ttyl is most famous for being told entirely through instant messages.

I guess that’s part of the reason I wanted to revisit the ttyl books again after… six or seven years, I guess? I’ve changed a lot since then, and my genuine love for cheesey YA books has long since passed, but one thing I always have and still admire about this series is how the book is written. And I found that to be especially true after this past reading year. When I was in my fiction workshops in college, I always felt in some ways, writing literature was one of the hardest forms of writing entertainment because all you have to work with are words, so you really had to bring your A-game with how you use them. And if it doesn’t stick out, then that’s it. With books, if the story doesn’t interest you, you’ve only got the writing style to fall back on. With movies, television, and video games, the story and how it’s presented to you is still there, but there’s also many other factors that contribute to your overall enjoyment of them, like the use of music, lighting techniques, special effects, and acting. I started thinking about why I wasn’t getting as much value from reading anymore, and I think a big part of it was because of how literature itself operates as a medium.

It felt like a chore more than anything else, and I honestly just wanted to do other things with my free time rather than read. Sometime last year, reading just stopped being fun for me. Usually I write posts about each book I’ve read lately, but I started skipping posts about many of these books. I even decided to break out of my comfort zone and start reading a new genre altogether, biographies, which I didn’t care for before, wanted to give a fresh fair chance with, but only proved to myself that I still do hate reading biographies. Many of these books were usually all right at best, straight up hating at worst, but either way most didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. It was a year of trying out a lot of books that made their way onto my to-read list one way or another, and a lot of them didn’t hold up very well. That’s nice and all, but I’ve been calling the trilogy of ttyl, ttfn, and l8r, g8r the “ ttyl books” for ten years now so you’re gonna have to forgive me for if I continue calling it that.Ģ016 was a pretty rough reading year for me.

Even on ttyl‘s Wikipedia page it says this is part of Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series of books. I kind of did a double take when I first saw ttyl as Internet Girls #1 on Goodreads and thought maybe it was a mistake, but nope. Or Internet Girls series as it’s apparently known.

Ttfn by lauren myracle