I consume a lot of reviewer content. Partly because I just like reading reviews, but in no small part because I like books and want people to tell me about books, quite possibly so I can decide if I want to buy and read them. But this can be a pretty difficult thing to judge (especially when dealing with people who review relentlessly positively, though that’s a whole other Thing). How do I tell if their tastes and mine line up? The long answer involves a lot of factors and a dedication to continuing to consume their content*, but there is a short answer as well, and it’s a few key books where, if our like/dislike doesn’t match up there… well it’s probably all going to be a wash.
So I thought it might be interesting to talk about five of my signal fire books** – the ones that are the most critical to me in determining a taste match, and why. I’m using a bunch of metrics for the things I care about in what I read – prose quality, whether its ethics match up to mine (this is mostly nebulous stuff like “book has misogyny vibes that I don’t think are purposeful to the story”, rather than “I think the author is a bad person”), themes I tend to like, whether the reviewer is as enthusiastic about weird shit as I am, that kind of thing. I’ve also tried to pick books that cover multiple bases and capture different aspects of what I look for in reading, rather than simply favourites and most hated. It’s about trying to capture the essence of someone’s taste as efficiently and comprehensively as possible, so each book has to do more than just “I like this”.
I’m pretty happy with my five – they span a range of things I care about, and attack them from multiple different angles, and so hopefully grasp the core of what I’m looking for in my reading. Here they are:
Red Rising by Pierce Brown – starting as the unrepentant hater I am, this one is actually probably one of the most useful to me at the moment. I think this book is badly written shite that aggressively fridges the female love interest, and do not trust anyone’s taste who thinks it a glorious triumph of literature. A lot of people on tiktok seem to think this book is good… in any way? Baffling. So if someone starts singing its praises, I can scroll on by, because I know we simply will not agree. It means I do a lot of scrolling.
To go into a touch more detail, I think this book would have been fine if it was taken more often as what it is – enjoyable trash. It’s not my sort of enjoyable trash, but I can respect someone regardless who goes “hey, it’s not well written, but I had fun”. That’s cool. My issue mainly comes with people holding it up as this beautifully prosey, intricately plotted, subtly political, radical piece of literature. It’s… it’s just not. And that’s fine! Not everything needs to be. But if someone is reviewing this as that piece of radical glory? Well we probably have a significantly different outlook on books, so it’s not gonna be all that useful of a recommendation source for me.
Key points: prose prose prose times a million, fridging the woman, unsubtle as all heck
Vellum by Hal Duncan – likes are, in many ways, trickier. If we both like a very popular book, for instance… well, that means nothing. So what I look for instead is my weirdo preferences, the ones that are less discussed but which I love with all of my little goblin heart. This is possibly the epitome of those. I have loved it dearly since I was a silly little undergrad foisting it on everyone who would give me the time of day because it brought me so much joy. It’s so weird. It’s so beautiful. It’s… quite mad. I have an abiding preference for magic that is not systematised, mythology that is heavily and thoughtfully reinterpreted and a cavalier attitude to linearity. This has all of those and more, and if they like it, it promises greatness.
Also, if they like it… they knew about it to begin with. Maybe we delve into the same bits of literature. Maybe we’re about the same age. So we probably draw from similar sources, and so their views may be a lot more contextually similar to mine.
Key points: prose, fascinating themes, weird shit (complimentary)
Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe – I had to get one Greek mythology retelling in this list somewhere, because it’s a whole big deal of a category, and I have a lot of thoughts about… well, a lot of it. But I’m choosing one I dislike, and for specific reasons, because I think likes run the risk of someone just… liking all of them. Which is fine! Just not indicative of my tastes. So gunning for one of the bigger deals that is entirely not my thing, and hopefully thus siphoning off some of the less critical takes. And boy, do I think this one needs critical takes. Lore Olympus is the epitome of the terrible softboi Hades, let’s-make-a-rape-into-a-consensual-romance, turn the woman into the bad guy thing that is a scourge upon retellings. It does it so unrepentently, so clearly… if you like this one, of all of them, then there’s no helping it. Our tastes will simply not align.
