example, but it would be bizarre for a person to give a jug five stars just because the colour is nice if said jug breaks after the first use. The result here is that there is a shared understanding among those who rate and use the ratings of water jugs or most other non-art products. Ratings, in this case, can communicate briefly and effectively the perceived value of products. 

In the case of art, ratings do not work nearly as well. The problem again comes back to how we perceive the purpose of a product and if we share an unspoken system of assessment for its effectiveness in achieving that purpose. Something like a water jug has this; art does not. Art is infamously hard to evaluate with anything approaching objectivity, partially because nobody can agree of what purpose it's even meant to serve. It makes sense, in a way, given that we can't even agree on what counts as "art" in the first place. The other problem is that art often functions by affecting us emotionally or psychologically, possibly the most personal and immeasurable ways one could be affected. I might like a painting because it makes me feel happy, while another person might hate it because it makes them feel sad. Still another person might find it sad but appreciate it for that very reason, seeing the purpose of that art as being to elicit that emotion. Yet another person will dislike it because it seems too emotionally raw and not thought-provoking enough. Then one more person will love it or hate it purely depending on if it suits their aesthetic tastes. All of this is immensely personal as well as next to impossible to quantify. 

This is not to say that evaluating art is pointless. I evaluate art according to my own standards every time I rant about a book or recommend a webcomic. The debates about what constitutes art, what its purpose is, and how we judge the value of artistic work - these are fascinating discussions to have. They are also much too nuanced and complex to be reduced to simplistic star ratings. Even a single-line verdict, for all its brevity, can provide more useful information. This is why, when I have to provide a brief summary of my thoughts on a piece of art, I prefer to use these rather than star ratings.

I think that there are reasons why star ratings have become popular, but only some of them have to do with effectiveness. This post is long enough though, so I'll have to go into more detail about that another time. In any case, I hope that this post has answered the question of why I don't use star ratings, at least not in the case of my book and film reviews. 

As always, I would love to hear what you think. Do you like star ratings, or do you hate them? Do you think that they work for some things better than others? Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments or let me know directly.

4 Short Book Reviews

For the last week or so, I've been on the kind of reading binge which normally only occurs when I'm on holiday and am somehow struck with an insatiable urge to consume as many books as I possibly can. I think the main trigger for this is the fact that my library membership is expiring soon, and as I won't be renewing it, this means that I have to read all the books on my library wishlist before I'm no longer allowed to borrow them.

Since I have been reading so much, I thought that for this week's post I would do a little reading round-up of all the books I've read recently. While not all of these were borrowed through my library, most of them were. Also, with the exception of Wuthering Heights, all of these were read in ebook format. With that out of the way, let's move on to the books.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Ah, the Bronte sisters. Authors of those elusive classic novels which I somehow never get around to reading despite always claiming I intend to. Thanks to Wuthering Heights, I've been able to actually read a second Bronte novel (the first being Jane Eyre), despite buying my copy approximately a year ago. This was an intense, emotional, Gothic read which I highly enjoyed, although in hindsight I wouldn't recommend reading it while ill - every other character seems to fall ill with a minor cold and then die with very little notice. I think Wuthering Heights gets a bad reputation because Heathcliff is romanticised by some, but the book itself makes it pretty clear (to me at least) that the man is a definitely horrible person. Most of the other characters in the book even say as much. Anyway, I liked this book a lot and would love to do some literary analysis of it in the future.

Verdict: darkly fascinating and very dramatic - a Gothic romance legend

Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner

I've been seeing loads of hype about this book online, which seems to be one of a few F/F (female-female, for the uninitiated) romance novels which has gone rather mainstream. Of course other books like Carol and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit have been successful too, but this one stands out as a light-hearted, fluffy love story in which there's little gay-related angst and no lesbians being killed. I sped through this novel in about a day, it was so easy to read and entertaining. Just a warning though: there is a sexual harassment plotline in here, which sort of makes sense given the Hollywood setting and it being published in light of #MeToo and #TimesUp, but it caught me a little off guard. 

Verdict: Very cute, very funny, and very gay.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is one of those contemporary "modern classics" which I've been meaning to read for ages but only just now got around to. I had high hopes for this novel based on Roy's reputation as a critically-acclaimed writer, and I'm happy to say it didn't disappoint. TGOST is the story of a wealthy but dysfunctional family in Ayemenem in India, focusing particularly on the lives of the twins Estha and Rahel. Themes of forbidden love (prohibited by the "Love Laws", in Roy's words), caste, and classism feature prominently alongside the importance of both the small and big things which impact us in our lives. I felt utterly immersed in the lives of Estha, Rahel, and their various friends and family over the course of the novel, an experience I didn't want to end even when it took devastating turns.

Verdict: Fluid, powerful, and heart-breaking - a justified modern classic.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Out of all the books mentioned in this post, Bunny is probably the weirdest. I read it because I saw it classed as a "dark academia" novel along the lines of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but it reads more like a hallucinogenic combination of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Heathers, complete with both mean-girl cliques and human-animal hybrids. While it's definitely an interesting, reasonably inventive concept, in practice I didn't find it that fascinating beyond just a surface level "wow, that's kind of messed up". I'm not sure exactly what the author was trying to achieve (horror? comedy? bildungsroman?) so it's hard to judge if they managed to do it. The characters were too flat to be interesting, the satirical takedowns of artistic creator-speak got repetitive, and the ending took the punch out of the rest of the storyline. 

