“I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. I hate it when you’re not around, and the fact that you didn’t call. But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.”
Love and hate, both such strong emotions, so strongly intertwined. We love to love, we love to hate, hate to love and hate to hate. It goes for people, material things, and of course books. There are so many books we love, so many books we hate, but then there are those we love to hate and hate to love. They are complicated, messy and we are not sure if what we feel for them is just that, love or hate.
(gif credit goes to giphy)
Books have a way of making you go completely wild with emotions, they take over your mind, and as a result make you feel like you no idea how or what to feel. Do I love this? Or do I hate it? It’s probably a bit of both right? Sometimes this is exactly what I think while reading, it’s a mess. I have a few books that make me feel like this, or well ten to be exact. Here is a list of ten books I have a love/hate relationship with:
- Obsidian by Jennifer L. Armentrout
- Friends vs. Family by C.L. Stone
- Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
- The Vincent Boys by Abbi Glines
- Unravel Me by Tahereh Mafi
- Coming in from the Cold by Sarina Bowen
- Heir of Fire by Sarah J Mass
- The Death Cure by James Dashner
- Delirium by Lauren Oliver
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
These books are all different in how they make me feel. Some of these books are just books that just made me the dislike the series in general even though I really loved it before, whereas the others are books that just have a certain event that made me go “omg why did you do this, what is this, go back” but that I still love despite that. It’s all just a mess of strong and weird feelings that you make go bratwurst (what??).
(gif credit goes to giphy)
To end things I just want to say, we are all going to have different books that we love and that we hate. Certain books we love might still have aspects that we’re not able to stand. After all, we’re all different people with different taste.
This post is supposed to be a fun discussion post about the complexity of feelings we can have for books. However, if a book is problematic and hurtful then it’s our duty to say so and warn our peers. No one should ever have to read a book with bad representation.
Other than that, I do think love/hate relationships with books are good. They fuel discussion and make us have to think a bit more about our emotions. Also hating something in a book doesn’t mean you actually hate the book itself, which is something we should all remember.
Olivia Chanel's Stories in Space 