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Hope this isn't a repeat thread but I looked back a few pages and didn't see anything similar. I just recently started using http://www.goodreads.com and am really enjoying it as a tool to track the books I've read, am currently reading, and want to read. I also really like their recommendations which works kind of like Amazon's, you rate books and they recommend them to you. However, I find that goodread's recommendations can be narrowed down a lot more and they also further categorize them for you depending on your taste for some that have broader tastes in literature. The site also has a lot of giveaways of new novels of lots of different genres that you can sign up for and q & a's with authors. In any case, I'd like to add some people as 'friends' on there because I enjoy reading other people's reviews and would like to expand my goodreads social circle. I thought I'd start off by posting my profile and maybe other people can follow suit with their profiles if they want and add a bit about what they like to read. http://www.goodreads.com/bittercup Tastes: I read everything under the sun, literary fiction with an especial penchance for Japanese literature, fantasy (but not high fantasy), some science fiction, crime fiction. Currently I'm reading a lot of horror novels and zombie novels. I especially love apocalyptic and post apocalyptic scenarios and novels with a literary bent that has a sort of mystery to solve (examples are A.S. Byatt's Possession or Arturo Perez-Reverte The Flanders Panel) Last 5 books read: Michael Koryta - The Cypress House Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River Mira Grant - Newsflesh Trilogy 1 and 2 Rhiannon Frater - As the World Dies Trilogy 1 and 2 3 books I really love: Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea - I love this book because her descriptions of young Antoinette remind me of my own times in an equally foreign but beautiful tropical landscape where I didn't really feel like I belonged Yukio Mishima - Confessions of a Mask - Because Mishima's so hosed up and this semi autobiographical novel is so well written. Los Bros Martines - Love and Rockets - This is kind of cheating since it's a graphic novel but I love this series especially Gilbert Hernandez's take on smalltown life in Mexico which is strongly influenced by magic realism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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Jan 28, 2012 00:20
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Conduit for Sale! posted:I would write reviews if I could think critically and write not ungoodly. I'm trying to do at least a quick and dirty review of every book I read this year, it's also a good exercise for me to remember how I felt about the book at the time that I read it because I do sometimes like to reread books. It will be interesting to see if my opinion changes over time. One thing I find I do like reading in other people's reviews but can't get into doing myself is a quick synopsis of the book plot. I just can't be bothered. It feels too much like doing a grade school report. I *love* reading it in other people's reviews, but I just can't bring myself to do it.
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Jan 30, 2012 00:01
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AreYouStillThere posted:It's the main thing that bugs me about Goodreads too. I'm reading Lolita right now and was perusing the reviews, and this exact scenario happened a few times in just the 3 reviews that I read. It's extremely prevalent in the Young Adult paranormal romance crowd but that's probably because it really is inundated with terrible books. I don't really let it bother me too much. The older I get the less elitist I get about literary tastes. In my head, if someone gets into reading because they luvs the RPatz and end up reading all 4 of those Stephenie Meyer novels at least they're reading something, and right now they might think Lolita is a terrible novel - they might always think Lolita is a terrible novel - but somewhere down the line they might pick up Wuthering Heights and be like "hey! This is SO much more amazing then Stephenie Meyer!" Tastes change. People change. When I was a teen I read a lot of terrible romance novels and really bad vampire books. Even if they don't, who am I to judge. I like a lot of good books but have yet to get through an entire read through of the Brothers Karamazov despite 3 separate tries spanning over a decade. The only exception to this rule is Ayn Rand. She makes me retch.
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Jan 30, 2012 03:48
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On a slight tangent, I came across this blog post about some crazy drama on goodreads: http://cuddlebuggery.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-five-days-on-goodreads.html apparently there are some authors that also use goodreads that are starting to react badly to negative reviews of their novels. Now other readers are reacting and voting down books just because of the author's reaction. When you have an author that you like and then you come across them on the internet and realize that they are a total fuckwad, does that make you like their novels any less or are you objectively able to separate the novel from the writer?
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Feb 1, 2012 05:33
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Conduit for Sale! posted:But I suppose that's different than some genre or passable fiction (this should be a genre) writer being a dick. I liked Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion but I won't read any more of Simmons' books because he's a racist fuckhead. And I don't care how good Ender's Game is, I'm not giving Card any money because he's even more of a fuckhead. I didn't know this about Simmons, care to elaborate? I feel pretty much the same as you. I remember in my younger goth days being really into Poppy Z Brite and then she went and got a livejournal and I was like "My god, this person is the biggest twat to ever walk the earth!" All of you goodreaders that are wandering over to the 52 books a year thread are really tempting me to sign up but I'm nervous because I find I read less when I have a deadline or a quota to meet.
