As my fans and followers are well aware, in 2026 one of my New Year's resolutions was to read four books. At first it was just to read more – but that wouldn't have been fair since technically reading one page would have been reading more. So I wanted to quantify it – read four books, or one per quarter. Seemed reasonable.
Within the first two months I churned through sixteen – I have quickly become quite the fan of books. It's easy actually – whenever I would normally scroll on Twitter or Instagram, I scroll on the Kindle app instead. However – I am keen to admit that I do not have the literary eye, the reader's touch, that a more seasoned connoisseur of English might have. I finish books and am often thrilled, surprised, and confused. I never see the twists coming; I'm left with answers to many of my questions, but often feel that I am left with more questions than I am supposed to have. So what do I do? I take to Reddit.
I have no interest in what an AI summary on Google has to tell me about my unanswered questions, nor what ChatGPT thinks they know. I want to know what some unnamed anon was thinking about when she finished this book years before I did, and I want to see the explosion of discourse she triggered.
Every time, without fail, I have read a book and checked its Reddit, I get the same thing – alleged "fans" bashing the living daylights out of the book. Pointing out holes, criticizing the plot and characters, questioning the legitimacy of twists, etc. I see a lot of their points, and I appreciate the higher-level thinking that these readers provide that a simple mind (like my own) cannot bring to the table. But at the same time, it drives me a bit crazy.
If all you're going to do when you read a book is sprint to the internet to complain about it, why even bother reading it? These authors are out there putting their entire livelihoods into an attempt to create art, to create something from nothing, to entertain. And these anons just sprint to the forums to try to tear them down to pieces. Where is your book? Where is your art?
I was talking to a fellow reading enthusiast about this very phenomenon at a dinner party Saturday night and she raised a good point: a lot of these people probably have reading as their hobby, their main thing they do outside of school and work, something they love to do and look forward to doing. So, when they take part in it, and it lets them down, wastes their time – they feel slighted, cheated, robbed. They have to publicize this disdain somewhere.
And that's when it hit me – this is the exact same thing as guys complaining about their football teams.
I don't do it as much anymore because I have officially resigned myself to the fact that the Jets will be awful until the day Joe Namath dies. But from 2022 to halfway through 2025, I tweeted several times a Sunday bashing every negative (and some of the positive) things the Jets did.
I love the Jets. I invest several hours of my week in them. The players lay it all on the field each week, doing things I could surely never do. No matter how awful things get, I keep coming back. They let me down, I complain. They lose, I still watch again the next week.
These book girls do the same – the book sucks, they vent about it, but the next time Freida McFadden drops a heater, they're first in line to download it to their Kindle Unlimited.
Am I no better than a woman?