You might have seen it: a list of problematic authors and the reasons why they belong in this category. I won’t link to the tweet, which went viral1, as many turds often do, when they are released into the online toilet bowl that is the Anglophone literary discourse. It’s not that the discourse is moronic these days but that the ones driving the conversation are a loud and (at best) mediocre posse of squealing minions, whether they are renowned or anonymous, so there is no need to divert more attention than needed towards this petty rumpus. Still, I must say that this kind of exercise always raises an eyebrow for me, perhaps because I come from a place where this type of list was many times penned in order to engage in actual cancel culture, that is state terrorism. No, this is certainly not the same and I’m not comparing a book twitterer to a criminal trained in the Escuela de las Américas by Yankee secret service agents. But I don’t like black lists — not even when they include reactionary clowns who deserve our scorn. I digress — what I wanted to say is that this list made me wonder what it would look like if we were to categorise problematic readers.
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