Verdict: Trippy enough to get a few entertaining conversations out of, but too muddled and vague to leave a lasting impression. 

So if you've made it to the end of this post, I will tell you a secret: this isn't actually all the books I've read recently. I just finished reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and have started reading Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yu, but I obviously can't write about the latter yet and I feel it would be too rushed to add in the former now. Still, perhaps you can expect a post about them sometime in the near future. 

Until then, please let me know: would you read any of the books above? Which, if any, sound most interesting to you?

In Praise of the Overwatch Expanded Universe

If you read the title of this post and thought to yourself, "Overwatch? What's that?", then you clearly haven't spoken to me much during the last few months. Those who have enjoyed such a privilege have already been subject to many a monologue from me about Overwatch, my current obsession. For the uninitiated, Overwatch is a video game - specifically a multiplayer, team-based, first-person shooter. After several years of distant fascination with the game, I finally purchased the PC edition last month. I have been obsessed ever since, playing almost every day and spending a good chunk of my time outside of the game by talking about it and reading up on its lore. It was this last aspect of the game, its lore, which first got me interested in Overwatch, and I'd like to use this post to talk about it a little more.

I am a big advocate for video games as storytelling mediums, and there are few things I love more than a story-rich, character-driven game. Most games I'd put into this category put the narrative directly in the game, connecting it to the actions of the player in a way that would make it almost impossible to complete the game without being exposed to the storyline as well. Unlike those games, Overwatch does things a bit differently.

One of the things which makes Overwatch unique is that there is technically little-to-no in-game story. It is, after all, a player-vs-player shooter, which is not exactly the game style most conducive to storytelling. While we are given a little information about the characters you can choose to play, as well as some hints to the game's backstory through said characters' interactions with each other, there isn't really enough detail given in-game to figure out the full narrative.

Yet the creators of the game must have been committed to expanding on the game's basic premise somehow, because they decided to explore the story in a new way that went beyond the game itself. The result of this is what is sometimes referred to as the Overwatch Expanded Universe, in a similar vein to the expanded universe of bigger franchises like Star Wars. Essentially, what Blizzard (Overwatch's parent company) has done is created a series of comics, fiction, and animated shorts that expand on the basic storyline introduced in the Overwatch game. These are connected to the base game to varying degrees: the short film "Are You With Us?" serves as an introduction, even playing the first time you boot up the game; the short story "What You Left Behind", in contrast, tells us more about the backstory of one specific character who wasn't even added until three years after Overwatch's initial release.

The experience of exploring these expanded universe stories reminds me a lot of reading Marvel comics (although I have no doubt it's similar to exploring the universes of DC, Star Wars, and others as well). Each film, comic, or story stands on its own, but it is also a part of a greater whole. There's no set "reading order" for them, but it's as you watch/read more of them that the pieces start to fit together. Reading "Old Soldiers" meant more once I had watched the animated short introducing Ana. Watching "Alive" took on a new meaning after reading "Stone by Stone". I love being able to watch two characters interact, then go back and learn about the backstories which led them to behave in the way that they did - or vice versa. 

While I would probably love the expanded universe even if I didn't play Overwatch, I find exploring these stories gives the game greater depth for me too. When the game loads up a Quick Play match on the Nepal map and Genji mentions how his "soul feels at peace" there, I feel silently pleased at knowing why he said that (he stayed in Nepal with the robot monk Zenyatta in order to spiritually accept his cyborg body, in case you were wondering). It gives the little interactions, voice lines, and even the skins of the characters an extra layer of meaning that makes the game all that more enjoyable.

It also helps that the Overwatch expanded universe is simply very good. The CGI animated shorts in particular stand out, seeing as they wouldn't look out of place playing before a Pixar movie in terms of their graphics and emotional impact, but the short fiction and comics (as well as the 2D animated films and various pieces of writing on the Blizzard website) are excellent as well. Not only are they technically very well done, but they deal with surprisingly heavy topics in a way that is meaningful and optimistic. Overwatch's stories take place in a world devastated by a global crisis caused by artificial intelligence, where humans and robots (called Omnics in the Overwatch universe) struggle to find ways to coexist. They look at issues of life and sentience, the morality of violence (even in self defence), and whether it is worth holding onto hope even if you've been let down every time. Not to give spoilers, but one thing I love about these stories is that they do always come back to themes of hope, redemption, and the importance of trying to make the world a better place. I never would have expected a multiplayer shooter to carry such emotional and philosophical weight in its narrative, but here we are. 

While I would recommend the Overwatch game itself, like I said, it's also possible to enjoy the expanded universe without playing it. If you are interested, I would recommend starting with the short teaser "Are You With Us?" and going from there. Most likely you will start to become interested in different characters or elements in the Overwatch universe after that, from which point you can search for stories involving that particular aspect and go from there. You can find almost all of the expanded universe media on Blizzard's website. The Overwatch wiki is also a great source, especially if you see mention of a certain place or person and need to quickly find out what on earth they're on about.

