ACOTAR and The Thrill of Reading

Completely spoiler free! I would never!

When I was in the fourth grade, I made an unusual request of my mother as we wandered the aisles of the Walmart in North Wilkesboro, NC. In the past I had pleaded with her for Keebler Softbatch Cookies and 3D Doritos, Spice Girls CDs and *NSYNC posters. But on this day, amid the blue signs with yellow smiley faces, I asked for an alarm clock. 

I’d asked for the alarm clock because I wanted to read more, but with my schedule of sleepovers and cheerleading practice, and generally just being a kid, the only chance I had to do so was before school each morning. So I requested my own alarm clock, the same one as my parents had in their room, so we knew it would work. She obliged my request, and that night — happy as can be — I set my alarm for 4:30 AM. When the alarm rang, I began reading, and in a few weeks time I’d torn through the stack of books I’d received for Christmas that year. Hungry for more, I visited the library at my school, where I checked out a steady stream of books, often long and tedious ones (because they had the highest Accelerated Reader points), and the next year I became the Union Elementary Accelerated Reader Champion.

When I was a child, reading was one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes it wouldn’t be easy, I’d have to fight to keep my attention on the book at hand, but I would make my way first to fifty pages, then to a hundred, and if I could get a hundred pages in I could usually finish the thing. Other times, though, a book would grip my attention fully, and I would spend full Saturdays reading. This has happened only on occasion since adulthood — encountering a book that sucks me in so much that all I want to do is spend the day with it — and it happened this past weekend.

First, some backstory. On the last day of 2022, in preparation for taking a year off of book buying, I bought several books based on cover alone. One of the books I picked up was A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. I put it on a shelf, and forgot about it, which is one of the habits that prompted the year of not buying books in the first place. In December 2023, after starting a particularly heady book about photography and mortality, I decided I needed something fun. And I remembered that I had bought the first book in the ACOTAR series. I picked it up, read it in two or three days, thought it pretty good, and didn’t think much more of it until a couple of weeks ago when I read Culture Study Goes Full ACOTAR by one of my writing crushes, Anne Helen Peterson. I pressed order on book two, and thought I’d get to it when I got to it. 

Last week we had dinner with some friends, one of which is a connoisseur of novels in any genre. We talked about ACOTAR, and I told her I had just picked up the second book in the series. I also mentioned that I read the first one back in December and didn’t love it. She gave me a look, and said book two was her favorite, and I’d probably love it enough to finish the entire series. I made a note to pick it up as soon as I was done with the book I was currently reading. 

This is how I found A Court of Mist and Fury in my lap on Sunday morning. I woke up around seven forty-five, filled my water bottle, lit a stick of incense and went to my reading spot on the couch. At around nine my husband, Tucker, brought coffee and Italian dipping cookies. At eleven-thirty, he made big bowls of pasta with sausage, spinach and a parmesan, lemon and olive oil sauce and brought it to me on the couch. At around three-thirty, 450 pages into the book, I left the couch for the first time to go hang out at a park with some friends. The minute the hang was over, I was back on the couch, and before I laid my head down to sleep I had read all 656 pages. I couldn’t put it down. I got lost between the pages, rarely checking to see what page number I was on, rarely looking to see what time it was. I was absolutely, positively sucked into the world, and the plot. I was consumed.

In AHP’s Full ACOTAR she makes some lovely points about the point that how we talk about these books matters. Many people make a preface every time they mention this series, whether about the quality of the writing or the fact that it’s a smutty fantasy series about fairies. They do this under an assumption that they’ll be judged for liking it and they need to qualify this as some sort of guilty pleasure. I’m not going to do that here for a number of reasons, primarily because I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, only pleasures. 

Reading this series has been an absolute pleasure. I’m not going to spoil it for you in any capacity, but the story is VAST, and it takes twists and turns that leave you wanting to dive deeper into the world. 

Over the course of Tuesday and today, I read the third book in the series, A Court of Wings and Ruin. As I type this, the fourth book, A Court of Frost and Starlight, sits behind my computer, ready for me when I want to take breaks from work. 

There’s something to be said about a cultural monolith that grips the imagination and the attention of so many people. ACOTAR has readership, primarily among a demographic that doesn’t often find itself reading all that much. According to the 2022 American Time Use Survey people ages 20-34 read for between 9 and 12.6 minutes per day on average. 

There’s something special about this series. The personal stories within these books are dazzling, but the world-building is just as rapturous. I also found myself frequently choked up at the friendships in book two and book three. The relationships, friendships and rivals are written with a lot of heart. Family is often self-defined and fiercely protected, and the bonds are written in a way that leaps out of the page at you. 

These books are, of course, also appealing because of the sex. The smutty scenes in ACOTAR, of which there are many, center on female pleasure and are rife with their own commentary on the politics of power that can be at play in sexual relationships. The descriptions are visceral, and they’re certainly horny enough to make you blush if you’re reading them in public. Contrary to much of the press around ACOTAR, they are not the main reason someone would read and then love the series, though that may very well be a part of the reason someone would pick them up. 

I think the reason people love this series is because it draws you in and demands your attention. It takes you away from the beeping and buzzing of a cell phone or the infinite scroll of social media. It takes you away from the chores and the minutiae of everyday life, and it deposits you somewhere else in another world, with fairies and lore and monsters and big love stories and imminent danger. 

People want the feeling that I got this past Sunday morning — the feeling I had about an hour into Mist and Fury, the feeling I chase with reading anything new. I was completely in it. All I wanted to do was keep reading. All I wanted to do was stay suspended in the world that Maas built as long as I could. And when I’m done with the series, it’s the feeling I’ll continue to chase. It’s the thrill of being a reader.

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