A Pocket Archive (43)

O. sighed and set his phone back on his desk "You guys want Doordash? I'm starving."

M. drummed his fingers on his desk, staring wistfully out the window. "Hmm. Let me think if there's anything I haven't eaten for a while."

"A salad?" suggested S. .

Cackles chorused from the other desks and he ducked as a paperclip sailed past his ear.

"Hey S., you know you're a lot better looking with your mouth shut?" M. leaned back in his chair, craning to see past O. as he looked in my direction. "Hey Kalishnikov, what sounds good to you?"

I looked up from my phone, fixing M. an apathetic stare at the sound of my new nickname, then shrugged. "Einstein's or Z.'s would be okay. I'm alright with whatever you guys want though. I'm not all that hungry."

O. frowned, trying to see my phone, which I had angled slightly away from him. "What are you working on over there?"

"This" I replied, typing slowly and very deliberately, "is a long overdue review. Remember that book I was ranting about last week? I finished it."

"So now you're writing another book in response?"

"Mhmm. In fact I re-opened a Goodreads account specifically for this purpose." I tapped another sentence, tapped the 'submit' button. Satisfied, I slid my phone across the green, chipped acrylic of my desk. "There is no way on God's green earth that that 'book' should ever have been published, let alone receive a four-star average review. I feel like she must have paid for some of them."

"Has it occurred to you that some people are just dumb?" S. asked, sipping his tea. Somehow the gesture made him look more condescending than usual.

"Dude, she works with you!"

S. flung the paperclip back at M., which it bounced of his shoulder and hit his desk with a satisfying clink. M. then flung his hands up in mock annoyance. "Alright then, y'all can buy your own lunch!"

O. rolled his eyes before fixing M. with a dead stare. "Were you even planning on buying?"

"Not anymore."

"Oh mmmhmm, okay."

I smirked, then stretched and leaned back in my chair, watching the snowflakes whirl past the window. S. wasn't wrong, but I still couldn't believe how truly awful some of the more popular books circulating the internet were at the moment. Part of me wondered if it was a reflection of or a contributing factor to the apparent mental health crisis in literature, specifically in the romance genre. Or maybe I just wasn't the target audience, which seemed more likely. Either way, many of the current best sellers left me feeling like I'd been cheated out of something vital. It was like the difference between the pictures on a McDonald's billboard vs. what actually comes in an order.

Personally, I liked books that made me think, or which made me feel something. It seems more that and more people don't. There's nothing wrong with that per-se, since like art, books are written with different purposes in mind, but unlike art, I believe that reading too many of the wrong kind of book can actually make a person stupid. And BookTok was all the proof that I needed.

My biggest pet peeve still remains male writers trying to sound feminine (especially colloquially in a modern settings; it's extremely unflattering and very telling), but women often write male characters that are equally (if not more) shallow and 2-dimensional, especially when it comes to BookTok. I had admittedly met men like that in real life, sans the attractive covers, but most male character architypes in BookTok are a gross over-simplification, which makes a lot of books very difficult to finish. I had already met a lot of fake, superficial people in real life, and I preferred not to feel like I was reading about more of them. To be fair, I had also read several books recently which were very good, but which still didn't quite make it to the level I would consider 'excellent', soley because the characters weren't quite on the level that I craved. I liked fictional characters who felt real enough that I could fall in love with them, or that I could hate, empathize, or cry with, but they were becoming harder to find. Then again, I was probably looking in the wrong places.

Maybe it was petty to write the review that I'd just posted, but unlike many readers, I felt justified in doing so, because while I was no Branden Sanderson, I knew I could more than back it up with my own abilities- not that skills were always relevant when it came to having opinions. At least my review was more gentle than some: I knew how to get my point across while conveying my reasons fairly, without sounding directly malicious. A decade in academia had more than prepared me for that.

"Hey, Kalishnikov! Plain sh'mere, or garden veggie?"

I blinked, suddenly remembering where I was. "Huh? Oh, garden veggie is fine." I grinned. "Besides, S. is right: you could probably benefit from eating something resembling a salad."

O. put a hand over his mouth to prevent his coffee from escaping, squeezing his eyes shut in a silent laugh

I flinched as a paperclip bounced off my forehead.