🌹Bewildered Bookish Nerds🌹 discussion

Here you can argue with people respectfully about how you feel about cancelling certain authors/books.

I have mixed feelings about this but at the end of the day most of the authors who are being called out have done something wrong and they need to be held accountable for their actions. Constant harassment and threats to a problematic author isn't okay, but making others aware of bad things that an author did and refusing to support an author who has done bad things are hard but important things that need to be done.

I think cancelling books though is a different story. You can call out a book's problems and still enjoy the book. It doesn't make you a bad person to like a book with problematic elements as long as you acknowledge its flaws or at least don't attack people for pointing out your favorite book's flaws. There's a difference also between things like bad POC representation in Harry Potter and a book like why homosexuality is a sin!. If a book's purpose isn't to purposefully push problematic beliefs on the readers then it's fine to like them but if it's sole purpose is to force a problematic view onto people or to cause harm to a community, then that's a big issue.

I believe freedom of speech is still a protected right. We have the right not to read books by authors we dislike or disagree with.
I have boycotted several authors because of either their behaviour or their totally unacceptable political position. Intolerance based on religious, gender or sexual preferences is not going to entice me to read anything by such an author.
I boycotted Jodi Picoult's books after she supported the horrendous twitter attack on a young college student who dared to criticize a well known YA author (Dessen, I think it was?) Dessen wrote a scathing tweet and all of Dessen's "friends" said equally awful things. The poor student's life became a misery. She was ostracized and publicly harassed.
https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/sar...
Using their media power to threaten and name call just because the student did not feel that the author's books were appropriate college level study materials was totally unacceptable. Picoult and Dessen and several of the other authors apologized but the damage to that poor young woman was irreparable. That knee-jerk reaction to attack that young student verbally like that was uncalled for. I read some of those tweets and there are several other authors that joined my boycott list. One of them would shock you, because she herself has experienced discrimination and abuse all of her life.
I find it interesting as well that the Media loves to tear down their icons. AJ Flynn was outed and vilified as well, but I really enjoyed his book, The Woman in the Window. I've read many times that we should never examine our heroes too closely because they often don't stand up to scrutiny. Patricia Highsmith was, according to some articles I read, an awful - some said downright vicious - narcissist who would stab you in the back before she ever said a nice thing about you. And yet, many of her books were made into movies and are still read to this day.
When the media gets into a frenzy, I tend to stand back. Lynch mob mentality is not my thing. I like to look at the facts and we all know that the media sometimes only presents a portion of, or their version of, the facts. Look at Fox News: what a soap opera THAT was!