2025 Bookish Ins & Outs [Feat. @poetry.shaman] - TEASER

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to another episode of Reader Tangents, everybody. If you are listening to this at the time that it comes out, Merry Christmas, happy Holidays, and you're probably about to get three or four episodes directly in a row. Because I'm behind, I'm like really behind on episodes. So this episode will hopefully be one of the more fun ones. I am joined today by my friend Shay. [00:00:27] Speaker B: Hello. Good to be here. [00:00:28] Speaker A: We're going to talk about bookish ins and outs of 2025, the things that we want to see come into the community and the industry and go out of the industry. I first saw this. This is kind of a thing that comes around yearly. This year I first saw it from Marines who you can find at. My name is Marines on all of the places on TikTok and Instagram. And so this is essentially, I think the way I described it to you, Shay, when I was talking to you is I was like, this can be pretty much anything. It can be stuff in the publishing industry. It can be community and. And it can be our petty grievances that we just want to air and talk about for some amount of time. [00:01:03] Speaker B: I'm so excited to do it. I have so many grievances because I'm a hater at heart. [00:01:07] Speaker A: Truly at the center of my core. Am a hater. [00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:11] Speaker A: A friend of mine, Jenny, who listeners may know of because I talk about her often. We do like really long voice notes back and forth to each other and we can always tell it's going to be a good one because we'll just start it with, as you know, I'm a hater. So. And then like a 40 minute voice note. [00:01:25] Speaker B: Yes. I love that I have friends like that too. We all call ourselves haters and we just hate on everything. And it's so fun. It's so freeing. [00:01:34] Speaker A: I'm sure this will come up at some point, but there is, I think, especially in book community, like this tendency to not allow for negative opinions and hate of that sort. I'm like, no, no, this is the fun part. [00:01:46] Speaker B: We need those things actually, because without them, there's this artificial glaze that actually harms the community. But we definitely can get into that more later. [00:01:55] Speaker A: I'm sure it will come up, if I had to guess. And so without much further ado, we're just going to jump into stuff. And as the guest, I will let you go first. [00:02:04] Speaker B: Cool. Do you want to start with ins or outs? [00:02:09] Speaker A: Let's go back and forth. Let's start with an in. [00:02:11] Speaker B: Okay. I figured I'd just Start with something easy to start the palette fresh. And something I really want to see on Booktok question mark, if it still exists, is reading other genres besides fiction and nonfiction, mostly being poetry and plays. I want to see people read poetry and plays and review them. And I think what stops people is a couple of things, and I have a lot of thoughts about it, but mostly like this fear of the being inaccessible or like, not being able to understand or, like, explain what they think about them. When I think really the same skills transfer from reading novels to, like, short stories, plays, poetry. It's the exact same experience you read for understanding, but like, high school sort of trained us out of that mindset. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I think a lot of people, when they hear, like, to read a play, they immediately think Shakespeare. Immediately think Shakespeare, Immediately think, like, Old English. The kind of thing where, like, you had to have, you know, the Shakespeare on one page and the translation into modern English on the other so you could figure out what was being said. What is your favorite play that you've read? [00:03:21] Speaker B: I'm a huge fan of, like, Arthur Miller. I really love the Crucible in particular for a lot of different reasons, like the themes. I like all of the different renditions of it. But one I enjoyed recently reading, like, a contemporary play was I read the Phoebe Waller Bridge. What is it? [00:03:40] Speaker A: The Fleabag. [00:03:41] Speaker B: Fleabag. I read Fleabag and it was fantastic. And it didn't take any additional skill. It just looks a little different on the page, you know, from a novel. But it's. It's got a narrative, it's got story, and you definitely can watch them. And it's the same, you know, it's a different experience. But reading them too, I think there's a lot of value in that. [00:03:59] Speaker A: Is it called, like, the Fleabag Bible? [00:04:01] Speaker B: I think it's just called Fleabag. [00:04:02] Speaker A: Fair enough. [00:04:03] Speaker B: I don't have my copy here, but it's in my grad apartment. But otherwise I'd show it off. But it's got, like, pictures and stuff, and they made, like, a special edition now that there's a show with, like, pictures of the show and stuff like that. But it's fantastic. It's really fantastic. But yeah, just things like that. There's so many great