Overwatch 2 is meant to be coming out sometime soon, although it seems to be indefinitely delayed due to COVID. Apparently it will be released with a new story mode, which I am somewhat ambivalent about. On one hand, I am excited that Blizzard is making the story such a prominent part of the game, and this new mode will no doubt mean lots of exciting new developments in the narrative. On the other hand, I really am fond of the multimedia, expanded universe approach that's currently being used to tell Overwatch's story. I hope that even with the new story mode available, Blizzard will continue to work on the expanded universe. If we get both, that would be an Overwatch story-lover's dream come true.

My Favourite Books of 2020

I know, I know. It's way too far into 2021 to be doing more 2020 roundup posts, especially as I've already done one this month and did a similarly late post last year as well. Still, if I don't do this post now I won't get to do it at all, and for some reason I feel irresistibly compelled to share with you my favourite books of 2020.

Like I said in my previous 2020 summary post, that so-called "year of hindsight" was... an experience, to say the least. Some good things came out of it though, and in my case one of those things was getting to read more than I have in a while. Lockdown in France got quite strict at points, so being shut in a lot of the time provided me with ample reading opportunity. Besides just generally reading more, I also reignited my love for libraries and even developed a newfound appreciation for ebooks - but those are topics for another post.

In this post, I want to tell you a little bit about my favourite books that I read in 2020. To be clear, these are books that I read in 2020, but they may have been published in any year. I'm not sure I even read any books published in 2020, because I am financially deficient and can't afford to buy hardbacks. 

So without further ado, here are my favourite books of 2020 (in the order I read them):

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth

I bought the ebook version of this novel during an April sale on the Verso Books website, along with about five others (don't judge me). While most of the other books I bought still sit, unread, in my phone's Overdrive app, I tore through Will and Testament before we even reached the end of the month.

I wasn't aware of this at the time of buying it, but apparently this book has caused something of a controversy in the author's home country of Norway, as supposedly Hjorth drew inspiration from her own family when writing. This doesn't seem so scandalous until you realise the plot of the book revolves around a family fractured by trauma and abuse.

Regardless of the debate surrounding it, Will and Testament is a brilliant novel and a painfully clear portrait of the struggles survivors of abuse face.

Severance by Ling Ma

I have already written about this novel a few times, so I should keep this quite short. I chose to check this novel out from my local library because it dealt specifically with the fallout of a global pandemic, which as you can imagine felt quite relevant to my recently-quarantined self. I got what I wanted out of the book: a story which mirrored the feelings of isolation and forced normalcy which I was experiencing during lockdown. I also got much more than that: a reflection on day-to-day life under capitalism and the things which still matter to us even when everything else has fallen apart.

Photo stolen from Instagram, but it was from my own account (@marynotavailable if you were wondering) so it's okay.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Like a lot of people who are non-Black, especially those of us who are white, the Black Lives Matter protests that happened globally during 2020 prompted me to do some reflecting and try to educate myself about the struggles of Black people in America and worldwide. One of the ways I tried to do this was by reading books by Black authors, the most impactful of which turned out to be this semi-autobiography by the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

First of all, Coates writes beautifully. His work is able to remain a pleasure to read without losing any of its poignancy. In Between the World and Me, he writes to his young son about his life growing up as a Black person in America and how that connects to both his personal story and that of other Black people throughout US history. There are some passages which I still stop and think about now almost a year after reading the book, like when Coates talks about travelling to other countries and how his son will grow up with a different conception of life abroad than he was raised with, because they impacted me so deeply. It's heart-breaking, hopeful, and beautiful.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Unlike most of the other books I've mentioned, Moon Tiger had been on my to-read list for some time before I finally got round to reading it this year. Another sort of life story, this novel focuses on Claudia Hampton, a historian and former journalist who is now on her death bed. The story moves between the past and the present, alternating between perspectives and intertwining Claudia's history with that of the world. 

While I sometimes like to add little paper tabs to book pages where I find lines or paragraphs I especially like, Moon Tiger was one of those books where almost every single page had a tab by the time I came to the end. Some of the passages felt like they put words to feelings I'd never been able to describe before; others brought to light things I'd never even thought of. In both cases, this book repeatedly took my breath away.

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

This novel has a lot in common with Will and Testament: it's an allegedly semi-autobiographical novel about the trauma of surviving abuse from a father figure as a child. Unlike Hjorth's novel though, Allison's isn't about coming to terms with that abuse years later, as an adult. Instead, Bastard Out of Carolina takes us through the protagonist's life from her birth to teen years, meaning that we as readers are made witness to her trauma at the same time she experiences it.

I don't know what compelled me to read two books with such similar, upsetting themes in relatively quick succession, but here we are. I don't regret the unconscious decision anyway, as I think the two books' comparability also gave me the opportunity to contrast them, seeing each of them in a new light.

Out of all the other books I've read this year, I'm not sure I know any other novel which broke my heart quite like this one.