Riot Headline Book Riot’s 2025 Read Harder Challenge
Humor

23 Things I’d Rather Read Than Another Think Piece On What’s “Wrong” With Children’s Literature

Cristin Stickles

Staff Writer

Cristin Stickles has been nothing but a children's bookseller for the past 25 years. She has a lot of opinions about The Giving Tree.

While we at the Riot take some time off to rest and catch up on our reading, we’re re-running some of our favorite posts from the last several months. Enjoy our highlight reel, and we’ll be back with new stuff on Monday, January 5th.

This post originally ran November 21, 2014.
_________________________

  • 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.

    ____________________

    Expand your literary horizons with New Books!, a weekly newsletter spotlighting 3-5 exciting new releases, hand-picked by our very own Liberty Hardy. Sign up now! 

    new books