What Should We Read Next: Poll Time!

Hello, readers! We’re calling on you to help us out once more, because Ariel and I have talked and talked and now we’re at the point where we want some direct input from you, our web traffic dearest readers.

We got a lot of recommendations, and Ariel and I spent a lot of time talking about what we’d personally be most interested in doing next. So just because it’s not on this poll, it doesn’t mean it’s not being considered at some point in the future. But right now, we’re pretty sure our next book is gonna be one of these:

As a supplement to just asking you point blank which of those books you’d prefer, here’s another poll that’s… sort of a personality quiz, let’s say. Not that we don’t trust your votes or anything. We just wonder what the results would be if we framed the question like…

And here’s a question specifically about that gender-swapped Twilight that Stephanie Meyer wrote for the 10th anniversary of the book. Which, if you don’t know anything about this, you should definitely take a look at this real thing that exists.

And one more question about our other vampire tale of vampires: House of Night! We’ve said that we’re totally ready to jump into book #4 (which is called Untamed, and doesn’t that sound promising), and we’re pretty sure everyone’s still pretty interested in this, but we just want to check…

Thanks for all your help! Seriously! We need to know what the people want.

Like this, but without everyone dying at the end.
Sort of like this, but without everyone dying at the end.
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31 comments

  1. AJ Reply

    For your next book, I vote for Leah Cifford’s A Touch Mortal; a few months back, my friend introduced this lovely book to me and I couldn’t help but read it myself. It’s so awful that I spent half my time laughing uncontrollably at the book and the other half researching the author’s weirdly constructed, more-than-slightly originalist mythology. The out-of-control suicide/self-harm ideation in that book is only the tip of the iceberg, trust me. It still confuses me how Clifford managed to get her book published, because it reads like a first draft with barely any coherence or wit.

    As for Life and Death, I don’t think y’all should waste your time on it. The differences between the Rule 63 version and the original book are pretty much negligible, and I was one of the idiots who read/snarked at the entire original saga back when it was fashionable too. I read the genderswap version out of curiosity a couple of weeks ago and the only things I took away from the book were that Smeyer doesn’t understand the paradox of gender dynamics and that abuse is obviously still abuse no matter who’s behind it. Y’all are too witty and hilarious for a snoozefest like Life and Death.

    • 22aer22 Reply

      This concerns me greatly…it is winning by quite a lot in the polls. But this is making me wonder if maybe we just do a few chapters of it or something rather than the whole thing…See how it goes and if we lose interest after the beginning and don’t force ourselves to slog through.

  2. E.H.Taylor Reply

    I’m voting Maze Runner just because when I read that book, I read it with a confused look on my face the entire time and I want to see if you can explain it to me, haha.

    Also, I think if you blogged about Life and Death and HoN, I think that would just be too many vampires going on at the same time.

    • 22aer22 Reply

      Oh god yeah…I don’t think we should do them at the same time. Very good point. THERE IS TOO MUCH TOO CONSIDER. Lots of balls in the air and such.

      I am pretty confident we will be tackling Maze Runner soon.

  3. Jennifer Layton Reply

    There weren’t very many with me on my vote for the Left Behind series, but I really hope you do that sometimes because that would be a totally different challenge. It’s a sensitive subject being dealt with by characters incapable of complex thought. I found myself mentally arguing with the characters during the whole series. Never mind the religious story — it’s a perfect example of social commentary missing the mark.

    • Misty Smith Reply

      I absolutely agree. I was all ready to press the gender swaped Twilight, but I thought I ought to just check the others out too, and now I am TOTALLY rooting for the Left behind series. I think they would be incredibly fun and a great refreshemnt after all the teenage love drama. Not that I won’t read and love anything you write (you guys are great), but should you ever do the Left Behind series I would be so excited to read that! Also reading a male author, like Ariel said, would be great.

      • 22aer22 Reply

        Yeah we’re almost certainly gonna read Left Behind really soon. Matthew and I are brainstorming right now about ways we can do the Life and Death that don’t take up months and months of all our lives, is fun, and then let’s us quickly do other stuff again!

      • matthewjulius Reply

        We’ve been trying to do a male author for the longest time 🙁 there wasn’t a great fit until this last round of suggestions, and then there were SO MANY. We’ll be making fun of men for a looooong time

    • svetasbooks Reply

      To be honest, I would feel nervous about them doing Left Behind. I’m of the persecuted religion, and I worry there might not be sensitivity to that particular persecuted religion 🙁

  4. Babs Reply

    Long-time lurker here…
    I voted for Life and Death, if only because I’ve never heard of Left Behind and I’ve read snarks on the Maze Runner. TMR is SO dull and weird and boring that I had a hard time just following along.
    I think that if you’re gonna do a Twilight novel, it should be this one, because the other four have been beaten to death and back. (Not that they don’t deserve it, but it gets pretty dull to read after the first few snarks lol)

    • 22aer22 Reply

      I love when everyone comments but I extra love when long-time lurkers comment! Hi!

