The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Yet another SEO-optimized title for the masses:

Sword of Darkness: A Dark Fantasy Romance Where a Feared King of Camelot and a Spirited Peasant Face Salvation or Death (Lords of Avalon Book 1)

According to my spouse, the author is Sherrilyn Kenyon writing under a pseudonym.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Yet another SEO-optimized title for the masses:

Sword of Darkness: A Dark Fantasy Romance Where a Feared King of Camelot and a Spirited Peasant Face Salvation or Death (Lords of Avalon Book 1)

The stupid title is from Amazon. Kobo does not display such. IT only displays the proper title.

[Cactus Chef]

Oh dear. I'm even starting to see this stupid SEO-optimized subtitling being applied retroactively to books released long before:

Olympos: A Science Fiction Epic Where Achilles and Hector Defy Zeus and Wage War on Olympus (Ilium series Book 2)

This madness has to stop!

[ownedbycats]

Reading a Star Trek novel. About halfway through the plot stops so that the Mary-Sue character can go on a several-page filibuster about objectivism and the evils of collectivism and how labour unions were the cause of World War III. And how the antagonist is somehow an evil collectivist despite there being no indication that he's anything other than a generic power-mad admiral. (I can only assume the narrative left out mention of the pro-union posters and hammer-and-sickle emblems plastered around his ship.)

I was left wondering if the author had even watched Star Trek.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Reading a Star Trek novel. About halfway through the plot stops so that the Mary-Sue character can go on a several-page filibuster about objectivism and the evils of collectivism and how labour unions were the cause of World War III. And how the antagonist is somehow an evil collectivist despite there being no indication that he's anything other than a generic power-mad admiral. (I can only assume the narrative left out mention of the pro-union posters and hammer-and-sickle emblems plastered around his ship.)

I was left wondering if the author had even watched Star Trek.

Yuck. I hate it when authors use their work as a platform for expressing their personal political views. I read genre fiction to escape real life, so please leave any real-life politics out of it!

[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Oh dear. I’m even starting to see this stupid SEO-optimized subtitling being applied retroactively to books released long before:

Olympos: A Science Fiction Epic Where Achilles and Hector Defy Zeus and Wage War on Olympus (Ilium series Book 2)

This madness has to stop!

I’ve just recently noticed this - it’d been a while since I bought any books from Amazon, but recently picked up a couple of free / on sale books and when I connected to Wi-Fi, noticed some of those horrible SEO-optimised descriptive titles in my list.

I mean, this, if nothing else, just makes me even more keen to not even read Amazon-bought books on my Kindle directly without getting them through Calibre and adjusting metadata and erasing all that superfluous stuff from the title before transferring them to the Kindle for reading.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Reading a Star Trek novel. About halfway through the plot stops so that the Mary-Sue character can go on a several-page filibuster about objectivism and the evils of collectivism and how labour unions were the cause of World War III. And how the antagonist is somehow an evil collectivist despite there being no indication that he's anything other than a generic power-mad admiral. (I can only assume the narrative left out mention of the pro-union posters and hammer-and-sickle emblems plastered around his ship.)

I was left wondering if the author had even watched Star Trek.

Which book is this?

[ownedbycats]

Dreadnought!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Dreadnought!

That's a Diane Carey book. Yes, she is outspoken and some of her Star Trek eBooks do reflect her opinions.

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yuck. I hate it when authors use their work as a platform for expressing their personal political views. I read genre fiction to escape real life, so please leave any real-life politics out of it!

Leave politics out of my liberal socialist utopia!

[JSWolf]

If the book is a political thriller, then it's OK to bring politics into this.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If the book is a political thriller, then it's OK to bring politics into this.

Well, I don't read those, so no idea.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

Leave politics out of my liberal socialist utopia!

Both liberal socialist utopias and conservative religious theocracies are fine, as long as they don't push the author's personal views into my face (i.e. no long diatribes about the good and evil of one system vs another).

I've read plenty of books with protagonists whose views and values clearly don't align with mine. I have no problem with this, as long as it's not used to air the author's own views at length.

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Both liberal socialist utopias and conservative religious theocracies are fine, as long as they don't push the author's personal views into my face (i.e. no long diatribes about the good and evil of one system vs another).

I've read plenty of books with protagonists whose views and values clearly don't align with mine. I have no problem with this, as long as it's not used to air the author's own views at length.

My message was originally going be a bit longer, but I got a phone call and thought it worked as it was.

But yeah, I was going to make the point that you can't really avoid getting politics included. The author's views are going to bleed through. Sometimes, with SF, it's the whole point of the setup. You can maybe avoid politics being badly and inappropriately included.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

My message was originally going be a bit longer, but I got a phone call and thought it worked as it was.

But yeah, I was going to make the point that you can't really avoid getting politics included. The author's views are going to bleed through. Sometimes, with SF, it's the whole point of the setup. You can maybe avoid politics being badly and inappropriately included.

Bleeding through is one thing and can be hard to avoid (though not impossible). Deliberate soapboxing is a different matter and IMO should be avoided.

To be precise, I don't mean the characters' in-universe soapboxing if it's integral to the plot or other aspects of the book. I mean authors using their characters to preach their own real-life views and opinions. That's something I don't want to see in the books I read, and it doesn't matter if I agree with the author or not.