I was requested to do this a whilleee back by nourishedricipediary.wordpress.com but have yet to have done so. So uhhhhhhhh my bad. It’s here now though! As I was writing this though, I decided to split my list of 10 books to 5 and just include the other 5 another time. Hope that’s okay!
A Court of Thorns and Roses and Other Hate Crimes by Sarah J. Maas
Sarah J Maas has been in hot water as of late, mainly because of the lack of diversity in her books and overall not responding well to critiques and discussing race. One of her most popular series, “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” is very smut heavy, which I’m not into anyway, but seems to be very popular, so it’s a shame that she’s actively choosing to not include all her readers. I don’t have much of an opinion on the series anyway, seeing as I’m super into elves but not romance (unless it’s a side plot) much less smut. I am concerned though that a bunch of the readers seem to be young teens considering the content within the series. There’s a huge difference between a 13 year old and a 16 year old in terms of what content they should be exposed to at that age and seeing as the maturity levels are completely different, i don’t know if it’s wise to let a 13 year old be exposed to not only sexual content but straight up abuse.
Anything by JK Rowling (especially her script writing and screenplays)
I’m a long time Harry Potter fan, I’m not going to deny it. I even watched the movies in different languages because I watched them in English too many times. Like Daniel Radcliffe said, ““Being in Harry Potter is like being in the Mafia. Once you are in, you are never really out.” And I’m not going to deny that JKR’s creation has created me so much joy. But I think now that JKR’s terfy comments have lost her a huge amount of credibility as an author, I’d like to admit something: I only read the series once. I finished the series before I started middle school and ended it there. I watched the films hundreds of times, read thousands of fanfics, liked thousands of pieces of fanart, but only read the series once. If Harry Potter was still largely loved today in the book community, I still would’ve probably would have only read it once and a ton of people online would tell me that I wasn’t a “true fan,” or something like that and I would stand by it. Why? Because my mind of what the best part of what Harry Potter is, was largely created by fellow fans. If JK told me right now that Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Tonks are 100% straight I wouldn’t take it seriously. Same goes with justifying whatever is going on with Cho Chang’s name and that the goblins at the wizard bank Gringotts aren’t a racist caricature of jews. I mean everything that was wrong with HP was largely fixed by fanfiction authors who were writing it for free. I’ve read better fanfiction than whatever was going on in The Cursed Child.
Now if you still believe that JK isn’t a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) then you’re taking a little too long on the denial stage of the grieving process. There’s no way her tweets and anti-trans manifesto can be interpreted as “badly worded,” or “an old person moment,” at this point. She’s written several, “opinion,” pieces (which I’m putting in quotations because I can’t consider her hate speech just an opinion anymore.) I was going to actually pick it apart and even I, a cis woman, had to stop. Especially at the part where she tries to correlate autistic people and gender dysphoria as if disabled people aren’t smart enough to know their gender identity.
Twilight Which Could’ve Ended in One Book if Bella Swan Just Went To Therapy by Stephenie Meyer
Now before the Twilight fans come for me, I want to point out that I did give the series a good honest try. Even as a tween, I never could get into books that’s main focus is romance rather than a subplot. I barely finished the second book and around the part where Bella is riding a motorcycle I stopped. I’m not going to lie though, whoever was in charge of the movie’s soundtrack did an amazing job and the movies are definitely fun to watch as long as you don’t take it too seriously. (I definitely recommend watching it as a comedy rather than a serious film.) I never finished the last film though so I don’t actually know how everything ends. However, the director of the Twilight films, Catherine Hardwicke, recently said in an interview that she wanted to make the cast more diverse and debated it often with Stephenie Meyer who felt it was not realistic. Unfortunately, it didn’t help that the one black vampire was also the villain and that she also used the Quileute tribe very often.
The Selection aka The Bachelor Knockoff I Legit Did Not Ask For by Kiera Cass
First off the main character’s name is America Singer. I’m sorry but I can’t stop laughing at that name. I can’t also get over that it seems like an off brand Bachelor with some similarities to Hunger Games for spice and not for the main point of Hunger Games which is to call out capitalism and the upper class. If you’ve gotten this far into the post, you’ve probably figured out that I’m really not into romance as a genre. This is due to the fact that I do not care. If it’s a side plot I’ll allow it, but overall I don’t care about romance so why would I buy a book and read about it?
Stormdancer makes anime fans look bad by Jay Kristoff
Jay Kristoff has recently been called out for his Lotus War series for relying heavily on Japanese stereotypes and not actually doing heavy research for this series. He also was called about for antisemitism, more specifically blood libel, which to be honest, as a non-Jew, I did not know about. It’s pretty much an anti-semetic lie that Jewish people used non-Jewish people’s blood for ritual purposes, which is not only heavily against the Torah but also against the kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws. If you would like more info on blood libel and Jay Kristoff, here’s a link to Katherine Locke’s post on it and info on blood libel from the Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Not only is it sad that an author did very minimal research into his Japanese inspired fantasy novel, the antisemitism references are just pure terrifying. If I’m going to read a book I want it to be very thought out, researched and not make me research Nazi propaganda. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.
If you would like to see more of books I will NOT be hauling anytime soon, I plan on releasing more posts soon! And of course if there’s any on YOUR list, feel free to share! I’d also like to say that if you have any post ideas please let me know and I can see what I can do! Hope you all have a good week! 🙂
-rachel h
rachel hall 