      I think even if people aren’t too familiar with Left Behind, hopefully it’ll still be fun to follow along with our summaries/snark and save the trouble of ever having to pick up the book yourself. That being said, I am definitely getting excited about doing Life and Death and hopefully doing it in a way that moves it along quicker than our usual pace. Matthew pointed out to me that if we did it by chapter we could be reading it until spring, which, no…

      I’ve only read the first couple chapters of Maze Runner, and my notes so far are essentially just, “The slang, ug. Stop.” and “Questions are being raised by the second.” I watched the movie, so I know how things pan out. Plus I read some wiki summaries. It definitely is confusing/essentially pointless. My concern is still about it being boring like Divergent, but maybe we’ll just do a quicker snark of it at some point. I think it would be a shame not to tackle it at all.

  5. wordswithhannah Reply

    I voted for the Twilight genderswap purely because you haven’t done Twilight yet. However, my very close second vote would be for Left Behind because a) I haven’t read Maze Runner and have no opinions on it and b) it’s so detached from reality that I can’t wait to see what y’all have to say about it.

    • 22aer22 Reply

      Is it sad that I’m excited to do Life and Death because I’m hoping people will search a lot for it and find the blog? I’m not all business all the time but I’m like oooh FIND US SEARCHERS.

      I’m very excited to do Left Behind! I don’t mind if we push it back slightly to do Life and Death. I think we’re still considering starting both of those and pushing House of Night off, but I think a lot of people seem really keen on us starting that right away, which is exciting but makes our decision harder.

  6. Honey Reply

    I’m actually listening to Life and Death and the moment. It’s….different? I mean, similar, but has a slightly different vibe to it. Honestly, switching the genders around makes you think about the dynamic and how weird it is. But seriously….the gender-switched names….they are ridiculous. The names of the Cullen kids: Edyth, Archie, Eleanor, Royal and Jessamine. Not a joke. (Same first letters for all the characters, it seems).

    I think side-by-side, this and Twilight will be a fun read.

    • 22aer22 Reply

      I knew Edward/Bella/Jacob were all swapped…but it didn’t hit me that EVERYONE was gender swapped. I think it would have been more interesting to keep everyone else the same (including Jacob) and see how that changed everything. Not that this is completely uninteresting but…those names…

      • Honey Reply

        At this point, Bella/Beau’s parents haven’t switched genders (Meyer said this was because it would have been impossible for a father to have primary custody in the 80s), but everyone else seems to have been switched.

        • 22aer22 Reply

          Ah yeah I just started reading Life and Death and saw that at the start of the book. I think everyone else should have stayed the same and just swapped Edward and Bella, I actually would have found that a lot more interesting.

  7. svetasbooks Reply

    I am curious, but how will you be handling the anti-Judaism in Left Behind Series, or when Jewish characters convert to christianity? I tried to read the first as a teenager (a girl gave it as a birthday gift,) and I recall feeling upset and angry at the way it portrayed Russia and, later, on, Jews. When I read summaries of subsequent books, I became pretty angry at the conversion of the characters in it.

    • matthewjulius Reply

      To be honest, we try going into these books blind, so we don’t know much of anything about the narrative. Which is to say we therefore have no specific plans because we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. What you’re describing about the plot and its themes sounds absolutely awful. Our goal is primarily to criticize books for awful, offensive social commentary, not to make jokes about people’s personal beliefs. We want this blog to be an inclusive, safe space. And we hope people call us out if we miss the mark.

    • 22aer22 Reply

      I’d also like to chime in here! I had a really similar experience to you when I first read these books as a kid – I was actually at a Jewish summer camp reading it instead of participating in sports. WHOOPS. Here I was worried if we read this I would be super ignorant towards Christianity without even considering that people would be concerned about how we’d handle other religions being portrayed in the story.

      I’m with Matthew, though, it’s more about the writing itself and how things are handled rather than us picking on religion. I may not personally be a fan of organized religion, but I respect that this is important to many many people, so I don’t need to spend time making fun of that aspect of a book.

      I also wanted to assure you that I bring a non-Christian perspective to the book if that makes you feel any better. I don’t really like to talk about the fact that I’m of Jewish heritage, so it probably won’t come up too much in my posts, so I figured mentioning it here would be a good start.

  8. svetasbooks Reply

    Thanks for responding back as well 22aer22 🙂 I’m Jewish as well, something I used to brag, but now I kind of hide it. Are you planning on doing only one book or the whole series? The conversion stuff happens throughout the entire series, although if something like that happens in first, it wouldn’t surprise me.

    • 22aer22 Reply

      My pleasure 🙂 Our plan right now was just to tackle the first book, see how it goes, and then maybe write about the last one. Then, because there’s so many books in the middle, we might do a couple of in-between posts just doing bullet-point recaps of what we missed in the interim. I can’t see us doing all of them, though. House of Night is one of the exceptions in this regard – I don’t care that there’s so many of them, I want to do them all! But I don’t really see it happening with this series.

  9. bookbaron Reply

    I’m really looking forward to gender bender Twilight commentary. But as someone who despised Maze Runner, I wouldnt mind reading that either. I skipped reading the second book and just watched the second movie for maze runner which I think was scorched trails. I don’t know about the book but I got a very Last Of Us feel
    from it except less awesome because it lacked Joel and Ellie. That and the lamp like female lead who could have been replaced with a cellphone was even more rage inducingly stupid in the second one. Ugggggh.

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