Kristen Sommers

I promised you occasional unhinged takes, so here’s an unpopular opinion for you, the first of many in a series I’ve loosely titled, Kristen vs the Internet.

The internet, as we all know, is full of controversy. If you stick around long enough, you’ll probably hear me address all of it at some point, but right now I want to talk about two related bookish controversies that keep coming across my social feed in increasingly irritating ways.

The first has been around forever, and it’s the argument of genre fiction vs literary fiction. More recently, though, on one side we have, “it’s bad that people are reading stupid (genre) books,” and on the other, “it’s good that people are reading at all.” 

Spoiler: I think both are true.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” You would think that the book community, of all the internet subgroups, would be the one capable of seeing nuance and holding seemingly opposing ideas, but social media doesn’t reward that, so we’re stuck with the stupid like everyone else.

Obviously, as a writer of genre fiction, I’m overjoyed that people are reading genre fiction. I think there’s merit in reading what you enjoy and enjoying what you read. And I’m glad that more people than ever have picked up a book recently (depending on which stat you’re listening to). 

But I also think there’s merit in sometimes challenging yourself to read outside of your comfort zone, to read about topics you might not know you like yet, to read books a little denser and more difficult than you’re used to in order to grow your mind.

I don’t think there’s any perfect list for this, either. While there are books I would absolutely recommend to anyone, every reader is on their own journey, and something that’s an easy read for one person might be a difficult read for another, whether that’s due to reading level, topic, context, style, what have you. Not everyone needs to read James Joyce, and it’s okay to try a book and hate it then try something else. Challenging reads are supposed to be rewarding for the reader, not punitive.

But our current society seems to consider any sort of struggle as a bad thing, which is just patently untrue. You can’t get better at something without first struggling with it. The key is enjoying the struggle. 

Here’s a hot take for you: If you gave a hobby the old college try and you’re still not enjoying the struggle it presents, maybe you just don’t like that hobby and should try something else. It doesn’t matter if that hobby is reading, writing, stamp collecting, mountaintop yodeling, what have you. Life is too short to continuously make yourself unnecessarily miserable, and everyone deserves to find hobbies they love. 

I would argue that at least a few people performing online as “bookish” don’t actually like reading. They might like stories, but they don’t actually like reading. Which is okay. You don’t have to like reading. But, like, go watch a movie and leave reading for the rest of us who actually do enjoy it. I’m not out here sitting in the middle of a golf course twirling a club and complaining about how golf is boring and I don’t know how to play.

The argument that “it’s good people are reading at all, even if they’re reading bad (genre) books” is how we end up with people claiming online that writers need to use smaller words because they’re mad that they had to use a dictionary. Most of the internet rightly mocked this take, but there were enough people referring to writing adult novels at a fourth grade reading level as “ableist” that I’m genuinely concerned for society.

I should also add: Not all genre books are created equal. Some are masterpieces of subtext and musicality, with expert worldbuilding and character design, while others are . . . not that. Reading a romance that someone spent three years honing and perfecting is a different experience from reading a romance someone wrote in three weeks and then uploaded to Amazon without a second look. 

There are well-written genre books and there are badly-written literary fiction books, and this is the problem with most of the discourse online. It’s not genre vs lit fic, it’s well-crafted books vs badly-crafted books, and yes, I believe that reading exclusively badly-written books will make you dumber, and I’d rather people didn’t read at all than do that. (To be clear, I’m not talking “books you didn’t like” or even “books I didn’t like,” I’m talking about serious craft issues, grammatical errors, nonsensical sentences—truly bad books.)

But this brings me to the next controversy I’ve seen pop up recently: People online are claiming that when they read romance or romantasy, they skip the prose and only read the dialogue. Other people online, including most writers with social media presences, are claiming that this is insane.

I think both sides are valid.

Obviously, as a writer who’s spent time on my craft, every word in my book is there on purpose and skipping the prose to only read the dialogue is going to result in a bad experience because you’ll miss a lot of what’s going on. This is probably true of most books.

But. There are a lot of writers out there who do not care about craft at all, and most of their book is not there on purpose, it’s there because they had a thought and chased it and went “ooh this is cool, I’ll write this” or “oh yeah, this is a vibe” with little to no thought of how everything worked together to tell a larger story. I’ve read many a book—especially in the romance genre—where the prose in between sections of dialogue only served to repeat what just happened in the dialogue or to introduce a superficial detail that wasn’t going to matter in two paragraphs.

It’s rare, but I’ve read books where I liked the characters and thought the dialogue was fun and skimmed or skipped everything else because the character’s inner monologue was so annoying and repetitive that it made me want to put my head through a wall.

Let me repeat: Not all books are created equal, and it’s not just about personal taste.

We shouldn’t be mocking the people who only read the dialogue, we should be giving them better books. Books where the prose actually is unmissable and not reading it makes for a worse experience than reading it.

So all that to say, most bookish arguments on social media have valid points on both sides and a lot of willful ignorance surrounding them, because social media rewards incendiary opinions, ragebait, and ignorance, which is why you won’t find me on there much.

Also, read what you want and like what you like, as long as you’re challenging yourself occasionally. (And as long as you’re not complaining loudly on the internet that every book ever written should be published with you and your tastes and your reading level specifically in mind, because that’s just obnoxious.) Books are for everyone, but not every book has to be for every person.

Stay excellent,
Kristen Sommers
XOXO

P.S. Since I don’t believe in complaining about something without doing anything about it, I’ll soon start publishing short reviews of books I liked and would recommend. Stay tuned!