Key points: dubious approach to retelling Greek myths, a trope I despise with all my soul
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez – Another deeply weird book that is very dear to me. This time make it more overtly gay (Vellum is already pretty queer, but The Spear Cuts Through Water… the marketing at least shouted about it more, though I suspect that’s more to do with when it came out than anything else). Loving this tells me a reviewer enjoys romance and good character dynamics, cares about nuanced approaches to people being people, likes a book that plays around with form and structure, is willing to cope with a story switching about between first/second/third person (which is apparently a bigger deal than I would ever have thought it ought to be) and also is paying attention to the books that are coming out now. Which is neither good nor bad, but is useful, because it’s something I am also doing, so there’s just a much better likelihood that what they’re talking about is going to be useful to me. It’s also just an astonishingly good book, so there’s that.
The risk with putting likes on here, far more than dislikes, is how widely varied the reasons are likely to be. But with this one, there are so many things it does that so many people seem to have as their “absolutely not” issue – particularly second person narrative – that it feels a strong chance that it’s filtering for a lot of tolerances/preferences I also share.
Key points: prose that will make you weep, queerness, weird shit (complimentary), layers of sexy sexy delicious themes, very contemporary, playing about with structure
To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers – this one was a toss-up against Project Hail Mary by Andy Weird (for similar but not identical reasons), but I eventually settled here because it feels more assumed that Becky Chambers lies closer to the rest of my tastes than Andy Weir does, so it’s a better differentiator. I have gained a bit of a reputation among friends as a hater of her work, but I swear, it’s not actually true! I am mostly pretty aggressively meh on the Wayfarers series, and the Monk and Robot books, it’s just that when something is so beloved, a defended “meh” starts to sound like hating. And I am sometimes an incredibly reactionary bitch. It goes both ways. Anyway, for the most part, she is simply a “shrug and I don’t get it” kind of author, which is fine. But… but. To Be Taught if Fortunate is another matter entirely. To Be Taught if Fortunate made me seethe when I read it. There’s a whole review’s worth of stuff I could cover, but the crux of it comes at the end of the story, where it is put pretty plainly on the page that science and space exploration in particular are the most important, corest bits of curiosity humans can have, and if you’re not into it you’re basically boring and worthless (hyperbole but not as much as I would like it to be). This attitude is one I have seen so much growing up through SFF spaces, especially as a woman, and double especially as a woman who did a non-science degree, and I hate it. Curiosity about the world takes many forms, and my abiding interest in other humans, in how they are, were and relate(d) to one another is no less valid than thinking comets are cool. Interest in sport, in theatre, in art, in your community, in faith, in all the myriad things humans care about, are all valid, and if someone endorses the message of this book uncritically, we simply do not agree on a fundamental level of beliefs about people. Our tastes will not cohere. And so I shall scroll on by.
Key points: a conclusion that makes me want to bite things (derogatory)
Is this going to be foolproof? Absolutely not. I’m sure there exist people who share my perspective on all five of these and yet somehow we disagree on most other things. Infinite diversity in infinite combination and all that, y’know? But I feel like these are a great starting point, and will do a lot of the work for me, so the rest can be vibes, nuances and actually… maybe reading the whole review, getting a sense of an actual person. Because it is more complex than matching points of data – there are people who like books I dislike, but do so so interestingly, so thoughtfully that I trust their taste regardless. There are people who are so good at explaining the feel of a book that their taste is irrelevant. But you have to start somewhere, and these feel like as good a foundation as any.
And I’d be really interested to know what yours are.
*Luckily I have fewer dedications in this life greater than my commitment to being catastrophically Online, so this is quite easy to accomplish in the main.
**I’ve seen people talk about these as red flag/green flag books, but I do not like that phrasing for a number of reasons. Also, I’m aiming for neutrality here – I’m not saying someone is a bad person for liking a book I dislike or vice versa. This is about how useful their reviews are to me in selecting books I will enjoy. Calling it a “red flag” feels a bit too moral-judgment.
A Reader of Else 