Circular Readings

ouroboros: cycle of endless return, the snake eating its own tail

You can read a book and look at all the words and make the sentences make sense and not take anything of meaning from the book. The plot can be intense and the characters avail over the big dark bad guy. There's probably a very angsty, muscly guy with wings in there (if you're reading something off BookTok) and he seems really mean, but he's just morally grey. The books we read today influence how we perceive the world. We feed our minds with the information we intake. Therefore, my argument today is simply this: how long would you live solely off eating Takis vs a lifetime of solely eating coconuts?

Answer:

Takis: literally days, and not fun days either. You'd be incredibly dehydrated, and you wouldn't feel good, your tummy would probably really hurt. Then you'd kick it. Major bummer.

Coconuts: you could survive months to years, depending on if you actually eat enough. Coconuts have literally everything: water, electrolytes, protein, minerals and vitamins, carbohydrates and fats. There are records of people literally surviving off coconuts on deserted islands.

It's the same reading different kinds of books. Literature that makes you think, and questions the world around you grow your mind, they feed your curiosity and your brain. Popular fad literature is an endless repetition of the same story that simply bores a passion for reading, you just plateau. Do you not want to grow? There are only so many times you can read a Romantasy plot from BookTok, doesn't matter if its 500 pages, it's the same takeaway. There is something to take away from literature, there is always a deeper meaning. Literature is a communication from an author to a reader. Someone took hours, weeks, months of their time creating something they were passionate about to give you a story that you could learn from. It is up to the reader to choose which literature to learn from.

Reading is like taking care of your body. You drink water, that is the book. You can eat vegetables, fruits, and proteins, which are the importance of new ideas, morals, compassion, and kindness that you learn from the book, and your brain grows strong and healthy. Or you could eat Cheetos, McFlurries, and a jar of Nutella, which is fun, but it would symbolize the weight your brain gains but from a lack of nutrients, it would hold no benefit to you. It may not cause a decline in your intelligence, but it would form an environment that fosters stagnation. Baseline is that the goal of reading a book is to learn something about yourself or the world, it is there to challenge you and make you feel something.

And, seriously, the tropes thing is getting out of hand.

Example 1: The main character is a petite girl with a family she takes care of by herself, then something happens and she meets this guy and falls in love, then the bad guy shows up (spoiler: he's hot and he has wings) and it turns out that he's actually the good guy and they banter and argue and then they make out and save the world, but the hot guy dies and she saves him somehow, and obviously they get married.

This is the ACOTAR series

Example 2: The main character is a petite human orphan adopted by a powerful man, she lives her life wishing to be more than she is, so she does something rash to prove herself, then she meets this guy during a tournament (spoiler: he's hot and he has wings, but this time he's a vampire!) and obviously they don't like each other and there's banter and arguing, then they like each other and make out, but they can't be together, then she wins the tournament (basically saving the human race), and he dies, and she saves him somehow and then (for political reasons) she has to marry him.

This is The Serpent and the Wings of the Night (truthfully, I have not read it, this is what I learned from my friend reading it)

Now....I don't know what you think, but these books seem eerily similar. Oh, and both hot guys wear black, leather one-piece suits. I guess they don't sweat or else that would be just disgusting. This isn't to say that these books can't be entertaining to read, they just follow the same plot, and it has become incredibly predictable when I pick up a book labelled 'BookTok' or 'Romantasy.' It is too predictable. I want to give the writers a chance to change it up, but the kind of book that became popular was ACOTAR and it enforced this trend of circular reading, where a specific kind of book gets popular, so the publishers and writers keep reinforcing the limited tropes that are In and keeping it going instead of trying new things. People hype up tropes on BookTok which tells publishers what to put out, and then the books get hyped up on BookTok and it just keeps going. The same things stay popular.

The only way to get out of this rut is to try new things. I imagine some people will get bored after reading the same plot 57 times and will try something new. And when a popular BookTokker (?) promotes a new kind of book, the scene will change. We might keep falling into the pattern of promoting and publishing the same stories, but at least some diversity in genres would make it more palatable.