Warning - this may contain....

Just like allergies to food, we can have a kind of allergic reaction to subjects. We all have an incredible array of lived experiences, some decidedly less delightful than others. We have content warnings on food packaging so people don’t suffer the ill effects of triggering an allergy, so what makes doing the same thing with books any different? The effects can be just as dangerous and life threatening, why would anyone want to inflict this on someone…I’ve got a few suspicions myself, and none of them relate to great writing or storytelling.

Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Before anyone says, but it spoils the story, I’d just like to say, no one’s asking you to give a detailed description of the who, what, when, where, how of these things, just a polite heads up. Then we can all make our own informed decisions on if we want to venture down that path or not. As individuals we also have the right not to have trauma, be it fictional or otherwise, imposed on us by others. This is always more about power than storytelling, a great story lives beyond the blurbs on the cover or any marketing strategy put in place. We’ve all got those special books with the well thumbed pages and familiar creaks of the binding, they are our old friends whom we visit time and again. Does us knowing the plot back to front change our enjoyment of it? No of course it doesn’t, so a few warnings on a book jacket certainly won’t either.

Toshikata Mizuno, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When it comes to freedom of speech let me be perfectly clear where I stand, books should not be banned or burned, the freedom to exchange ideas and talk openly about things is important. But the keyword here is exchange, an exchange is a respectful dialogue, not an invitation to impose your will or beliefs on others, or try to wipe them from existence. Small but important point of information, just discussing or mentioning a subject in a book is not someone trying to impose a belief. If however lies, manipulation and diatribes start to push a particular message of hate, it’s only natural to be suspicious. So if someone does decide to publish something hateful and deliberately harmful to others, we get to exercise our freedom of speech against it, we get to decide to not stock it in our stores, we get to decide not to add it to our personal library, that my friends is the free market! We know how powerful words can be, we’ve most of us experienced bullying in some form or another in our lives and can remember how it felt – try not to let these experiences fuel how you communicate, at least when you have the time it takes to get something printed to reconsider. No one wants to morph into a bully themselves when combating hate…at least I hope they don’t!

So until this happens how can we navigate this literary minefield, I myself have established a series of helpful systems which I will now share in the hope of helping you all avoid any of your own subject allergies being triggered in the future! (This is not a full-proof system, but it should help).

So you’ve found a book you like the sound of…

1. Mosey on over to Storygraph, search for the book that's peaked your interest (they don't have every book listed but their selection is pretty vast).

2. You can then see how other readers have reviewed the book in % to do with mood like how mysterious, challenging, 'dark', tense etc it is. Pace, diversity of characters and other details are also covered.

3. Now scroll a bit further and you can see a section called content warnings that have been submitted by users, as always this is subjective but can definitely be a useful guide. You can either click to 'view a summary' or 'see all' (there are so many ways to avoid spoilers here so it doesn't ruin any plot).

4. If the book still looks like a goer then I like to read a preview of the first few pages somewhere like Amazon to get a sense of the writer's style and whether it's my kind of thing.

5. With all those things looking good and in place I then head to Bookshop.org, select which indie bookshop I'd like to support and place my order! Yay books!

Now as I said, this isn't a full-proof system and I have come a cropper once or twice, but it's certainly avoided many unhappy reading surprises for me and significantly increased the likelihood that I'll actually buy more books because I'm enjoying looking for new reads again! I really hope this helps anyone who needs it right now and if you'd like to have a few recommendations you can check out my Bookshop.org page (includes affiliate links) full of some of the books that have uplifted, inspired and helped me to unwind...