Hello and happy Thursday. June had been slowly killing me until this week, and now time is going by super quickly and I don’t know if I’m ready for July. It’ll come anyway, right. Today I’ll tell you about two ARCs I got from NetGalley (and I’m very thankful for) but couldn’t finish them. Okay, I could have, but I didn’t want to. Since I didn’t finish these books, I won’t be sharing links to them. My first DNF is Most Hated by Kara Alloway and The Souls of Queer Folk by Joel Davis Brown.

I had problems with Most Hated from the very start because I had absolutely no interest in (on?) the subject matter. Basically, we’re following a group of rich women who will star pretty much in a version of Real Housewives. I’m sure there are people who love this show, but I don’t for many reasons, the main ones being I am not American so that’s not at all relatable and I don’t watch TV in general, so I wouldn’t choose to watch this. I gave this a couple of tries, then soft DNFed it, then hard DNFed it, but while I was trying to read it, I kept asking myself about the type of reader who would enjoy this novel. I asked myself this because it is about this reality show that I know many people love unironically, but it tried to be a satire and to provide some commentary on how fake and frivolous these shows are, which is okay, but again, who would read this? If I love a show, I wouldn’t read a novel that mocks said show, but if I hate a show, I wouldn’t read a novel about said show, even if it’s a satire. That would be too much time and effort spent on something I’m not into. And I guess that’s why I ultimately didn’t finish this book…I didn’t see the point, and hopefully other readers do.

I have a lot to say about The Souls of Queer Folk, but from a researcher standpoint rather than a reviewer. I have researched issues related to gender identity, sexual orientation, and more specifically, queerness for years now, so I’m not new to what the author proposes in their book. This was not a problem to me because I thought that if anything, The Souls of Queer Folk would serve as a point of reference in terms of the concepts presented and maybe even the sources cited. Here’s where I had my issues. When writing research papers, it is important not only to establish key words but also to provide a definition, at least in terms of how the author is going to address a topic, and this didn’t happen in what I read from this book. For example, Queer culture is mentioned throughout the first chapters (and I’d assume throughout the book) but we didn’t get a clear definition of what Queer culture meant within the book and in relation to the research made and presented by the author. So even though I didn’t find any information that was new to me, I was left confused at times with how the information was being presented. In other words, it didn’t give me a new perspective or deepen my understanding of Queer culture. It didn’t even provide a definition based on the author’s own experiences, which are very different to mine, even though we both fit into the category of Queer.

The other issue I had was related to the sources. As a researcher I am very picky, especially when it comes to topics such as those related to Queerness, gender identity, and sexual orientation because they are still emerging topics, and the discourse around them is constantly changing. That means that I will look and consider publications no older than ten or fifteen years to integrate into my own research work. That is a personal preference, I know, but it affected my experience reading The Souls of Queer Folk because I found that most of the sources were, at least according to my standards, outdated. That meant that for me this couldn’t be considered as a reference point or a starting point because it led to publications that, again, according to my personal view, are obsolete.

Lastly, circling back to the concept of Queer culture, I think it was not approached in the most responsible way. I say this considering that I didn’t read any clear definition of what the author meant by Queer culture, so I was left to assume that the author would group basically anyone who was not cisgender and/or heterosexual into one category. And okay, I know that wasn’t their intention, but again, when writing a research paper, you have to be explicit and you have to be careful with what you name and how you name it, but also what you don’t name. Honestly, having the first chapter be a definition of Queer culture that actually was based in intersectionality would have saved this book for me.