Book reddit and Booktok are just both really different communities despite both nominally being book-centric.

You're not reading what I'm writing so I'm going to stop.

You wrote a lot in response to a short post you clearly did not read.

I don't care who you are. I care about you supporting oppression.

So your children have no idea straight couples or marriages exist at all?

Elementary school? Sure.

High school? Those are basically just libraries and probably have way worse things than that.

Without even getting into the fact that actual porn is available in infinite quantities on the internet and, on average, kids are more tech-savvy than the adults trying to stop them.

> I do however believe I would have some type of feelings if a school wanted to distribute books to my elementary aged child about any sex straight gay or otherwise.

The thing is, it's everywhere in society because we're the majority.

Do your children know that sometimes men and women get married? Congratulations they've received straight indoctrination.

And if you're thinking, that doesn't count? Well, neither does most of the shit Republicans are freaking out about lately.

Look, if God didn't want people milking the prostate he shouldn't have put the male g-spot there.

Best case, these nutters chill out. Worst case, we get a dystopian Equilibrium future and that's not so bad, gunkata!

> In any case, I'm still trying to figure out how including Rosa Parks violating the law that required a Black person to give up their seat to a white person in a history book is "dangerous" and "woke".

In a recent court case...

> “DeSantis' lawyers were forced by the court to define "woke." The lead lawyer described it as "The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

So "it's not fair that black people have to go to back of the bus" is right about on. Of course they'd typically rather not say that part out loud and would rather motte-and-bailey fallacy it.

I feel like this take misses what a lot of people find compelling about true crime: not its gore or faux intimacy but its cultural weight as a modern day cautionary tale, like an urban legend with some amount of reality behind it. This woman got killed, what red flags might she have missed or what mistakes might she have made that I, the reader/listener, can learn to avoid so that I also avoid her outcome? This person survived a dangerous situation, what good choices did they make that I can put in my own tool box to also survive a similar situation?

That is to say, for a wide swath of its audience the emotion is not lust or even bloodlust but fear. Fear tamed or made smaller by the acquisition or feeling of acquisition of knowledge.

I definitely feel like you have this idea in your head of what a cruise is like that is not that close to what it is actually like. Outside of a tiny subset, a spring break atmosphere it is not.

Generally it's closer to a week at a resort hotel that people bring their kids to.

> You see two people share a drink at a bar and then head to a cabin and the thread of evidence ends there, none of the conversation involving revoked consent is captured.

Sure, but if they're crew they're already someplace they're not allowed to be and will lose their job for.

And there's no way to deny most of what happened.

This doesn't mean crime is impossible but being a serial rapist crew member is basically impossible. Kind of the same way murders still happen but you don't have the serial killers with 50 victims of our grandparents time because forensics are so much better than they used to be.

> Few convictions lead to persecutions.

Note that your source is, basically, the closest cruise ship equivalent of ambulance chasers. Not that some of what they're saying isn't correct but take it with a grain of salt.

> Again, it may not be the intended purpose, but getting to hire cleaning staff and not have to pay them American mimimum wage seems awfully convenient...

It absolutely is. In a sense it's a lot like migrant farm workers who come from Mexico to the US to pick our fruit. That's simultaneously a job that no American is willing to do for the wage it pays, and a job that is good enough / pays well enough to make sacrifices to travel and do for many Mexicans.

You talk to people who work on ships, and the story you get a lot is that, yeah, they work long hours and they're away from their families a lot of the year... but what they're paid, while by our standards really low, is also a lot more money they can make at home with the skills they have. For a lot of crew this is a sacrifice they choose to make so their kids can have better lives than they did when they were kids. I like to think I'd be willing to do the same in their situation.

You also will, for example, meet crew who are gay and from countries where it's dangerous to be gay or something similar and this is their way to be able to, essentially, escape and get to be who they are.

> As for planes, it's an efficient mode of transport for me, not a luxury. At worst I'm there for 12 hrs? At no point am I being sold the fantasy of an air resort or expected to mix and mingle with the hundreds of people on the flight.

Ok, then let me try: whatever you're picturing for crowding is probably not accurate on a modern ship. The biggest ships in the world will have thousands of passengers but also are, essentially, small floating cities.

> On the same topic, there's also the unique challenge of sexual assaults on board.

This is also a lot different than 30 years ago. There's basically no public area of a modern ship not covered 24/7 by security cameras.

> Skirting responsibility: the book said most ships fly under flags of convenience and use concessionaires for their goods and services. An American cruise liner can then avoid the more stringent safety and labor law requirements of the states by sailing under the flag of a more lax nation.

