I found a website that collects each year’s most scathing book reviews, and it’s very helpful. Any book that departs from the left-wing dogma of the past two seconds gets torn to shreds. I found a list of books that are potential good reads there.
How to Find Books
Clarissa's Blog 
i don’t think i have ever seen such a witless congeries of blind, narrow minded, badly written, potted reviews in one place. Were they collected in order to demonstrate a total lack of critical acumen so that students learn how NOT to write a book review?
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I struggled to get through even just the excerpts of these reviews. And these are people who are paid to write them. If you want to demolish a book in a review, there a ways to do that in a clear, informative and funny way. These reviews, however, are word soup. Their authors really need to read Strunk and White.
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“such a witless congeries of blind, narrow minded, badly written, potted reviews in one place”
I read them as mini-autobiographies.
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Freud would have made a lot of them.
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What are your thoughts on the whole “autofiction” thing, if you have any? Knausgard, etc. I haven’t read any of this stuff but I sure hear it mentioned a lot by “literary types.”
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It’s incredible when done by a genius like Rafael Chirbes. And absolutely horrid when done by anybody else. Many people think they have a personality deep enough to rummage in publicly but it’s almost never true. As a result, such books have a tendency to sound like a claustrophobic and endless Instagram feed.
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Lithub: Tell us you have petty bourgeois grievances against primarily right-leaning or right-adjacent writers without saying it outright.
But the main problem isn’t even length, it’s the thick flow of emotive excrement from Male Karens.
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I couldn’t have said it any better. This is exactly what it is.
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There needs to be an umbrella term for people who emote professionally, and for the action of professional emoting– actors, some writers, talk show hosts, a subset of journalists– it’s icky, like sex work but less honest. I would prefer if we had some kind of very stylized kabuki-type ritual emoting to take the place of all of it– you know, we are now presenting a sad news story, so the newsanchors all pull out their papier-mache sad masks from under the desk. It’d be less… grubby and manipulative.
What should we call them? People who wring their emotions and maneuver others’ feelings for money in a gross, cynical way? Emotorists? Tear Jockeys? Public Criers? Performative Feelers? Sensitive Plants?
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Struggle Artists.
Because everything they do, especially every little thing they do, has to be made into a public performance of a “struggle session”.
As for the “kabuki”, the masks are always on even if you don’t see them.
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It could work.
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