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Feb 2, 2012 00:43
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Conduit for Sale! posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3345499&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=67#post399725206 Thank you for the link I had no idea. How disappointing. I've read Carrion Comfort and enjoyed that but thought Drood was a little boring. The Terror was on my list but that does make me want to drop it. prolecat posted:Oh, and goodreads is just prettier. I agree, I have a librarything account too and it might sound incredibly shallow but I just like the way goodreads looks so much better. Poutling fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Feb 2, 2012 |
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Feb 2, 2012 02:44
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naptalan posted:Of course, that kind of behaviour is not specific to YA, just more prevalent. Just because an author writes "adult" fiction doesn't mean he's going to act like one. I honestly think that in this day and age of instant gratification that authors, especially 'rockstar' authors like Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, et al - should get a good publicist or handler to prevent this specific situation. That being said, I do think that Salon has a habit of getting rabidly malicious in their negative reviews of both books and movies. I tend to follow their good reviews and ignore their bad ones because sometimes I get the sense that the reviewers 'dislike' specific novels or movies just because they're likely to appeal to the masses. This is just my opinion, of course.
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Feb 2, 2012 05:33
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barkingclam posted:it's not quite as great as the modern library's list but it's still funny Wow... 2 Ayn Rand novels and L Ron Hubbard as top 3. That list is nightmarishly horrendous. I think no matter what you look at the general populace is always going to skew to a certain demographic. I tend to ignore that stuff and go for recommendations from reviewers that I actually trust and stick to reading only 3 or 4 star reviews with detailed criticism because those are the ones that will actually give me an good representation of what the novel in question is like.
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Feb 3, 2012 19:22
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Conduit for Sale! posted:How do you guys rate books that you liked when you were younger but probably wouldn't today? For instance, I used to be the biggest Haruki Murakami fan but I'm not sure I'd like him anymore. I don't know whether to rate it based on what I thought when I read it or what I think now, or just split the difference. I used to have an exclusive "read when I was younger" shelf but that was silly. Rate him according to your tastes now, so that your recommendations will be more accurate.
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Feb 18, 2012 18:10
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Conduit for Sale! posted:Shelves are nice but Goodreads really really really needs a tag system. I mean sure I can shelve Lies of Locke Lamora for instance as fantasy. But if there was a tag system I could tag it with like thieves, con artists, orphans, horse piss, whatever. I'm not gonna make a horse piss shelf because really I only think Lies of Locke Lamora would fit there. Tags would really make the recommendation system 1000% better. Just out of curiosity, why would you want to tag a book 'horse piss' if you knew it would only apply to this book? Is it for the sake of remembering that there was horse piss involved in this book somehow? And if so, why wouldn't you just use the review system as a way to jog your memory of specific things that caught your attention about the book? I'm honestly curious because when I tag things on a blog for instance it's for the purpose of categorizing which I assume is what they are trying to get you to do with the bookshelves. I think some of the most prolific goodreads posters have like 50 or 60 bookshelves at a time. I do agree that the shelving is a clumsy way of categorizing but it does help in the recommendation process, though I haven't gotten specific to the point that other people have (having a shelf devoted only to families sharing secrets, for instance). I do have a shelf devoted only to books set in boarding schools or universities and that seems to do a fairly good job in recommending similar items.
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Mar 6, 2012 07:53
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deety posted:Shelves, as they're implemented on GR, are a different thing than tags because they're the main way of navigating your book list. If you make as many shelves as you may want tags, you can no longer see them all down the left margin. Then you're stuck clicking back and forth between multiple pages in this massive, mostly alphabetical list in order to do anything. Those of us who want to have quick access to our most frequently used shelves can't have more than the fifty or so that will show on the book list without pagination. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't if you read a variety of subjects and would also like to use tracking shelves to mark things like library books, ebooks, or whatever. This makes sense to me, I can see why you would want that. I do see how the shelving system would get cumbersome when you get into the high hundreds with books and need to find one quickly.
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Mar 6, 2012 16:31
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Evfedu posted:Yeah, I am a Glad Person now that my hundreds of book impulse buys all fit on my Kindle. gently caress moving house when you own books. 149 books on my to-read shelf. My main rule now is I won't buy a book unless it's available in e-format. There are some exceptions to the rule but it's few and far between. I sold 10 boxes of books from storage last year to pay for my wedding rings. You are so right about moving with books. It sucks. I've slowly whittled my physical collection down over time because my marriage might end if we have to move all those books again.
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Mar 10, 2012 18:58
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Quad posted:One thing I learned about Goodreads that I should've already known, was that the book-specific forum threads are wretched. Catcher in the Rye has a thread about "I don't get it" and it's basically 30 pages of "Welp, obviously the book had no plot, Holden didn't do anything and it was a waste of time. THANKS FRESHMAN ENGLISH."... from, like everywhere between 18-45 year olds. I bet that it would be a different story if you were looking into a forum for a novel that's a little more esoteric and not so widely read by 8th graders who were forced to read it for English class. True story, while I was a poor starving university student I worked for a large chain bookstore. At least once a day I would have kids coming in requesting cliffs notes for the stupidest things. My favourites were: 1) That 'new poem by that guy Keats', you know, 'Ode to a Greekin' Urn' 2) Julia. Julia Caesar. By Shakespeare 3) Is this a library? Can I borrow as many cliffs notes as I want?