plays I read. This is a kind of controversial play, but I read a play called Slave Play. [00:04:24] Speaker A: Oh, I know about that one. Yeah, yeah. Yes. [00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Super controversial. People have all sorts of opinions on it. I think it's fantastic. And it was a hard read, I bet, but so valuable. So valuable to read. [00:04:37] Speaker A: I hang On I'm for the audio podcast. You won't notice this. I'm going to get up for a second because I have. Speaking of plays, I don't know if I've mentioned that I have this before. So speaking of plays and Arthur Miller, you can see this because we can see each other. The audio podcast will have no idea. One of my strangest. Actually not one of my. The strangest book anything that I own is a copy of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller signed by. By Panic at the Disco. Why? [00:05:09] Speaker B: That's amazing. [00:05:10] Speaker A: It is the weirdest, most off the wall thing that I own. And it's because in my senior year of high school, I was in AP lit and for our final, our main play that we were reading was Death of a Salesman was the whole like, you know, you're going to read a Death of a Salesman, you've got it for however long you have it and you're going to come back on the day of the final and you're going to write three separate essays in class about it. And the day before the final, I went to a Panic at the Disco concert and I hadn't read the damn thing. So I was standing in line, like for the meet and greet because I had like vip, whatever. I was standing in line for the meet and greet, reading this, you know, getting ready for my final. And when I got up to the front, I got my picture and I actually had everybody sign this because I was like, when I'm sitting in my final and I fucking fail it, I want to remember why. [00:05:56] Speaker B: I remember. [00:05:58] Speaker A: Am I worth it? And for the record, I passed. I think I got an A on all three of them. But yeah. Now the strangest thing I own is Death of a Salesman signed by Panic at the Disco. [00:06:08] Speaker B: That's a. They. They had to have said something. [00:06:11] Speaker A: It was. [00:06:11] Speaker B: Were they like. [00:06:12] Speaker A: Yes. They were very shocked at first. They did not understand and then I explained the whole thing and then they were mostly just hoping that I didn't fail my class. [00:06:19] Speaker B: That's amazing. Was it the Ryan Ross panic or. [00:06:22] Speaker A: Alas, it was not. It was. It was Brendan and was it. John was still around. So it was Brendan and John were still around. Spencer and Ryan had already left. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Still. Still. Fantastic. [00:06:35] Speaker A: Just the strangest thing that I own to this day. [00:06:38] Speaker B: I want strange artifacts. That's like an artifact, you know what I mean? It's something that's like in your key item menu of your person. Yeah. [00:06:45] Speaker A: And you talk about unique experiences. I'm like, I guarantee you nobody else on the planet, nobody. So in for 2025, reading poetry and plays, reading outside of your general formats and genres. To go for silly, I'm gonna grab an out of mine and to keep things light, I'm gonna say out Threads. I don't know if you have experienced the nightmare that is Threads. [00:07:14] Speaker B: Yes, I have. [00:07:15] Speaker A: Oh my God. For the listeners, obviously Threads, the social media app, the one that's supposed to replace Twitter through, through meta, through Facebook. I don't know why, why is this app especially. I don't. I mean it must be like this for kind of every niche, but especially for book Internet, it is just a nightmare. Hate fueled. Like, I don't even, I don't even know why it's so funny. [00:07:40] Speaker B: Bad faith engagement platform. [00:07:42] Speaker A: I have never seen the. Yeah, the amount of bad faith takes rage bait. Like every time I get on because now I have blue sky and so I kind of only open threads accidentally. And every time I open it up, it's like the. Everybody is talking about the same thing, but nobody will say what it is. And you have to like fucking forensic files your way to the beginning to figure out what everybody's talking about. And it's like the dumbest shit you've ever heard. Like, I think it's back on audiobook discourse now. [00:08:09] Speaker B: Oh, again for the 8,000. [00:08:12] Speaker A: We're doing it all over again. [00:08:14] Speaker B: I mean, you and I have been here a while. I feel like I just, I can't even entertain any argumentation about that anymore. It's so silly. [00:08:22] Speaker A: Something about Threads in particular is just so sinister. [00:08:27] Speaker B: Well, it's like with, with X or Twitter or whatever. It's like all that's left there are the like Elon fanboys. So like, you know it's gonna be heinous, but then when you go to Threads, it's like all the people who pretend that they're not like that. And so it's like a covert level of heinous that feels worse. [00:08:46] Speaker A: And I think part of the problem