Books I Should Read (but probably won't)
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In case you haven't noticed, I haven't read anything for almost two weeks now. Men Explain Things to Me sits on my coffee table, staring back at me, begging to be read. And I did give it a glance, I read the first essay.
A week ago...
Men Explain Things to Me is not the only book I should be reading. My to-read list grows weekly as I find or hear about books that interest me. And yet there is one list of books I should be reading that I probably never will.
I have nothing against you, Google. I'm sure the most searched books of May 2015 have some merit to them. I do, I do. It's just... sometimes what's the most popular is not what's the most interesting. Or what's the coolest.
Take A Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Fifty Shades Darker for instance. Three books that have been turned into TV/movie enterprises, and yet three books that will never, ever, cross my desk. A Game of Thrones is far too long and the Fifty Shades books... well, let's just say that if I wanted to read bad writing without a plot I would pull out some of my own creative work from junior high.
Far from the Madding Crowd and Cinderella were just made into movies too, but I'm far more likely to read them. Maybe it's not fair, but the older a book is the more credit I give it. Maybe that's because it's managed to stick around all this time, and maybe it's because I prefer classics to any other category of writing. But still, I don't see myself picking up those books anytime soon either. They're just not high up on the list.
As for the rest of these, I've honestly never heard of them. I'm not sure where anyone else has either. (And although the alliteration in Blood Blockade Battlefront appeals to me, all three words in that title have me running in the other direction towards sunshine and happy endings.) And if I haven't read about it over and over again for a year (that's what it took for me to finally read The Fault in Our Stars. WHAT WAS I THINKING?), then it won't make the cut.
As a book blogger, I should probably be keeping up with the book trends. Yet sometimes we need to make the trends, not simply subscribe to them. What's trendy is not always what's cool (if it was trendy to jump off a bridge, would you?). We get to define and create what's cool, and I'd far rather do that.
