Recently I’ve been rewatching Ted Lasso, somewhat in preparation for watching Season 4, even though I’m still gutted by Phil Dunster not returning (I enjoyed the first season of Rooster at least, so the scheduling conflict that keeps him away is not all bad). So the last couple of weeks, Apple TV has been trying to convince to watch their new Mayday movie with Kenneth Branagh and Ryan Reynolds. Now, I’m a sucker for Reynolds (I know, I know, it’s a character flaw) but I’m also a sucker for seeing present-day depictions of anything to do with Russia and the Soviet Union.

Thus suckered into the movie, I can’t say it was anything surprising. It’s a tidy piece of propaganda about how great America is with some lip service mixed in about how they’re not perfect and not all Russians are evil monsters – a good reminder, if a little trite in the context of the movie. However, it did have good chemistry between the leads, fun action scenes, some funny moments and I respect Branagh’s decent attempt at Russian. So while its virtues can help me forgive most of its sins, I cannot bring myself to forgive them for their absolute butchering of geography towards the end of the film.

Warning, here be spoilers.
​
At the climax of the movie, our protagonists hijack a small commercial plane at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow and try to escape to Finland. Alas, they soon discover that they don’t have enough fuel to take them all the way to Finland so they would have to land the plane onto an American aircraft carrier in international waters in the Baltic Sea. Here’s the glaring problem though:

As you can see from the above, while it’s true that a straight line between Moscow and the Finnish border takes the plane over the Gulf of Finland, which technically is part of the Baltic Sea, you have to consider that a) a slight course correction would have resolved the issue and b) even if their route took them over that stretch of the Gulf of Finland, there was no way an American aircraft career would be casually parked there in 1987.

But to add insult to injury, the film established that the good guys reached the aircraft career in about an hour, despite the Baltic coast being 700km away from Moscow, a distance that would be impossible for the tiny little prop plane with an open door and one busted engine to cover.

I will absolutely admit that I should probably be making a more concerted effort to suspend my disbelief here and not descend into borderline pedantry while the geographic discrepancy goes unnoticed by almost every viewer of this movie. I will also probably commit similar errors in my own writing, though the goal is not to use quite this much artistic licence when I write. To me, this experience is about finding that line I have in my own head and hopefully staying on the right side of it with my own craft. Because while I can forgive some random watering hole in the middle of a Russian forest having television reception and a bright neon sign, funky geography is what takes me out.
​
But hey, at least they didn’t try to establish that the movie is set in Russia by just slapping some random church cupola on a manor and calling it a day (looking at you, Fate of the Furious).

Late last week, literary Twitter exploded with one of the stupidest arguments that I’d ever seen and, as the Russian saying goes “a pig will find mud”, I decided to wade in.

Apparently, what all the brouhaha started with was someone claiming that if the author hasn’t hooked them within the first 20 pages, then they immediately drop the book. Granted, this is a completely arbitrary cut off that doesn’t give legitimate slow burns a fare shake. I’m not going to defend this particular opinion. But the rebuttal to this that ended up getting retweeted into every corner of the universe basically said that not finishing a book is an insult to the author, and the least you could do is finish whatever you started.

Of course, this is literary and writing Twitter we’re talking about, where people say the most asinine shit for engagement. My two favourite examples are “Am I the only one that gets excited when I sell a book?” and “My friend told me they think only people with blue eyes make good authors, do you agree?” However, this accusation of insulting authors struck the perfect balance between being outrageous, and sounding perfectly serious.

That tweet really packed a two-for-one punch. Form the perspective of readers, it reeked of snobbishness – as if because you managed to commit to the whole of War and Peace after getting ten pages into, it somehow makes you a more respectful reader. All it does is further discourage those intimidated by such pieces of literature because it makes them feel like they’d be looked down on if they don’t end up finishing it. Well, if a cockroach looks down on you, does that really affect your day?

And from the perspective of authors, this seems to have both arrogance and insecurity all wrapped into one – like a reader owes it to you to finish your book as long as they started it, and if they drop it, well, that’s not your fault, it’s the reader bestowing upon you a great dishonour. How utterly rude of them. Or you could think about it this way – at best, there’s no such thing as a book loved by everyone, or at worst, don’t write a garbage book and people might be less likely to put it down in the first ten pages.

I really do have to hand it to that inflammatory – it was some kind of provocative work of art in its own right; based on a completely ludicrous premise. How would the author even know that I didn’t finish their book that I bought in order to even be insulted by me. The tweet managed to illuminate so many ugly opinions when it comes to reading. One rebuttal to people saying that their time is too precious to waste on books they don’t like was “Well if your time is worth so much to you, what are you doing on Twitter?” Apparently, we’re not allowed to have fun until we’ve finished torturing ourselves with hundreds of pages of writing we don’t want to read.

It’s like if you went to a nice restaurant and your food came way too salty, and you didn’t want to finish it, and then I accused you of being rude to the chef, and you said “But I only eat food that is good” and my rebuttal was that I saw you eating at McDonalds last week.

The amount of people who seemed to be extremely emotionally invested in how other people spend their time is astounding. Makes me think that it all boils down to some misplaced sense of superiority – these people don’t read books because they enjoy it or because they get something out of it, they read because they think they can lord it over someone who didn’t.

“Well I am on a whole other level, for I have read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and you have not.”

Well I read it in the original Russian, and it was an awful experience, so go hang out at the kids’ table you thought you were setting up for everyone else, and I’ll hang out with the people who don’t have sticks lodged up their butts. And this is coming from someone who insists on finishing every book he opens; not as a matter of principle, but more as a result of a deep person flaw. I just don’t think it makes a difference if you start ten and finish ten or if you start ten and finish one. Same as it doesn’t make a difference if you read two books a year, or fifty two, or if you’re reading genre fiction off the shelves of your grocery store, or the greatest Lithuanian authors of the pre-Soviet era.
​
Read what you want, read what brings you joy, and don’t let any Twitter gatekeepers make you feel bad about any of it.