is that there's, I think a couple of layers to this one is that you can get paid for posting on threads. The like threads bonuses and apparently you can get paid pretty well. So I think that's why so much of it is rage bait and like very obvious engagement bait. And the other thing is that you get those like you can't escape if you use Instagram. The like thread previews that will pop up in your feed even if you don't have threads. And again, it's like the same thing is like it will give you, like, just enough for the engagement bait. And it's just like, I. As a former YouTube commenter, back in. Back in the days of YouTube arguments, I. It genuinely took me years, years of growth to stop doing that. And I feel like Threads is pulling it back in. [00:09:35] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I. I've never been, like, confident enough to super get into to comments because. But I sure like reading them. I love to lurk. I'm a. I'm a. I mean, my whole aesthetic online is lurking like a masterful lurker, and I love it. I love watching the rage, but engaging with. It's always scary to me. [00:09:55] Speaker A: I don't even think it's a. For me. It was never that, like, I'm. I mean, part of it is maybe that I'm confident enough to do it. I just think I'm insufferable enough to do it. [00:10:03] Speaker B: I don't know. It's a fine line, maybe, like, oh, it's like. [00:10:07] Speaker A: Because there are. I mean, there's definitely stuff that I feel like I'm definitely right about this, and I will not back down. And you're definitely wrong about this. And, like, when I was younger especially, it was that idea of, like, I have to tell this person that they're wrong. I have to educate this person. And now I've, like, gotten out of that because I'm like, don't be a dick. But Threads just fucking brings it out. [00:10:24] Speaker B: Well, we've talked about this before, but it's sort of that, like, weird line of, like, I should ignore this for my sanity. Also, this isn't a place for nuance, because the structure of this app doesn't support nuance. But if I leave it unchecked, I feel like I'm culpable in misinformation, or I feel culpable in sort of whatever bad is happening here, you know? And so it's hard to sort of, like, pick your battles. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I try really hard not to. I actually got. I have to get to a point now, as I'm saying, this is out for 2025. I will just delete the Threads app for my own sake. And on the opposite side of that, my inn, I think, is gonna be Blue sky, question mark. We're gonna see how that goes. Have you tried it? [00:11:09] Speaker B: I follow. I follow you and Zoran. And that's it. [00:11:13] Speaker A: It's a solid feed. [00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And I just opened it a little bit. I don't know how to engage with it yet, so I maybe open it once a week for, like, a minute. But I saw something about bodega cats on there and I was like, this is nice. [00:11:25] Speaker A: I love bodega cats. [00:11:27] Speaker B: I could hang here a bit and feel like I'm productive somehow. [00:11:30] Speaker A: So far it feels very nice. I think part of it might be that it largely chronological, like there's not really an intense discovery algorithm on it at this point. And so I feel like it's not like prioritizing that it really does go. [00:11:41] Speaker B: To show that like how the community is like built by its devs and like what they value like brings the people that value the same things. So hopefully it stays that way and I hope they maintain their sort of perspective on like open openness and you know. Yeah, I don't know, I haven't looked too much into it but it seems like they're against sort of like letting people purchase big sections of it and change it against their will and stuff like that. So I like that. [00:12:09] Speaker A: Yeah, there's no Elon Musk in it. There's no Mark Zuckerberg in it. There's a really interesting YouTube video of, from D'Angelo Wallace I think is his name, who started like an empty Twitter account and was like how long until I fall down the alt right pipeline? And it's like immediately but you just don't get on Blue sky. [00:12:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And that is nice and I hope I'm interested to see how like book, bookish people exist on it because I, I, this actually follows falls into like one of my ins, which is I love critical long specific book reviews. [00:12:45] Speaker A: Also one of my ins. [00:12:46] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes. Critical long specific book reviews. Like your attention spans need to get bigger. We need more eyes on talking about one longer than like a minute. [00:13:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:00] Speaker B: And I want to cultivate that space and I want to see others cultivate that space. But a lot of our infrastructure, TikTok, Blue sky, whatever really supports tiny little snippets and that leads to a lot of bad things. [00:13:14] Speaker A: Yeah, there's, there's something to be said for the