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Mar 13, 2012 19:15
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Hedrigall posted:Good YA fiction is in no way different to good adult fiction, apart from less sex and swearing. I mentioned this in the YA thread but I read somewhere that in the current market, the only feature that determines whether or not a book is young adult or not is whether or not the protagonist is a teenager. So a lot of books that probably should be classified as adult fiction gets bundled to young adult for just this reason. It's also interesting to note that the classification section seems to be determined by what shelves people put that specific book on so I guess a lot of people classify the books they read by putting it on a 'young adult' fiction shelf.
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Jun 18, 2012 03:26
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Criminal Minded posted:The idea of rating every book I've ever read is kind of hilarious. Like what the hell am I going to give Walter the Farting Dog or all those Goosebumps choose-your-own-adventure books? So yeah I don't bother, I just try to rate anything I've read with a critical eye. Kind of an arbitrary criterion but whatever. I review everything because I have pretty eclectic tastes and will read anything from a trashy romance novel to a non fiction book about widespread illegal antiquities purchases amongst the largest museums in North America. However, I still want to remember if I really liked that trashy romance novel compared to other ones I've read. You know what I don't get, why are there so many reviews with completely extraneous images in them?? I mean at first I thought, 'well, not many people like to read these days, you gotta hook 'em in with pictures'. Then I remembered I'm on a reading site. Where else can you expect people to read if not on an entire site about keeping track of what you're reading?? I find all the lolcatz-esque pictures in reviews to be really annoying.
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Jul 10, 2012 23:11
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Someone posted this in one of the groups I'm part of on Goodreads: http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/bullying-goodreads/ Apparently some anonymous authors have banded together to form a 'stop GR bullying' website and call out names of reviewers they feel are 'unfairly' bullying Goodreads authors. Thoughts?
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Jul 13, 2012 16:32
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Hasseltkoffie posted:It all seems rather childish. I guess if you'd wind up on that site you could press charges or something right? I highly doubt that any of the reviewers who ended up on that site could actually afford to press charges. It's really alarming to me because it makes me think twice about posting a bad review since the author could take offense and all of a sudden start stalking me. I think it will be interesting to see if Goodreads reacts at all to this. I would think if it got any worse that they would have to because it could cause some serious issues down the line.
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Jul 14, 2012 16:07
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Had my first author comment on a review today - it was a positive review so he just addressed some random 'thinking aloud' sort of questions I had and thanked me for my thoughtful comments, but I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole authors commenting on their own books thing. Admittedly as an author I think I would have a very hard time avoiding reading my own reviews but even in this case I think if I reviewed another of this author's novels it would make me hold my tongue somewhat knowing that he'll be reading and noting what I'm saying. Glancing down at other reviews for this book, I did note that he has been pretty good at not replying to most people and only in one case did he get somewhat snarky.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:44
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Yiggy posted:I know epublishing is supposed to democratize the ebooks that get out there, but you know, sometimes the filtering role the publishing houses play shows itself in a positive light. I don't necessarily think that the crazy is a result of e-publishing as it is a result the internet (and goodreads, by extension) giving both authors and readers more of a platform to voice their opinions. The issue is that goodreads allows those authors and readers to co-mingle - which, in a perfect utopia, sounds blissful and interesting where you get to communicate with that guy who wrote one of your favourite books - but in truth, you end up finding out that guy who wrote your favourite book is batshit cray-cray and you actually wish you'd never learned that fact because now your reading of that book will forever be tainted by the poo poo spewed from aforementioned author's fingertips onto the internet without the safety net of an editor. It's happened before livejournal, before that even, usenet, but goodreads just makes it more convenient.
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Aug 20, 2012 00:52
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Breaking news from this link: http://www.themidnightgarden.net/2012/08/q-with-dan-krokos.html a direct quote from an author that has a profile and is active on goodreads, Dan Krokos: quote:I bring this up because GR is going to be rolling out a premium author program eventually. According to them, we’ll be able to change the top review that appears if we pay some undetermined amount of money. Uh... what? So shady, goodreads! Not impressed with this. So now you are promoting this as more of an author space than a reader space. I've always known goodreads makes a lot of dollars on active promotion of novels through advertising but I think this is blurring the line a bit *too* much. Anyone heard about this before? Thoughts?
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Aug 21, 2012 21:47
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Goodreads keeps adding people from my facebook automatically which I don't like. Anyone know if there's a way to prevent this?
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Aug 31, 2012 22:03
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Perfidia posted:Oh god that Best Books Ever list is pretty depressing for the first 25-30 places. Twilight and Harry Potter as far as the eye can see. Things perk up a bit farther down, but I was just stunned speechless when I first hit the list. The voting for the 2012 best of list is so depressing. I started using the site more frequently when the 2011 goodreads best-of list came out and I have to say it's really gone downhill. There's WAY too many sequels, which I just don't get. Last year I picked up a lot of stuff from the best-of lists that were new to me and I really enjoyed. I don't get all the sequels and mainstream stuff. I guess the site really took off this year and got way more populist.
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Nov 15, 2012 19:41
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