This misses a bunch of the nuance. American maritime law is protectionist to a somewhat self-defeating degree. That is to say, probably cruise ships that operate in America probably wouldn't prefer to operate under an American flag, but that's irrelevant because they also literally can't.

Among other things, to be an American cruise ship the ship would also have to be built in America, and America currently does not have the industry to build a modern cruise ship. Basically, our shipbuilding is heavily specialized into ships that kill people. There is currently one cruise ship that is America flagged (Norwegian Cruise Line's Pride of America) which was basically built in Europe, like 1% assembled in America, and required a specific act of Congress to be considered American enough to do it.

Why you would even want to have a ship be American is a separate rabbit hole of American maritime law.

I will say, if you aren't too afraid to get on an airplane... you are much more crammed into a small space with lots of people even being in an airport than you will ever be on a ship.

I'm not an audiobook guy, but my friend who audiobooks constantly (used to be a super voracious reader, now has terminal brain issues such that he really can't read read for long anymore) loves Roy Dotrice. So there's at least one person out there that's a big fan of his delivery.

Depending on your taste in mysteries, you could always go Agatha Christie, who pretty much never writes sex but occasionally two characters who have just met will decide to get married in the denouement.

> I think it’s hard to judge ebooks based solely on e-reader frequency. The kindle and Libby apps both work great, and let me read anywhere on my phone without having to carry a second device or a physical book around. It’s entirely possible the person next to you on the subway is reading The Count of Monte Christi, to Reddit’s great delight.

Yep. As another anecdote, 90% of my reading is on my phone these days. I have an eReader and I do use it in certain circumstances. I haven't bought a dead tree book since the Bush Administration and I don't know that I ever will again.

My wife, who reads probably 5 books a week on average is phone, tablet, or PC and would never be seen with an ereader as such.

Is Moving Finger the one where Miss Marple doesn't show up until like 70% of the way through the book?

I don't mind Miss Marple as a character but sometimes it does feel like Christie has to contrive a bit to justify why she needs to / can solve a mystery. Poirot, at least, was this famous former professional police officer / detective.

ATTWN is a cool book but it's also really different than her norm.

It's less a mystery you can figure out and more like a classic horror movie almost.

Mysterious Affair at Styles is one of the weaker Poirots, IMHO (also the first, so, maybe fair), although having read it pays off a bit if you ever make it as far as Curtain, which is the last Poirot and I think hits differently if you've read most of the other Poirots before it, especially the ones that include Hastings.

A few others I liked not on your list that I liked: Cards on the Table, Five Little Pigs, Death on the Nile.

The only one of the Poirot books in my opinion that is really bad is The Big Four, and maybe even that is just because it wasn't what I wanted. It's... basically a James Bond novel, written a generation before there were James Bond novels, except instead of James Bond as the international super spy it's... Poirot for some reason.

> However, this typecasting sometimes relied on what contemporary readers know to be harmful stereotypes. She frequently caricatured particular occupations and ethnic groups for comic effect, reinforcing the prejudices of her time.

I feel like, especially given that she was writing a century ago, Christie is relatively ahead of her time on this front.

For example, it's not uncommon that there will be a non-protagonist character who is like "Well of course the Italian did it, they love stabbing people!" or whatever stereotype of the time but that person is pretty much always wrong. It's pretty much never servants or random underclass people committing the murders either.

I can think of one more (b) in Christie but it's not a Poirot.

I always felt like she felt like she had to give Poirot a Watson, but very quickly discovered she did not enjoy writing Hastings, who often comes across as "Watson, but dumb and with no helpful skills."

Granted, I also think Curtain would not have been nearly as good without the foundation she DID lay with Hastings in earlier books.

Probably you did mainline too much hype. That said...

• He does a good job of writing the characters and their voice very distinctly. He doesn't need to tell you which character is talking, for example -- it's obvious.

• In Abercrombie's novels, as in life, things don't always go great for the characters. Sometimes their deaths or endings aren't especially noble or heroic. Sometimes they try to become a better person and fail. Sometimes a character thinks they're a pretty good person, but the people around them who have to live with the consequences of their actions have a different view. Your tolerance or enthusiasm for these kinds of things probably has a lot of influence on how well you like Abercrombie's characters.

I generally prefer Christie... usually, but not always, at the end of a Poirot novel I feel like I could have guessed the solution even if I didn't. This is pretty much what I'm looking for in a mystery.

I disagree a bit about the sidekicks -- Watson isn't as smart as Holmes but he at least has some useful skills -- Hastings is pretty much just an impulsive idiot. (Although this maybe is what makes Curtain so... well, I won't say more but it wouldn't work without Hastings being Hastings, even as an older man.)