Go Me - I earned an 'epic badge'

Don't get too excited, it was only from Audible. They have all these badges, many of which I am unlikely ever to get, but a little notification cropped up on my phone yesterday to tell me I had earned the epic badge. I was intrigued so followed up. 

And you know what, I'm going to agree with that  'earned' even though all  did was listen to a book. Because it was a whopper. It came in at a massive 32 hours and 43 minutes, which is the longest book I have in my Audible library, and I wish I could say it had been a pleasure to listen to but it wasn't.

So what was this marathon listen? It was Robert Galbraith (aka J K Rowling) 's latest Cormoran Strike novel The Ink Black Heart. I wish I could say I'd it or that it had been worth almost 33 hours of my time, but I can't. 

The basic plot was reasonably good in that slightly OTT/bordering on the surreal sort of way that is the trademark of the series. But it was seriously bloated, the language was appalling and it read as JKR's revenge on all the people who had ever been nasty to her on Twitter. 

Don't get me wrong. The misogyny suffered by women, both private ones and those in the public eye, on social media (I really only do FB myself but even that horrifies me sometimes and I gather it's as nothing to what gets tweeted) is nasty and wrong. In fact I'd go so far as to say it was evil. But parroting it in a novel is perhaps not the best way to fight it. And asking readers swim in a sea of woman hating obscenity isn't doing anything to stop it. To campaign for change in the tone of social media is a good thing to do, although also I sadly suspect a waste of time and energy, but this is not a campaigning book, it's a personal howl of rage which does neither her readers nor her characters any favours.