courting the controversial | let’s talk bookish (may 22, 2024)
Hello again, dear friends! It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for Let’s Talk Bookish! Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish discussion meme create by Rukky of Eternity Books and currently hosted by Aria over at Book Nook Bits. This week we’ve got a juicy topic as we’re talking about author controversies…
HELP CHANGE THE WORLD
Before anything: FREE PALESTINE!!! 🍉 For over half a century now, the Israeli government has been enacting a genocide against the Palestinian people. This is more than something that started on October 7, 2023. It’s not complicated. It’s genocide. And it’s important that we witness, raise our voices, protest, and fight against it in any way possible. Below are a list of resources to help educate yourself on Palestine, as well as to donate to aid the Palestinian people. In addition, I’ve added some Palestinian influencers and journalists you can follow to learn more from and who keep track of what’s going on. Peace to all and keep fighting the good fight!
EDUCATIONAL & INFO RESOURCES
DONATION & AID RESOURCES
PALESTINIAN JOURNALISTS & INFLUENCERS TO FOLLOW & AMPLIFY
OTHER CAUSES TO HELP
free congo
free sudan
stand against the us anti trans campaign
- 2024 Anti Trans Bills Tracker
- ACLU Nationwide 2024 Anti LGBT+ Info
- Black Trans Advocacy Coalition
- The Marsha P. Johsnon Institute
- National Queer API Alliance
This week’s topic is a freebie, so I’ll be discussing a topic from April, 2024, “Do author controversies impact your reading?”
For this topic, Jillain wrote that she thought of this topic because of the situation with Cait Corrain, the author who lost her book deal after posting fake negative Goodreads reviews of other books in attempt to sabotage those authors. Did you hear about the Cait Corrain situation? Do you often keep up with or read about author/bookish controversies? Do situations such as this one impact your reading choices?
CONTROVERSIAL AUTHORS & MY RESPONSIBILITIES AS A BOOK INFLUENCER & REVIEWER
As a book bloggger who’s been in the game for 10 years now, it’s pretty much impossible for me not to be aware of author controversies. I also think as a literary critic and bookish influencer, I do have somewhat of a responsibility to at least be aware of what’s going on with the current crop of authors who are “it,” for several reasons.
First off, sociopolitical beliefs are beliefs that are typically related to our personal values and thus deeply affect how we perceive, process, and react to the world around us and what we feel our placce in it is. So, it is only natural that such beliefs are echoed in, if not directly reflected in, writers’ works. This is why whenever you take a literature class, often you study an author’s life and the sociopoitical, cultural, and historical context in which a work was written alongside directly analyzing the text. So, as someone who is a literature critic, I feel that it’s important for me to have a bit of background knowledge on an author’s beliefs about the world, as knowing this will help me understand and analyze their works more accurately.
Second off, I think as a bookish influencer it’s important to know who and what you’re influencing people to read because those people may or may not feel as comfortable reading that content if they knew the author’s background and beliefs at the time of writing said content. If we’re gonna say it’s a “buyer beware” economy, then the buyer must actually be aware of what they are purchasing/consuming, and part of my responsibility as an influencer is to help people be fully aware of this information. Yes, some readers might be cool with reading a controversial author’s works, but others may not, which is why it’s important that I help ensure readers are fully informed about what they are about to walk into.
So, TL;DR: As a book influencer and reviewer, I do feel it’s relatively important for me to keep on top of author controversies.
MY PERSONAL ETHOS AS A READER
Now, this is where things get a little tricky. Obviuosly people’s mileage may vary when it comes to what offends them. However! When a large chunk of a community has been negatively affected by a piece of literature, I think it’s safe to say the author in question at least owes that community a response, if not a sincere apology and to make amends. And if most people in said community accept the apology and amends, then I think the author is safe to move forward, and so are other readers. In other words, when an author controversy happens, I tend to take cues from the people directly impacted, especially if I am not a member of the impacted community. If the impacted are calling for a boycott, that’s what I’ll do, if they’re calling for a work to be edited and refined, then that’s what I’ll call for as well. I just think that’s the fair and respectful way to go about it.
This all said, I don’t hold most readers accountable for which authors they read. After all, most readers aren’t members of the online bookish community and usually are completely unaware of author controversies. For example, if I see one of my IRL friends reading a Sarah J. Maas book, I typically am not going to discuss her controversies with them, largely because my IRL friends don’t have the communal contextual knowledge to even know what to do with that information (especially those who haven’t taken many literature courses past their required curriculum). But if I see another bookish influencer reading a controversial author? It depends, honestly. If the influencer seems unaware of the author’s controversies, I might politely let them know about those issues if the topic naturally comes up. If the influencer seems to know and just not care, then I usually just make a note to unfollow that influencer. I guess you could put my philosophy down to this: I can only actively change myself, so I’m not going to sit there arguing and trying to change someone’s mind, because in my experience that rarely allows for any progress; thus, my beliefs about author controversies are reflected only in my reading choices and the polite info I can give to those open to listening and learning and not in me trying to forcefully stop people from reading a work.
SPILL THE BEANS, FRIENDS!
- Do you stay on top of author controversies?
- How do you handle when an author has a controversy?
I’m not really sure how to properly deal with author controversies, too! I’ve also been blogging for over a decade now, though I did take a big break between 2018-2022 or so, and when I came back, I was bombarded with so many controversies! It’s difficult for me personally to be on top of *real* news because I notice a lot of people (especially on places like Twitter where the retweet and like buttons are just right there) end up parrotting the controversies they hear without getting the full context or understanding the situations themselves. In the cases where it’s clear that there was a lot of research done on the author and the controversy, I try my best to boycott or at least not talk about that author and/or their books bc all publicity is still publicity. Otherwise, I’m careful but not totally avoidant. Hope this makes sense, I feel like I rambled on for ages. 😂
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this! <3
That definitely sounds overwhelming to come back to! And yes—hearing news through the grapevine via Twitter definitely complicates things when it comes to figuring out what’s going on!! It’s definitely led me down the research rabbit hole searching out deleted initial subtweets on more than one occasion (ugh). Sometimes it’s very confusing to try to figure out what’s going on and makes figuring out how best to react unnecessarily complicated! I’m pretty much in the same boat as you in those cases.