sort of like the bite sized video that in isolation, in a vacuum sounds very innocuous, sounds very harmless, but once you get a few years of that and like even just trying to keep track of how many videos you see in a day or even in an hour in like one single hour of scrolling TikTok it's like thousands and thousands. It's information you can't retain. It's like those little baby shows now that like are so overstimulating and so bright and so like moving everything because you have to keep the little baby's attention. And that's what all of our fucking content is like now. It's like if you don't grab somebody in the first 10 seconds, they're out. [00:13:53] Speaker B: It's crazy. And it leads to a lot of things. Like one example I think of, like using you as an example, like that video of yours that went viral early this year for criticizing, you know, spice in books and stuff like that. And a bunch of crazy young alt right men mostly found it. Watched the first 10 seconds and thought you were saying one thing. [00:14:13] Speaker A: Yep. [00:14:14] Speaker B: But when you were actually saying another. And that harassment like spiraled for months. [00:14:18] Speaker A: I remember months on end. My God. Yeah, yeah. It's like part of it is, you know, I don't want to say my fault, but part of it is like, I should have seen this coming because it's a seven minute video and you know, of course people. But yeah, I think on the creator side, I think a lot of viewers maybe don't. There's a lot of things that viewers maybe don't realize on an individual level when they think about it as an individual. And you and I as creators see it on a larger scale. We have a larger sample to pull from is you can see like how people are interacting with that content. And like that video in particular, I could see that something like 1% of viewers got past 30 seconds and I could see that people were like largely the, the, the biggest drop off, like where most people had already left was like 24 seconds. And so at a certain point you're like, okay, you're engaging with things you're not paying attention to. You're engaging with things you're not. You're not looking at. I just saw a video from Francesca, whose last name I am forgetting. I will put this in post. [00:15:15] Speaker C: This is Emma in post here. [00:15:16] Speaker A: I was talking about Francesca Ramsey, whose TikTok username is Francesca Underscore Lee L E I G H. She was responding to. She had made a video about Parable the so Octavia Butler. And somewhere in the comments somebody had asked the question like, well, how does the book end? And somebody replied to them and said, you could just read it. And this person goes off and they're like, well, some people can't read and some people don't have time to read and some people can't afford books. Just tell me how it ends. It was like, no, Google it. Yeah, you could Google it. There's like a ton of. You could go to the library, you could listen to an audiobook. There's a lot of things you could do here. And there's so much focus on, like, having excuses for why somebody doesn't have the attention span to do something, which sometimes is reasonable and sometimes is not. I just did a video about, like, a pretty innocuous video about, like, my least favorite comments that I get on TikTok, one of which was the easily googleable questions. I was like, one of the most annoying things that happens to creators is you'll get really simple, easily googleable questions. And I had a number of people that were like, oh, I just don't have the attention span to like, watch the whole video or I don't have the attention span to like, go to another app. And I was like, you're on a phone already. It's about two finger swipes to close TikTok and open Google and about seven seconds to Google the question. I don't understand, like, what's happening and. [00:16:37] Speaker B: The reason why this matters for those who are like, well, it's books. Who cares? It's in an isolated environment. It's not in an isolated environment. I get emails from students every day. How do I mla cite this thing? Oh, my God, Google it. It's right there on Google. I swear. I swear. You can find it way faster than it took you to type out this email if you just Google it. And I see that in every area. How do you write a check? You know, it's like, you could Google how to write a check. That's what I did. [00:17:05] Speaker A: It's like, what happened to the era of the YouTube tutorial? Everything that you possibly want to know. [00:17:11] Speaker B: I love YouTube tutorials. I know. I still YouTube tutorial. Almost everything that I don't know how to do as like a normal activity. [00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know if you saw it. I was complaining about this in my close friend story for a while. I. My car was haunted. My car alarm kept going off for like, no reason. [00:17:26] Speaker B: Yes. [00:17:27] Speaker A: And it ended up being like a whole thing. But, like, I figured out exactly what was wrong with my car and exactly the part that needed to be replaced because I just