Sarah J Maas. I quit ACOTAR on chapter one because it felt so weird and juvenile. But I gave it a second chance and now I’ve read 2 of her series, eager to start Throne of Glass. I still have my gripes about her writing but the character dynamics always bring me back.

You are not wrong.

Hoover’s work is mediocre, but to be fair I don’t think it should fall under the traditional “romance genre” like it’s usually marketed. A lot of her stories explore toxic relationships like they’re trying to be psychological thrillers but end up simply romanticizing abuse. Maas is hit or miss for me. The cheese is off the charts but sometimes I’m in the mood for cheese. I am the target demographic.

I regret wasting money on them. I also regret any amount of time I spent on them, even if I DNF. I could’ve been reading better stuff!

Most of the recommendations from book tok. I’m not usually a classic lit snob about “popular” books because commercial fiction has its merits but it seems like most of the ones that go viral now are just unreadably bad. So poorly written that it’s cringey and reads like Wattpad fan fiction.

Aren’t statistics fun

You probably didn’t have a smartphone and endless stream of content wreaking havoc on your attention span back then. At least not to the extent that we deal with that now. Idk about you but my brain melted post-pandemic, basically.

The true median is probably lower than the average. Because the people who DO read, read voraciously. If 1 person reads 0 books, and another reads 30, the average is 15. But that doesn’t mean both people actually read 15 books a year. So I think removing the outliers, the “average American” probably reads 1 book a year if that.

I generally hate YA so yeah that’s always a bummer when a book gets highly recommended only to discover it’s not in the adult fiction section. It’s also annoying when YA authors basically write a YA book but throw in one tepid vague sex scene to break into “adult fiction” (looking at you SJM).

An “adult” rating is not just about the sex and swearing for me. It’s the overall tone, the maturity of the characters, the weight of the themes, what kind of problems they’re dealing with. I would argue that despite The Hunger Games being marketed as Dystopian YA, it is an adult book simply because of the heavy subject matter. It’s very different than “high school girl deals with bullying” or “I’m struggling to get good grades in school and my parents are getting divorced” or “am I a gryffindor or a hufflepuff?” That being said, I’m glad that kids can read it too.

The princess diaries. Got me into reading. Surprised I don’t see more Meg Cabot appreciation on here because she’s one of the most successful authors who has written over 80 books across multiple genres and age groups. And the princess diaries books are surprisingly progressive for the early 2000s.