Upon Further Review

I suppose I ought to explain a few things concerning my sudden interest in posting about books, and no, it has nothing directly to do with my own attempts at fiction.* 

Several months ago, a long-time blogger friend of mine put out a request for beta readers of a novel she was completing. Given that I’d long been an admirer of her artistic endeavors, I raised my hand and volunteered. “Why not,” I figured, since I was very curious about how her writing had been progressing.

A month or two later a PDF file was sent to me, and that meant I had to buckle down and get to work. Still, it was the holidays, and I’d already committed to installing some office furniture in the dining room of the house, effectively turning it into the home office we’d been using it as for over a decade.** So when I finally sat down to begin reading, I wasn’t sure if I had the time commitment to finish reading the novel to make any review useful. 

I guess I need not have worried, because once I got into the groove of reading, my usual issues with being sucked into a story reared their head and I found myself staying up far past 3 AM multiple nights. It got so bad that I would start reading during some particularly boring meetings at work. I have read books that I’ve simply had to give up because there was no drive to continue with the story, so kudos to my friend for writing an engaging novel. 

Oh crap, I hope I didn't look like
THAT. From Ranker.

When I finished, I sat back and said to myself “What now?”

I knew I should write up my thoughts and send them off to her, but I did ask several questions during a chat session we had after I reached the ending. I think I can count the number of romance novels I’ve read on one hand (two hands if you count Sharon Shinn, whose novels straddle the line between Fantasy and Romance), so I had questions about the genre, the word choices, some of the tropes I noticed, and how some parts of the novel fit together. She is currently well on her way toward finishing the second novel featuring the same characters, so I’m glad she’s continuing to write in the same world.***

Still, there was the nagging hole in my free time that only fiction could fill. 

Alcohol and reading books generally
don't mix well. Don't ask how I know
that one. From Imgflip.

I glanced over my long standing “to be read” pile, which had grown into a fairly large collection over the past decade, and poked at it for a while, wondering what to do. I eventually settled on The Chronicles of the Black Company rather than finish a series or two I’d started years ago as I would likely have to start over for those, and that can be a bit daunting. 

I’ve since reread my post on The Black Company, and one thing I noted was that while I tried to explain away my liking of the omnibus trilogy, the post itself was rather bland. I don’t think that I was intentionally avoiding taking a hard stand in either direction, because I realize that different people like different things about a book review, but watching the brouhaha over the Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson I realized that I was being the anti-rabble rouser. It’s not as if I have any grand, incisive commentary on the prose or the story, but even if I did I would have never have written my review in the same fashion that the author of the Wired article did. 

TL;DR: I don’t believe in being a dick.

***

"Card, you're too nice," is what a guildie once told me when I passed on gear I needed but that other people could use in the raid. He wasn’t wrong, because I don’t believe that being an asshole helps much in the long run. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry or inveigh against the gods from time to time –and I am a tower of fury when that happens—but I recognize that being in a constant state of anger is unhelpful. 

Which is also why I dislike certain aspects of the media –and social media—that rely upon raw emotional reactions to drive popularity. 

I have caught myself being angry at something I’ve seen on television or social media and only a while later I’ve gone back and discovered that the news article (or whatever) was carefully crafted to generate such a reaction out of me, or more importantly, people with my background. And that in turn has generated even more anger, but this time against those who performed the manipulation. Because of that, I’ve oriented my posts in PC to be less confrontational than they could be. There’s always a little devil sitting on my shoulder, telling me that if I was a bit louder, more arrogant, or more combative I’d see more traffic on the blog. And perched on the other shoulder is a little angel musing “You know, you could be a bit more assertive…”

“You’re not helping,” I tell her quite frequently.

“Still, in the end it’s who you want to associate with,” she presses on, ignoring my commentary. “Do you want to be with assholes, or with people you like?”

And I know the answer to that one. 

Yes, they are modeled after
The Devil's Panties. If you haven't
read this webcomic yet, GO!

So in the end, I'm going to stick to my guns and not be an asshole about these reviews. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be critical when I feel the need for it, but I can separate being critical from being a jerk.

And maybe after some months of reading I'll be able to slow down a bit and not read so voraciously. (I hope.)

*Back in high school, my guidance counselor would constantly hound me to read as much as I could, because he believed strongly that reading –any reading—would prepare me for college. He wasn’t picky about what I read, unlike my dad; he only cared that I was reading. My AP English teacher encouraged reading as well because he felt it would improve my writing. So, while I do realize that reading would improve my writing, that was only of secondary concern to why I’m reading more fiction than I have before. And stumbling on my high school journal entries a few months ago while cleaning, I can only say that my writing certainly needed all the help it could get. I was not a wunderkind like Christopher Paolini, for certain.

**It also meant my wife wasn’t spreading her papers all over the house and she finally had a space of her own. We had been using a dining room table we received as a hand-me-down from her sister for my desk, and a hodge-podge of 25-year-old pre-fab desks and microwave carts to hold everything.

***I even borrowed the name of something in the story for a baby Tauren Hunter I have on a Wrath Classic server, so I hope that imitation is surely the most sincere form of flattery.