tales of Suchita

If there is one thing that the A-team of Blogchatter loves doing – whether in the middle of the day or during the Wednesday Twitter chats and sometimes later in the evening – it is to share our deepest secrets around books, authors and writing.

Our WhatsApp group is a safe space where we talk about popular books we don’t like, dissect writing styles that we adore and recommend books to each other because after working together for so long, we just look at a book and go, “You know what, you are going to love this one.”

Today, I’ll attempt to share a few of my bookish opinions. Judge away!

#1: I dislike how Indian writers over explain our Indianness. I recently read a book that had almost 40% dialogues in Spanish and it did nothing to derail my experience of it. Please, it’s okay to own our desi-ness.

#2: I hate how we have started marketing books like, “This book is The Prestige meets The Song of Achilles.” First, this book is NOT a combination of those two amazing pieces of art. And second, you’re setting me up with false expectations. Find better blurb writers, please.

#3: I love the tags on ao3 and how they tell you exactly what to expect when you decide to pick up a fanfiction of 126,687 words. I think I would like similar tags from books: major character death (so I’m prepared to cry), slow burn (so I don’t get impatient) and this book is unhinged (so I know exactly what to expect).

#4: Blurbs too have become so misleading; I have almost stopped reading them. Sometimes, I feel the blurb is talking about a book it wishes the author had written and not the one the author actually wrote. I only ever read the blurb if the title and cover of the book haven’t convinced me enough to add it to my TBR.

#5: I love the covers that are being designed these days. You can see the attention to detail and when some element from the cover starts making sense as you read the book, it’s even better!

#6: I have read some questionable stuff, including books around A/B/O universe, magic being used for weird shenanigans, a monster that has a pet fish and a sports mafia romance. In two books, there was a romantic sub-plot between a character and a spaceship. I absolutely love how manic my recommendations look on Goodreads.

#7: I do not trust people who say they haven’t read a book, especially a fiction book, in their life.

#8: I do not understand Booker or Pulitzer Prize winning books. 95% of them are pretentious. However, if a book has been nominated for a Hugo, a Nebula or an Orange Prize, I know they’ll be worth my time.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2023