know how to Google things and I'm like, this is. This is a skill that is being actively lost. And I don't. I think we oftentimes, and especially people younger than us, especially the Gen Z's and the Gen Alphas will make fun of boomers, you know, for not knowing how to, you know, how could you not tell this thing on the Internet was fake? How could you not tell this obviously fake thing was fake? But I think Gen Z and Alpha is also running into not understanding how to find information because nobody ever taught them. [00:18:01] Speaker B: It blows my mind. It really blows my mind as a. I teach college students and so, like, I'm at the point where I should have, like, fully formed adults, but I don't. I do not have fully formed adults coming into my classes. And I have to wonder, like, how can. At least in America, right, Like, how can the Department of Education, like, something has to happen where we focus on, like, developing human beings rather than, like, cramming them full of answers for, like, things that really don't matter. [00:18:30] Speaker A: Well, apparently we're gonna get rid of the Department of Education is how that's gonna happen. My God. [00:18:35] Speaker B: I, I have no idea what that's gonna look like. I'm so. Next year's gonna be nuts, dude. I. I'm not ready. [00:18:42] Speaker A: It's. It's gonna be a bad time. But to, to circle back to, like. Yeah, a lot of this is solved by that idea of, like doing a long form review. Being able to sit down, have a coherent, not even just a single thought, but a set of thoughts and a set of thoughts that exist in conversation with the text that you're reading and all the other thoughts you've had in your life. And like, asks a question. And yeah, we, we definitely lose that, especially on TikTok. I have that as my in and my corresponding out is silent reviews, one word reviews. Those kind of trends. I hated those so much. I'm like, you can't. What does this mean? What do you mean exactly? [00:19:23] Speaker B: I, I've, I've never been a fan of then I think I, I'm sure, I'm sure I've done something similar for like, engagement at some point. So don't think I'm, you know, I'm. I'm saying this to cover myself, but I, I don't find any value in them. I skip them always. I just, I'm like, okay, I'm. This doesn't mean anything to me, right? They're. They're awful. I, I don't like them. I want specific reasons why you felt a certain way. I don't want to be spoiled in the book. That's not what I want. I don't want you to tell me what happened. That's not a review. I want you to tell me how you felt reading the thing you read and why it made you feel that way. Like, what was the progression of like, you know, point A to point B. Like, what were the characters doing? Did you like, sort of, you know, the perspective switching or the pacing, like, just tell me those things. And that also tangentially will make you a better conversationalist in your real life. [00:20:21] Speaker A: Yes. Oh, my God. Trying to talk to people who don't know how to riff and don't know how to connect one thought to another is a nightmare. [00:20:30] Speaker B: Agonizing. [00:20:30] Speaker A: Oh, always with the tangents. When I. You watched Hannibal, right? I think we talked about this. [00:20:34] Speaker B: Yes, I did. [00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So I went to New York Comic Con this year, and the, like, thing I was most excited about for the entire convention was the Hannibal panel. They had Mads Mikkelsen, and I keep wanting to call him Will Graham, Hugh Dancy there. And, like, it was, like, a huge deal that, like, they were both there and we were going to do this whole, like, 3,000 room. And the. It is the worst panel, the worst interview I've ever seen in my. Like, I have never sat in a room with 3,000 people and watched somebody bomb an interview so bad right in front of me. And part of that, like, a huge part of that was that she did not have the ability to riff off of a thought that they were giving her and connect it to anything else. And, I mean, you are in education all the time. Yeah. I can't imagine, like, how frustrating it is to be, like, trying to explain to people who are, you know, especially the STEM kids in the humanities who are like, well, I'm never going to use this. It doesn't matter. And it's like, no, you're going to use this every day of your life. You just don't recognize it. [00:21:35] Speaker B: It's hard. It's hard out there. Like, I only teach humanities courses, and even the humanities kids are having a difficult time. I say kids not to be demeaning. It's just kind of my students, I should say, they're all adults. [00:21:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:47] Speaker B: But, like, they. They're younger. And watching them, like, how I have to sort of manage class discussion, I feel like I'm talking 70% of the time when I should be talking 30% of the time. And they should be responding to each other in a classroom, like, they should be having dialogue and not, like, looking at me to manage it. It's been very hard to sort of, like, figure