That Book Everyone Else Loved…

I love books and I love lists so, accordingly, I adore lists of books.  Best books of the year, best books for the summer, best books for road trips, best books to read with coffee, best books to read with tea (obviously tea and coffee books are different), etc.  My to-read pile includes books I found on Amazon, Goodreads, the library, the bookstore, and suggestions of friends, but I’m also a regular reader of book lists, so many books that appear on someone’s “best of” list end up in my to-read pile as well.  And when you see the same title on multiple lists, you know it has to be good, right?

Well… sometimes.  Every now and then,  I stumble across a book that was on multiple lists, got high praise, everyone loved it… except me.  Am I the crazy one here?  Or is everybody else crazy?  Statistically, it looks like it might be me.  But seriously, didn’t everyone see how absurd that plot twist was?  Wasn’t everyone super annoyed by that character who wasn’t charmingly precocious, but rather gratingly pretentious?  The writing style that wasn’t avant-garde so much as a total mess?  What am I missing here?

There’s a place for egalitarianism of taste and “to each their own” and all that.  But it’s not this blog post.  This is a safe space for those who wish to battle against the current and call out that popular book everyone loved but them.  The more disparagement and censure, the better.  These books already got a lot of praise, they can take some criticism as well.  Was the plot disjointed and contrived?  Did you want to punch the protagonist in the throat?  Did the prose make you feel like you had dropped acid?  Tell us all about it in the comments, and spare no details.  Heated arguments encouraged.

Like Free Books? You’ll love Wattpad.

Sometimes an Amazon description or the back of the book isn’t enough to know whether you’ll really like a book or not.  Or sometimes you skim the first chapter in the bookstore and it seems good, but then it really goes in a different direction after that.

One solution: Wattpad.

I know, I know, but hear me out.  It’s not just fan fiction (though if that’s what you’re into, there’s a lot of that too.  One Direction stories are particularly popular.)

But there’s also established authors (Margaret Atwood!) and quality writing, from excerpts (like mine: https://www.wattpad.com/user/MorganMarjek) to full novels.

I know lots of readers instinctively shy away from self-published or unpublished works on the internet, myself included.  But when you consider all the garbage that actually gets published (looking at you, Fifty Shades), you realize traditionally published works aren’t really guaranteed to be any better.  Self-published works, through Kindle or Wattpad, can be great and for those still gun-shy, Wattpad lets you read the writing first before you decide.

Free, no-commitment reading.  Have you tried Wattpad before, or are you persuaded to?  Leave a comment about your Wattpad experience, and suggest some of your favorite works you’ve found there.