I read 3 books everyone ‘loved’ — I’ll never listen to reviews again | Books | Entertainment

I am an avid reader, and always have been. I love all kinds of literature, and although I was late to the game, joining TikTok in 2022, I was swiftly recommended ‘BookTok’, i.e. a subsection of the social media platform where people share their current reads and recommendations.

The ‘BookTok’ that TikTok decided was best for me was not the fairy porn packaged as romance and redistributed on the strict algorithmic doublespeak as ‘spicy books’. Instead, I got sucked into the possibly more embarrassing ‘weird girl’ fiction rabbit hole, where goths and emos compete with each other to find the most surreal, shocking or unearthly fiction to recommend. Although I have got some great recommendations from this niche of culture, there have been more let downs than benefits.

These are three of the books I read on the recommendation of BookTok that have cemented my decision to stop taking recommendations from the internet.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation flew to cult status a few years ago as the pinnacle of ‘weird girl’ fiction. The main character, an anonymous, miserable and waifish 20-something woman living in New York circa 2000 is apathetic and cruel. She decides to self medicate herself into as close to a coma as she can manage to deal with her all-encompassing depressive episode.

It’s a really interesting concept for a book, but sadly it just falls flat. I understand the dread that comes from spiralling so deeply into depression that everything is meaningless, the sly horror that sits alongside living in a world where consumerism is king and nihilism is religion, but I already understood those concepts before I picked this novel up.

The following 306 pages did little to elucidate on those themes. I finished this book with the main takeaway that it was well written — but unbelievably boring. I hated the experience of reading it so much that I thought it was the fault of the author, however, I have since read two of her other novels (Lapvona and Homesick for Another World) and I loved them both. I don’t know why this book was so utterly forgettable but I’m happy to leave it that way.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Another fabulous concept for a novel that unfortunately just fell flat. Our Wives Under the Sea is a sapphic love story between Leah and Miri. Leah, a deep sea researcher, has recently returned home from a disastrous mission where the submarine she was in lost communications and sank to the ocean floor. Now back home with her wife Miri, it’s clear that something is very, very wrong. The story is a dual narrative, switching between Leah’s horrific subaqueous imprisonment, and Mira’s quiet struggle to try and bring Leah back to the woman she remembers.

I really, really wanted to love this book but unfortunately it just felt like it was reaching for something it never quite achieved. The idea of being trapped under the sea, cut off from the world and alone in the darkness is intense and terrifying but Armfield only ever writes it as mundanity.

The same goes for Mira’s point of view. As her wife begins to morph into an Eldritch horror confined to the bathtub, Mira calls up her work and keeps the taps running. I do like the idea of questioning what happens when the person you fell in love with is no longer the same — mentally and physically — but I feel like so much more could have been done with the characters. Their voices are very similar, which may have been a stylistic choice, but for me, it just made it hard to get through the book.

Maeve Fly by C.J Leede

Marketed as an extreme horror fiction, Maeve Fly follows the titular character through her life living in LA, working at a certain theme park as a character actress portraying a certain icy princess. On the side, she’s into ‘murders and executions’ — a ham-fisted nod towards Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

Maeve’s constant monologues about Halloween music are another way Leede tries to pay homage to American Psycho, but simply emulating a classic is not impressive. Maeve Fly does nothing to move the genre forward and reads like a teenager’s fanfiction. It may be the worst book I have ever read.

The concept of a serial killer — but shock horror, she’s a woman — is neither feminist nor revolutionary but C.J Leede seems to think she has done something truly transgressive in writing a female lead character who is horrible. The characters are so, so flat and the motivations are entirely absent. Long, florid descriptions of violent murder and sexual assaults do nothing to hide the fact that this novel will never do what it thinks it can.