A quick note.

I've been gone for a while, some nasty health challenges are at last clearing up...goddesses please bless the drug industry for its many successes!...but one thing, or more precisely two things, happened in December and January that reduced my desire to do this unpaid and non-commercial blog thing.

I got snarked at by A Famous Author on Facebook for calling out authors on what he was pleased to call "your mediocre reviews" (his had four stars lest you think I was making a point of being rude to him) and two weeks later on Twitter another Famous SF Author snapped about the way people "who think they're being helpful" by highlighting typos and the like, when all it does is cause Amazon to list that product as problematic.

Well, gents, a giant "fuck you" to reviewing your books, and the crappy, badly edited, typo-ridden books of indie authors. As to whom I'm intending to help, it ain't the author who can't or won't or doesn't think she needs to hire a copyeditor and a proofreader. They're different, equally important jobs; neither should be loaded onto a developmental editor, whose art is making your story better, not your book salable.

Can't afford it? Don't publish until you can. Publish anyway? Fix the errors your readers have alerted you to.

And belt the fuck up about how anyone who's paid for your book "owes" or "should" review it at all, still less only positively. No one owes you dick. You wrote the best book you could? Gold star, muffin, now put it in a drawer and glow with pleasure at this not inconsiderable achievement. Enter it into the commercial world and you're going to have to play by that world's rules.

Among those is the golden one: Value for dollars. An ebook is about as much as a fast-food burger. A paperback is about as much as an entrée at Applebee's. A hardcover's about what an entrée costs at a hotel restaurant. You'd better give me at least that much value or I am gonna tell the world you didn't.

I want to be clear: I do not have any income stream from book reviewing by my choice. When I've written reviews for other venues, they are and will be unpaid. I can't afford to make money because the US disability system says I must be in abject, unending poverty to have access to my Social Security payments (at less than half of what they would be if I'd retired on time). I ***hate*** advertising, so I'm not going to attempt to monetize this little tiny blog. So there's no reason for me try for huge readership, or to seek out the rare paying gigs that career writers BADLY NEED. I review books because I'm a tsundoku-suffering biblioholic without the slightest will or desire to be "cured" of my addiction. So here I am, asking you to read my reader-response reviews of books I've liked, loved, or (infrequently) loathed. There's no need for me to trim my cloth to the needs of others, and I won't, but the sheer noxious idiocy of saying in public that readers owe anything except the purchase price of the book to the author, or that a reviewer shouldn't say to a writer "I liked your book!" by mentioning that they've written a review of it, is something I won't let pass unchallenged.

Happier topics: 2019 was a *stellar* reading year! For the first time ever, I had two six-stars-of-five reads: Black Light: Stories, a debut story collection that gave me so much pleasure I read it twice (ever rarer occurance that), and the wrenching, gutting agony of Heart Berries, a memoir of such honesty and such vulnerability that I was a wreck after I finished it. I went back and forth a dozen times, first Author Parsons was the sixer, then Author Mailhot; neither book could possibly "win" for long because I couldn't get either book out of my mind.

I handed out 34 5- or damn-near-5-star reviews out of 155 reviewed books on LibraryThing and/or Goodreads; that's 22% of the total and that is a LOT. Many, even most of these (10+) were for short stories, for end-of-beloved-series novels, or for story collections. But hold on to something heavy: TWO, yes that's t-w-o dos due deux zwei два were...POETRY COLLECTIONS. Sarah Tolmie's The Art of Dying and the late Frank Stanford's collected poems, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. Both were peak reading experiences. Another was cultural monadnock George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, which could not be more important for young people today to absorb.

What a beautiful year it was, to bring so many delights to my door. I hope, greedy thing that I am, that 2020 will repeat this performance. For all of us, really...honest! I didn't just add that on the end of this summing-up to make it sound less solipsistic.

In 2020, I wanted to post 10 book reviews a month on my blog. As of 26 February, I haven't posted a-one! The mitigating factors, some anyway, are listed above; but I need to get this train rollin' or the deficit will become daunting quickly. Even so, I still read a story every other day, as 2019's total of 155 (a lot of individual stories don't have entries in the sites' databases so I didn't post them individually; guess I should do more to sync the data this year) reads shows; so it's doable, and I've done better than that in the past.

I will Pearl Rule books I'm not enjoying with notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read.

...and that's me done. My reports will continue to be quarterly here, the day after the end of the quarter.

Blogging about versus Reviewing the Book

I just read 13 Common Mistakes in Book Reviewing and How to Avoid Them by Jay A. Fernandez, and ran across this item:

So it follows that every statement is an opinion of yours. Trust me, more authority is communicated through a confident omnipotent voice than through narrow personal asides that the reader has no reason to consider.

I laughed and laughed. Wow, thought I, this dude's never, ever been on the internet before! As an opinionated old cuss, I've run afoul of the "HOW DARE YOU" folk many a time, and not one of my friends is innocent of joining in at some point. But the annoyance to me has always been the troublesome assumption that if one disagrees with a point of view, it must be wrong, and the person expressing is therefore Wrong and Must Be Corrected.