out that balance post Covid, because they've been in little screens, you know, for, like, really formative parts of their life. But even I'm telling you, like, even in my own graduate research cohort, a couple of my good friends who I'm friends with, because they're incredible people and they're interesting and have all these critical thoughts. Like sometimes we interact with other people that we're friendly with but maybe aren't direct. Direct friends. And we don't hang out all the time. It's. We complain about having like, to feel like we're performing for them because they don't participate in our conversation. Yeah, it's, it's wild and it's an important skill. Like, to be likable. [00:22:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:49] Speaker B: Is a skill. It's not something people are naturally born with. [00:22:52] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, that all comes down into various ways that we learn how to communicate with each other and with the world around of us. Around of us. Speaking of being able to communicate. Well, I remember in one of my college classes, I think it was either history or poli sci class. I think we've talked about this. I had a professor who. My favorite professor that I've ever had. And one of the things that I struggled with early in the classes were doing what essentially amounts to book reports, but like, you don't typically call them book reports in college, but, you know, you're giving your thoughts on, on the text that you're reading. And I was probably a freshman at this point, which is, you know, I was a baby. And we were talking about the things that you're struggling with and I was like, well, one of the things that I struggle with a lot is that, like, I am an 18 year old. I'm a 19 year old, like, and I'm reading this text from somebody who's older than me, who's an expert in the field ostensibly. And like, it feels very strange to like, put down paper my thoughts on this and say that, like, I feel confident and strong that this is what I feel about this, especially if that's critical or negative because, like, I'm an 18 year old. Who the fuck am I to say, like, what are you talking? And he literally looked me in the face and went, get over it. He's like, that's, that's the advice is get over it. You, you learn to have your own thoughts and to. And to present them in such a way. And I think in doing long form reviews, that is a very difficult skill to learn is just being able to say that you feel a certain way, that you think a certain thing and put that out on the Internet and like, stand by that and not couch it in so much caveating language of like, okay, well, maybe if I'm, if I'm wrong about this, just let me know. Or if this is different, or if you don't agree, like, that's okay. And like, there's a confidence to that and there is a skill to that that is difficult. But, like, yeah, we really need to be, like, prioritizing that stuff over one sentence. Review. Go. And here's 47 of them in the same video. [00:24:36] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly 100%. I want long, specific book reviews. Like, similarly, I think we're, like, also kind of going into this conversation of, like, thinking about objective and, like, subjective understandings of things. Right. Like, what I want less of, what I want out in 2025 is comments or people, like, assuming that when somebody says something, they're not thinking of the whole picture. [00:25:02] Speaker A: Right? [00:25:02] Speaker B: Right. So, like, when I'm. Sometimes I'm like, reviewing a book or I'm talking about something and I'm. I make a confident statement and then somebody says, well, what about this obvious thing that you didn't actually talk about specifically? And I'm like, it was implied. Yeah, read the context here. [00:25:17] Speaker A: That, I think is one of the strangest things about TikTok in particular. I promise for the listeners, this whole thing isn't going to be us bitching about TikTok, but it also might be one of the things about TikTok, fun, silly things, too. Oh, yes. Is that, like, you, you get a lot of this wanting to have, like, quick, snappy, punchy stuff that, like, happens, you know, without a lot of too many unnecessary words. And at the same time, if you don't come cover every single possible, like, rebuttal in the video, you're gonna get like, a deluge of bad faith of, like, I need you to use your brain for five seconds and realize that, like, this was an obvious thing. So clearly this is, you know, implied in, in what I'm saying. [00:25:58] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:25:59] Speaker A: Insanity. [00:25:59] Speaker B: Exactly. I. I want people to just think a little, that's all. Maybe that's mean, but just think a little. [00:26:06] Speaker A: Very understandable because I think there's. There's a lot of the. I mean, it's, It's, I think, got popularized on TikTok. Is the bean soup kind of. Comments fucking, you know? [00:26:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:15] Speaker A: You know, here's a recipe for making bean soup. And