Top 10 Tuesdays: Unpopular Opinions

I love to read posts or watch videos about people’s unpopular opinions, because they are always so fun. It often seems like there is such a consensus online about certain books or series, so it’s really interesting to me to see the other side. It was surprisingly hard to come up with my own list of unpopular opinions because I found some of them very hard to put into words. For example, I had a few ideas in mind relating to diversity in books, but couldn’t figure out how to explain them clearly enough. I also don’t necessarily have strong opinions when it comes to certain common tropes, and I have generally enjoyed most of the popular books that seem to be very hyped. This is definitely a topic that I find fun to explore and I’d love to come back to it again at some point in the future.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

1) I think Goblet of Fire, while great, is a bit overrated and Order of the Phoenix is very underrated – I love the Harry Potter series in general, and while Goblet of Fire is still an amazing book, I’ve always felt it was a little overrated. I think it is mostly because I read it so much when I was younger while waiting for the rest of the series that I burnt myself out on it a bit, and have never quite gotten over that feeling. On the other hand, I absolutely adored Order of the Phoenix and was surprised to find that most people didn’t love it!

2) I could never really get into The Hobbit – I’ve had to read The Hobbit twice for school, once in elementary school and again in university. Both times, I found it a little boring and slow, and could never really get into it. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings movies because I knew nothing at all about the story or world going into them and didn’t really follow what was going on very well. Plus, I thought they were way too long.

3) I didn’t really mind Simon in The Mortal Instruments series (but I’ve only read the first three books so far) – I started reading Cassandra Clare’s books for the first time this year, and I was surprised to see quite a bit of hate toward Simon online. I didn’t mind him at all as a character and actually found some of his story pretty interesting. As a side note, I also wasn’t super invested in Clary and Jace as a couple. I thought they were okay together, but definitely wasn’t as strongly interested in them as everyone else seemed to be.

4) I really enjoyed Red Queen and thought the rest of the series was pretty good  too – I saw so much negativity around this series, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the first book when I read it a couple of years ago. I definitely see how it used many of the common tropes that people were fed up with, but I thought it did them well. Although I wouldn’t say this is my favourite series overall, I really enjoyed it.

5) I generally do not enjoy non-fiction – I’m not even sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but I find it’s often met with disbelief because of how broad a genre non-fiction really is. This came up a few times in my Goodreads challenge group in discussions about non-fiction prompts, and the comments generally were along the lines of “But non-fiction includes so many subgenres, surely there is something you’d like.” I’ve tried several different kinds of non-fiction and haven’t really been into any of them. I find most non-fiction dry and boring to read, and I’m much more interested in reading fiction.

6) Rainbow shelves look really nice, but they are completely impractical – Unless you’re a vlogger or Instagrammer (if that’s a word?) whose shelves are constantly visible, I don’t see the point of arranging your books by colour. While I agree that they tend to look really nice, it would really bother me to have to memorize the spine colour of all of my books in order to find them when I actually want to read them.

7) I think the word “problematic” is becoming a bit overused when it comes to books, and often misused – I’m struggling to figure out how to explain this one clearly. While there are books that genuinely have problematic content which can and should be pointed out, I find that the word is sometimes used to label any content that the person just does not agree with or that might be controversial. I think there is a big difference between books that actually have harmful messages, and books with characters who are racist, homophobic, etc. for a specific purpose in the story.

8) I really didn’t enjoy The Underground Railroad – I only read this book in general because it was a Book of the Month pick in one of my reading challenge groups, and I just couldn’t get into it at all. I loved the concept of what it was trying to do, but I didn’t enjoy the actual process of reading because it felt so distant and emotionless. I really felt like I was missing something with this book after seeing everyone else absolutely raving about how much they loved it.

9) I don’t understand the purpose of collecting multiple editions of the same book – I’m not trying to judge anyone who does this, because people can choose to spend their money however they want. I’ve just never understood the purpose of owning multiple copies of the exact same story. As a result of this, it also bugs me when there are exclusive or special editions that come out either after I’ve already bought the book, or only in some places but not everywhere. It just seems unfair that some readers can have the content and others can’t.

10) I don’t necessarily mind if characters are unlikeable, as long as they are well-written – I’ve seen so many reviews of books that complain that they can’t get into it because none of the characters are likable people, which is always interesting to me since often those characters are not supposed to be likable. Personally, I don’t need to like a character as a person to be invested in their story. Some of the most interesting characters to me are the ones who are morally grey or even downright horrible people, and these characters are often a lot more interesting to read about.

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