(no subject)

[julesjones]

I spent much of yesterday setting up the new laptop, getting the old one ready to ship off to someone else, and trying and failing to get the WinME desktop and the Win XP Pro laptop to talk to one another over the network. Between that and loading another hundred or so books into LibraryThing, I didn't get any writing done yesterday. The LibraryThinging was useful, though, as I had a bit of a blitz on the teetering piles of books, and the A-L paperbacks bookcase is looking a lot tidier. One of the side-effects is that a bunch of book reviews and booklogging will be following this post -- I'm going to post the remaining books for February and March, and then the whole two books I can remember reading in April.

Whether I should keep doing this is another matter. Last week one of the writers I know mentioned in the course of "how to get your name in front of people" that he'd found review writing quite effective, but no longer did reviews, as now that he has a career it could be more hinderance than help. That's the second time in a month I've seen this issue mentioned by someone whose career has taken off recently. If you write reviews, you will inevitably annoy people. There will be people who hate you because you didn't praise a book, and people who will hate you because you did. (I mentioned in the lead-up to the review rant that I suspected that someone had given me an unhelpful rating on an Amazon review out of spite. The review in question was one praising the book, not slamming it...) Now, I should be so lucky as to be prominent enough to worry about this, but it is a possibility I have to keep in mind. I'm not inclined to stop -- but I am inclined to make it reasonably easy to pull reviews should it become necessary in the future. One of the things there is to *not* do what other reviewers on Amazon do, which is to have a signature in the body of the review so that when the various leeches suck reviews off Amazon you still get credit for your review. Perhaps I don't want to be credited on reviews where I have no further control on their publication...

Comments

[spacefall.livejournal.com]

I had lots of pain getting ME, 95, and XP talking to one another. I think I eventually installed the NetBEUI protocol.

[julesjones]

The Win9x and WinNT lines are notorious for not playing nicely together on a network.:-( Thanks for the suggestion. At this point I'm going to dump the job on Other Half (he was away at a conference yesterday, so I couldn't then) as he's had more experience with networking, but I shall pass the suggestion on to him.

I followed the instructions in the networking wizard, and the net result is that the laptop can see that the desktop is there, but can't see any of the files. Which is a pain, because not only do I want to shift all my files across without having to burn them to CD first (lappie has a port replicator and will be the new "desktop"), but the desktop is destined to be the big storage drive on the network. It's got a 200GB hard drive, so it's going to be where the photos get stored. Which doesn't really work unless the rest of the network can see it...

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

I'm going to find your email. I have an idea for you.

[julesjones]

Public one is jules.jones@gmail.com (though you may get a reply form a different one :-) .

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

found it, wrote it, sent it. But then you know that by now.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

I write reviews, and sometimes not nice ones. Just because I am published, I don't see why I should stop having opinions, as it were. And some people will hate you anyway, whatever you do, so you might as well keep at it.

I think two of mine are due out on SFSITE - they chanaged editions yesterday, I haven't looked to see if I"m up yet - but one of those reviews is NOT good. Hey, that's what I thought. I said WHY I thought it. ANyone who hates me for it, welll... [shrug].

[julesjones]

Nice to get another opinion on this, so thank you. :-)

It was... interesting... writing the one for Harald. I genuinely liked the book, but I also know that it took a while to get past that peculiar elliptical style that David opted for, and that the book might have been put down and not picked up again if I had not known the author and been willing to give him time to show me why I should keep reading. So while the review itself was not affected by knowing the author, my response to the book was.

[emmyjag.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that if you're going to base your actions on whether 100% of people around you agree and approve, not much will get done. If you read a book and sincerely enjoyed it, why not say so? Same if you didnt like it. You've always got your cop out of "It wasnt for me, but if you like this genre, you might like it". Your reviews are thoughtful and well written. The good majority of us read and take it for the input it is and make our own decision based on several reviews, not just one. No sense changing your entire life because one person out of the thousands who read reviews on Amazon happens to be, to use a technical term, an evil, spiteful bitch.

[julesjones]

Oh, "this book is not to my taste" is not a cop-out. I'm quite capable of writing reviews that say bluntly "this sucked". I don't know whether this link will work for you, but if it does, you'll see an example from my LibraryThinging yesterday. And yes, I will be putting this up at Amazon. Possibly with more detailed venom.

http://www.librarything.com/card_card.php?work=949781&book=3086469

(This book sucked galaxies through a straw. In fact, it _was_ the final straw as far as I was concerned - I'd have to be really, really desperate to buy a Boxtree book nowadays, and this book was merely the last and worst in a line of reasons why.)

[emmyjag.livejournal.com]

Did work, yes. And..um...ouch. Definitely got the impression that you were less than thrilled with the book, lol.

[julesjones]

I am so unthrilled with that book that even though I was mostly just bunging in ISBNs by then, I stopped long enough to write a micro review of *that* one, to ensure other people didn't make the mistake of thinking that it might be worth buying...