somebody comments, well, what if I don't like bean soup? Then it's not fucking for you. Like, I don't. What do you want from me? [00:26:21] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:26:22] Speaker A: Like, then move on. Like, not everything needs to be for every person. And also I need you to, like, use your brain just a teeny tiny bit. But yeah, there's that. That idea of like, oh, I'm just sitting and I'm mindlessly scrolling and I'm like intentionally rotting, you know, for a specific. But like for hours and hours and hours time. And I want all of my content to be like that. That's not, that's not helpful. [00:26:42] Speaker B: Yeah. TikTok. Maybe TikTok is out in 2025. [00:26:46] Speaker A: I mean, it might actually be. [00:26:47] Speaker B: It might be forcibly out. [00:26:49] Speaker A: It might be forcibly. TikTok is out in 2025. We'll see what happens. What's tangentially. That's what I was looking for. Tangentially. Weird that that's the word I forgot to. All of that is one of my outs for 2025. Out in 2025. Brain off reading. In Brain on Reading. Brain on. Brain off Reading. I have recently had a revelation and I think a lot of us kind of had a revelation in November, specifically following the. The discourse that happened of post election. And like book talk shouldn't be political. Books aren't political. And realizing what people meant when they said brain off. Because I think you and I have a different definition of brain off reading than what apparently is what a lot of other people meant, which was they literally will turn their brain off and. [00:27:42] Speaker B: Not turn it back on and, and like knowingly ignore issues. [00:27:46] Speaker A: Yes. [00:27:47] Speaker B: Right. Because I, I don't believe that people don't understand issues. I, I think people are smarter than we give them credit for. But I do think people, like, willfully ignore issues in order to like, not be uncomfortable. [00:28:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:01] Speaker B: Because they don't want to think too much about the implications of like them maybe having sympathy for somebody that's not themselves. [00:28:06] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:06] Speaker B: Scary. I know. I wrote it this exact. You're out is an in for me. I said in with intellectualism and critical thinking. [00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:28:15] Speaker B: I think that you. And we've talked about this a lot in DMs because we, you know, for the listeners, we talk about these things a lot privately. But just like, like you're allowed to enjoy a book for like the Spice or the characters having a cute romance or, you know, seeing somebody go save a village or whatever it is that you like to read and still understanding that like certain aspects of the story have political and real world implications. [00:28:45] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:45] Speaker B: Doesn't mean you have to necessarily act on them in that moment or stop what you're doing and go cry in the corner or something like that. But you should recognize, like, this is an interesting conversation I see in the real world. Maybe next time I encounter that thing in the real world, I'll think back to this moment and have some sort of comparative analysis of those things. [00:29:06] Speaker A: I recently read a book called A Proper Dragon by. [00:29:10] Speaker B: Oh, yes. [00:29:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to say it was Evie Wheeler. And if anybody is listening to this, also listens to the Shit We've Read podcast, you'll hear this on our Christmas episode. But I think there's a couple things that went along with this. One of them was that I would rather read a mediocre book that causes this sort of unlocking of something that I couldn't articulate before. Like, I would rather read a mediocre book that I have a lot of thoughts about than, like, a pretty good book, but is ultimately forgettable and I don't really think anything about. And that was what that book was for me. And the thing that it unlocked for me was my version of Brain off reading is that I won't. In my version of Brain Off Reading, I'm really not gonna look too deep into, like, world building and, like, small plot holes and, like, inconsistencies. Like, I will actively, you know, tell myself, I really don't care right now. So, like, in that book, everybody has a dragon, and it's Victorian and. Or not Victorian, Regency era. And so they're like, Regency era balls. And in the middle of a scene, I was like, wait a minute, where's all the dragons? They all have dragons. What's happening? And I. Right, I was, like, physically pushing the thought from my head of, like, I don't care. I really don't care. I'm just gonna keep going. And that's my version of Brain off reading. So I was like, oh, this is a pretty brain off book. But what Brainoff didn't mean was that I wasn't catching the political overtones and, like, the blatant politics of the book. Like, it brings in the Luddites, which are a very real political action group from the early 