Episode 161 - Hate Reads

Book Club for Masochists: a Readers’ Advisory Podcast

This episode we’re talking about Hate Reads! We discuss annoyance reading, hate reading vs reading something you hate, completionism, experiencing bad media as a social bonding experience, and 1-star reviews of books. Plus: Books about women murdering!

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jam Edwards

Media We Mentioned

• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Wikipedia)
  • "A spectre is haunting Europe”
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Game of Thrones (Wikipedia)
• Divergent by Veronica Roth
  • “Divergent might have been sloppy in places, but in a bizarre continuity error, both Tris’ disabling trauma around guns and an actual gun appears and disappears as is convenient in the final chapters… This violates both Chekhov’s Gun and some corollary: if you introduce a gun, it must exist.” (from Jam’s review; see also “I’m not reading another YA trilogy unless someone guarantees me no queer people die in the second act”)
• Insurgent by Veronica Roth
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
  • “reading this book felt like having to eat three bags of raw spinach before I was allowed the ice cream sundae I'd been promised” (from Matthew’s review)
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Links, Articles, and Things

• 161 (number) (Wikipedia)
• Schadenfreude (Wikipedia)
• Mark Oshiro (who Jam mentioned) appears to have deleted their YouTube channel? Or Something? You can still go to their website and the Mark Reads website.
• Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr Podcast
  • Episode on Ready Player One
• A recent(ish) episode of Watch+Play (there’s a lot of them!)
  • There’s also this playlist of shorter, edited videos if you don’t want to commit
• Hark (Jam’s holiday music podcast)
• Hot take (Wikipedia)
• Hate-watching (Wikipedia)
• Episode 011 - Religious Fiction (the one in which Anna read the book she hated)
• BookTok (Wikipedia)
• Matthew can’t find the specific X-Men review he mentioned, but it’s buried in this site somewhere (that link specifically is to a scathing review of the final issue of Mutant X)
• Show, don't tell (Wikipedia)

Questions

• What Romance genres do you want us to read?
• What comic would you use to introduce superhero comics to adults (who haven't read them before)?
  • Twitter thread

15 works of Experimental Fiction by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

• Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
• When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
• Big City by Marream Krollos
• Search History by Eugene Lim
• Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
• The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
• This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels by Subimal Misra, translated by V. Ramaswamy
• If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
• Oreo by Fran Ross
• We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
• Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
• I was the President's Mistress!! by Miguel Syjuco
• Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
• Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Give us feedback!

• Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!

Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, November 1st we’ll be discussing the genre of Investigative Journalism!

Then on Tuesday, November 15th we’ll be talking about Podcasts!