Factual errors should be pointed out, preferably politely; but no one is Wrong about their opinion. It's impossible. It's their own opinion. Your disagreement with same is, with the greatest possible respect, irrelevant. An interesting and spirited discussion can be had over the said opinion. But converting others to one's point of view is a side-effect, not a goal, of the spirited discussion.

Unless it's y'all misguided dupes who insist on venerating Chuckles the Dick. That's a failure of intellect and must be rooted out with vigorous and pitiless applications of contumely. But, this being self-evident, it need not be belabored.

Then the author of the piece wrote this:

If it reads as if it’s been written for a blog, then it belongs on a blog.

So...no blogger can be a real critic? I beg to differ, sir! Though on sober reflection I came to the quite simple realization that I was misreading the entire article.

It's not about people reviewing books, it's about Book Reviewers. Those paid to do the job. The pros, the vanishing tiny cadre of them remaining.

Oh.

That's very different. Never mind.

Careful reading is so often, in my experience, about the willingness to revisit your conclusions. Reread your source material. Re-evaluate the entire focus of your reading...are you reading for analytical reasons or for the experience of the story? Both are valid, of course, and each can lead to wonderful reviews. So can any of the many other prompts to read a story. Too often, I find, I switch reading gears and so lead myself astray by not clarifying in my own mind why I want to write about a book. And this article put my mental finger on the source of the problem for me: Focus.

As always. Focus. I'm a blogger, not a Book Reviewer. I do my best to explain my opinion in such a way as to make it relevant to your search for the next great read from your immense number of choices. I don't think that's Book Criticism. I don't think it's pointless or useless, either, and am always thinking about how to express my opinion in such a way as to make your experience of it helpful and/or useful.

If people keep reading my ideas, I guess I've succeeded.

EDITED TO ADD
This BookMarks piece about Gabino Iglesias (follow him on Twitter!) has him making what I consider to be the pithiest distillation of the issues besetting the bookish world:

We have to share the term, but a two-line review on Goodreads and a nuanced deconstruction and analysis of a text that contextualizes a narrative within a genre or genres and the culture at large is not the same thing.

We need a new word for what bloggers do. My aim is to give you some help winnowing the immense and ever-growing choices for your reading pleasure. I assume you're already a reader. Why else would you even have heard of me? I'm not going to pretend I'm anything but an amateur...but the space I occupy is weirdly threatening to professionals:

You need to read, write, and then distribute your criticism. And you have to keep it short and punchy. Write a long review and you will lose your readers because you're competing with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for their attention. This has sadly led to venues dropping criticism. ... {W}e have the best free platforms and yet can't get people to read criticism as much as we'd like to. I hope we crack that code soon.

My audience isn't large, but y'all are book readers. The audiences Iglesias and other professionals write for are larger, more general-interest readers. The two are intersecting less and less often, and that makes me both sad and worried. The internet has been a boon to me personally; I am painfully aware that's not so for everyone everywhere. It's so new, so unprecedented in human history, that I'm not surprised there are kinks to work out.

It's important to me personally that the old tech of the book and the new tech of the screen play together nicely. There is too much at stake for them not to.

2019, the year I SWORE I'd avoid challenges, delivered one I like too much to ignore

Via Bookish, here's a list of challenges to #KillYourTBR (note that I've modified a few entries to make them possible for me to meet):

1. A book you bought for the cover
2. A book by an author you’ve met
3. A book you’re embarrassed you haven’t read yet
4. A book that is under 220 pages
5. A book that came out the year you were born
6. A book whose title uses alliteration
7. A book in your best friend’s favorite genre
8. A book from an independent publisher
9. A book you borrowed from the library
10. A book featuring a fictional language
11. A novel that includes a recipe (Bonus points for making the recipe)
12. A book won in a raffle/giveaway
13. A book about going on a quest
14. A book set in a city you’ve visited
15. A book with a dust jacket
16. A book by two or more authors
17. A book that is over 1000 pages
18. A book that’s been out for less than a month
19. A book with a name in the title
20. A book from a genre you want to read more of
21. A book written by a Native American author
22. A book with an asexual character
23. A book you were given as a gift
24. A book translated from Spanish
25. An award-winning graphic novel
26. A book featuring a false confession
27. A book you meant to read in 2018
28. A book featuring a memorable companion animal
29. A book set in South America
30. A book with a cover you kind of hate (but a story you love)
31. A book by an author you’ve never heard of before
32. A book of short stories
33. A book featuring a nonbinary protagonist
34. A book you’ve been waiting for forever
35. A book about intersectional feminism
36. A book with a place in the title
Completed; Our Man in Havana on the Thrillers tab
37. A book bought at/from a physical bookstore
38. A book by an author you’re thankful for
39. A book with gorgeous descriptions
40. A book signed by the author
41. A book set in Africa
42. A book about mental health
43. A book written by an immigrant
44. A retelling
45. A book about incarceration
46. A book recommended by an author
47. A book with a person of color on the cover
48. A book by an author who uses a pen name
49. A book whose title includes a verb
50. A book recommended by a librarian
51. A book being adapted in 2019
52. A book you found in a Little Free Library