1800s. And I was like, okay, I know who the Luddites are. So I'm making that connection here. And I can see what this book is doing, what I think wrong because it's mischaracterizing them. And, like, it's still a brain off read for me. But I can't turn, like, you can't actually turn off making those connections. And I think maybe some people do, like, they, like, put up a physical wall of, like, this is fiction. So I'm going to choose to read this in a vacuum and not think of a single other thing I've ever heard or seen in my life. [00:30:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I think It's a combination of, like, willful ignorance and then also, like, maybe, like, I don't mean this in a mean way, but, like, a stunted development of critical thought that wasn't encouraged beyond, like, very basic, like, why is the curtain blue in this book? Oh, it's because the author was sad, sort of. [00:31:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:18] Speaker B: Going back to all of this rooted in certain education issues at the very. Very, like, you know, at the grade level sort of thing. Not saying that people are dumb either. I think willful ignorance is something you have to practice, unfortunately. [00:31:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:34] Speaker B: But, yeah, that. That is just hard for me, and I. I get a lot of that, like, your version and my version of brain off reading in fanfiction. I don't particularly care to read published books with that sort of frame of mind just because, like, when I invest in a book, I really want it to be a full experience, which is just my preference, but for that, I do a lot of fan fiction reading, and there's spelling errors galore. It's actually part of the fun is the spelling errors and, oh, you forgot this canon thing that actually, you know, that you're talking about, but you're not really analyzing it. Right. But I'm just gonna ignore that because this is fun, and I want to see these two characters kiss a little, like, you know what I mean? That's my brain off reading. And it's fun. I love it. [00:32:18] Speaker A: I want to see the same couple that I have read 75 other times get together in 75 other ways, and I want to watch them get together in a 76th way, and that's what I want. [00:32:27] Speaker B: I want to see them do it in a coffee shop. I want to see them get together, like, in a future alternate universe. I want to see all that stuff. Give it to me. [00:32:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Fan fiction. More people would benefit from reading fanfiction. [00:32:38] Speaker B: And not talking about it until they understand. [00:32:40] Speaker A: Not talking about it, reading fanfiction and shutting the hell up about it. [00:32:45] Speaker B: Yeah. My in is reading fanfiction responsibly, and my out is talking about fanfiction without knowing the conventions. [00:32:52] Speaker A: Yes. Oh, my God. I knew as soon as I asked you to do this episode, I was like, we're going to talk about fan fiction. [00:32:58] Speaker B: We're going to talk about that. [00:32:58] Speaker A: We're going to talk about fan fiction. [00:33:00] Speaker B: Oh, my God. I love fanfiction. [00:33:02] Speaker A: Do you want to kick it off? Kick it off? [00:33:03] Speaker B: Sure. I. Let's see. [00:33:06] Speaker C: All right, if you're hearing this, that means you're listening to the publicly available version of this episode. Which is just about 33 minutes long. The full episode. The the fully edited cut down episode is 2 hours and 18 minutes long. Shay and I simply would not, could not, did not want to shut the fuck up about this. So we just, we just kept going. Throughout the rest of this episode we talk about Romantasy as a genre dominating the industry industry or at least the speculative part of the industry. Bad author behaviors, weird parasocial relationships with self published authors. Book boxes and special editions are sort of general malaise about the direction of the publishing industry, including concerns about editing and AI and a lot more because it's it's genuinely almost another two hours of this. [00:33:51] Speaker A: If you would like to access the. [00:33:52] Speaker C: Full version of this episode, you can become a subscriber to my bindery@skyesreads.binderybooks.com you can find a link to that in the show Notes or in my social media link in Bio. Kind of wherever you find the people people post their links you can find that there. Subscriber episodes are available to Tier 2 subscribers on my Bindery along with a number of other benefits and things that you can get down the line. And I will say that 2025 is going to be a really great year to be a tier 2 subscriber on bindery as we have our first book coming out to Bargain with Mortals by Arabasu. [00:34:24] Speaker A: So I will leave this at that. [00:34:25] Speaker C: That is. That is sort of the pitch. [00:34:26] Speaker A: But yes, if you would like the. [00:34:27] Speaker C: Full version of this episode you can go become subscriber over on Bindery and get get the next like two hours of this.