23 Things I’d Rather Read Than Another Think Piece On What’s “Wrong” With Children’s Literature
- An annotated edition of Fight Club with David Foster Wallace-style footnotes provided by all my worst boyfriends.
- A transcript from the night I was conceived.
- The toxic shock syndrome tampon box insert.
- Dossiers on every Law & Order character seen unloading crates from a truck or ship.
- My 10th grade midterm progress report where I was given “Too Much Unnecessary Talking In Class” by 6 of my 8 teachers, setting a new record for my household.
- The shooting script for that Scientology commercial.
- Mike Tyson’s autobiography.
- The MTA poster that cites how many people were killed on New York City’s subway tracks last year (55), perpetuating my decade-long crippling fear of being shoved over the yellow line.
- The Kardashians’ YA novel.
- Closed captioning on a TV that is not in a doctor’s office or loud bar.
- Christopher Hitchens’ Vanity Fair article about how women aren’t funny.
- Captions on your Pinterest “Dream Home” board.
- A biography of Eva Braun (author note: I own this in real life).
- My college application personal statement that, at the time, I thought was a true and beautiful representation of who I was as a human.
- Board of Education meeting minutes from a town in which I did not grow up.
- Board of Education meetings from the town in which I did grow up.
- Facebook posts that directly address dead relatives.
- The lyrics to “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time.”
- All the poetry I wrote about my parents in high school before realizing nothing rhymes with “divorce.”
- Twitter updates about how few emails you have in your inbox.
- Comments on a famous person’s Instagram posts.
- One or all of the undergraduate lit papers wherein I referred to an interpreted connection in the text as “tenuous at best.”
- One Direction’s tour rider.
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