Burdened By #BookTok And All Things Viral
I let the internet decide what I should read and regretted it instantly.
hello!
it’s been a hot minute. i’ve had a few busy months where i’ve spent most of my time worrying about some aspect of my life. and let me tell you, it’s exhausting and overwhelming to keep jumping from one concern to another. i lowkey can’t even believe that it’s the end of may already. in a week, we’ll be midway through the year!!! time, to me, is one of the strangest and most fascinating concepts of human existence that i will never be able to make peace with.
anyway, i’ve decided it’s time to put an end to this embarrassing behavior. henceforth, i shall stop being a stress ball. and there is only one foolproof way of doing that:
because i’ve been such a….mess, i decided to read a couple of romance novels. romcom is not my preferred book genre. i usually enjoy reading books about Sad Adults but because, for the past few months, i’ve been feeling like a Sad Adult myself, i decided to read something light instead. after superficially browsing through instagram and some #BookTok recommendations, i chose: The Love Hypothesis and The Spanish Love Deception.
why did i pick these? both The Love Hypothesis and The Spanish Love Deception have my favourite trope: fake-dating-to-real-dating. The Spanish Love Deception goes a step ahead by combining fake-dating-to-real-dating with enemies-to-loves (one of my least favourite tropes) but i was willing to give it shot because the set up is interesting.
both the books seemed to have really strong protagonists: independent women with successful STEM careers. in The Love Hypothesis, the protagonist is a self-made PhD student doing really great work. in The Spanish Love Deception, the protagonist is the only female team-lead in an organisation full of douche-y male engineers.
naturally, i assumed the books would shed some light on the challenges faced by women working in male-dominated professional environments while also normalising the idea of romance + career as an achievable goal for modern women. i was also hoping that the protagonists would be as colourful and layered as protagonists in other mainstream romance novels. i wasn’t disappointed! not entirely, at least. my expectations were decently met. though both the books are not without flaws.
what didn’t work for me was how the male characters were sketched out. while the premise and everything else is pretty progressive and interesting, the male characters in both the books are irreparably bland. they’re both stoic, silent men with six pack abs, broad shoulders, and a gait that makes eyes turn every time they walk into a room. they’re all certified assholes and no one likes interacting with them. but somehow, overtime, they feel comfortable showing their ‘real, sensitive’ side to the women they’re in love with and all is well.
i mean….that’s bullshit, right? i really thought we’d have more evolved cis het male characters with actual personality, you know? i don’t even need the male characters to have any depth or personality. just make him believable and ensure there’s good chemistry. is that too much to ask for? what’s the point of a good premise when you’re going to use the same old stereotypes by just packaging them differently?
i am not much into….#Bookstagram or #BookTok recommendations. there’s too much YA out there for my taste. so, i’m not entirely surprised with my disappointment but i do worry about this algorithm-based content consumption economy which tricks us into feeling like we’re choosing the content we consume when we’re really not.
i spent all of last week perfecting the words and steps to the my money don’t jiggle jiggle trend. a few days ago, one of my colleagues asked the other, “are you humming the new Harry Styles song?” i didn’t even hear the person hum it (even though they were sitting next to me) but i’m not surprised that my other colleague would pick up on it from across the table considering it’s…everywhere. recently, halsey went tiktok viral for accusing her label of not letting her release a song until it was associated with a tiktok campaign.
last wekeend i was re-reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (an excellent memoir). in the foreword, Abraham Verghese, while taking about Paul Kalanithi’s popular New York Times essay on how he went from being a doctor to a patient in the blink of an eye, writes:
“In the ensuing days, it spread exponentially. (I’m an infectious disease specialist, so forgive me for not using the word viral as a metaphor.)
reading that made me chuckle. how strange it must be to be a doctor today. to have the word ‘viral’ be thrown around like it means nothing.
ever since social media has come into the picture, becoming ‘viral’ has been the dream. it’s all about that one post/video/tweet/challenge blowing up on the internet for a few days. at some point, i think it even pushed people to create quality content (quality being a subjective parameter of course) but i don’t think that’s happening anymore. everyone’s reviewing/reading the same book, dancing to the same song, and tweeting about the same controversy on twitter. we now exist in a world where literally anyone can go viral by performing the latest internet challenge, but does that virality mean anything? i’m not so sure.
personally, i’m hoping to live a life that’s less curated by the internet. it’s tough, and i have my search history to prove that. but here’s to trying anyway.
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love this! i am personally of the opinion that male protagonists are 100x more attractive when they are canonically ugly. (as a sidenote, have you read Stoner? it's Sad Adult Academia, might just be up your alley.) really nice to hear from you after long. :)