It's okay that you didn't enjoy the book and wouldn't recommend it to people, but you're insulting other readers because you didn't like it. If you read the book, you know the book keeps most of the violence and torture off the page and leaves most of it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. You're being disinguous. It's not torture porn, because the book is not meant to be titillating. It's painful, it's heartbreaking, and the characters are morally reprehensible, but it's also (through the safety of fiction) exploring how people, especially children, are capable of heinous acts of cruelty and be disensitized to violence through their own environments or abuse. That was the actual crime that happened. The book fictionalized the crime, and it's actually way less cruel than the real events. By telling the story with the safety net of fiction, the author can be respectful to the victims without speaking for them, or the woman and children who committed the crimes. The book never intends to turn on the reader or excite them, and there are whole passages where the narrator grapples with how anyone could have that mindset. As for the narrator, it would be absolutely awful to read Meg's experiences from her perspective. As it's written, the book's major theme is violence and cruelty through complicity or inaction. By having the character be a side character, and outsider who becomes an insider to the story, the reader feels vulnerable, complicit, and unable to change the events, just like the narrator. So fuck you for assuming reading a specific book makes someone mentally ill or sadistic, and not intelligent or empathetic.
Moosemellow t1_j6o95wl wrote
Reply to comment by mayor_of_funville in What to do with unwanted book? by [deleted]
It's okay that you didn't enjoy the book and wouldn't recommend it to people, but you're insulting other readers because you didn't like it. If you read the book, you know the book keeps most of the violence and torture off the page and leaves most of it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. You're being disinguous. It's not torture porn, because the book is not meant to be titillating. It's painful, it's heartbreaking, and the characters are morally reprehensible, but it's also (through the safety of fiction) exploring how people, especially children, are capable of heinous acts of cruelty and be disensitized to violence through their own environments or abuse. That was the actual crime that happened. The book fictionalized the crime, and it's actually way less cruel than the real events. By telling the story with the safety net of fiction, the author can be respectful to the victims without speaking for them, or the woman and children who committed the crimes. The book never intends to turn on the reader or excite them, and there are whole passages where the narrator grapples with how anyone could have that mindset. As for the narrator, it would be absolutely awful to read Meg's experiences from her perspective. As it's written, the book's major theme is violence and cruelty through complicity or inaction. By having the character be a side character, and outsider who becomes an insider to the story, the reader feels vulnerable, complicit, and unable to change the events, just like the narrator. So fuck you for assuming reading a specific book makes someone mentally ill or sadistic, and not intelligent or empathetic.