Hey all I’m back for this week’s Bookish Wednesday with another topic that I’m finally getting around to covering. It’s all about my hatred for Dystopian novels.

Dystopians? Really?: Yeah, I absolutely hate the genre. It started with me reading The Giver as a kid and being utterly disgusted with it. Stories don’t have to end with a happy ever after, but honestly a story shouldn’t be so depressing and that’s what The Giver was to me.

So many novels, including stuff like Brave New World, The Hunger Games, 1984, and their like are just all made as social commentaries. Honestly if the authors wanted to write a social commentary, they should just submit an op-ed to their local or national news outlet or write an essay and submit it to a scholarly publication.

Instead they write incredibly depressing stories that are pretty much tailor made specifically for literary analysis in order to showcase what the author feels is wrong with the world. For me Dystopian stories are the epitome of terrible writing. A novel should be a way for the reader to escape their day to day lives, and these novels are all about the things most people will want to escape from.

How is that rational?: It isn’t and I don’t claim that my hatred of Dystopia is a completely rational hatred, in fact one reason I haven’t written this column until now is me coming to terms with that fact. I think that Dystopian stories are bad writing because they are made specifically to make the reader think about their life and what can go wrong. And for me that is absolutely the antithesis of what reading is.

I read to get away from my own inner despair and hopelessness that I struggle with every waking moment due to my severe depression, and Dystopian novels showcase the worst parts of my own mind and thrust it into my face. I don’t need that crap given to me in the form of a story since I get it already from my own inner voice that tells me to give up and just die every moment of my life.

That’s it for this week’s Bookish Wednesday.