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Archive for: October, 2008
Audiobooks: Reading, or Cheating?
This is from a column last month in Slate:
For all the column inches downloaded to Kindles this year about how electronic books will someday replace traditional ones, little has been made of the steady rise of another rival to the printed word: audiobooks. Nearly $1 billion worth were sold last year, meaning 15 percent of all books sold these days are the kind that read themselves.
I started listening to audiobooks in 2005 when I trained for a triathlon and was doing cardio for a gazillion hours a week (In case you’re wondering, I came in dead last. Like, the officials having to put down their burgers and dig their stopwatches out of their duffel bags last. But that didn’t stop me from referring to myself as a “triathlete” for at least a full year afterwards.). During that period, I listened to all the Harry Potter books on audio, and if you’ve ever heard the Jim Dale recordings, you know they set the gold standard for audiobooks.
When I started reading romance in 2007, it seemed like the perfect genre to try on audio, and I have had some pretty good luck. There’s nothing sexier (to my ears, anyway) than a deep Scottish brogue, and the male narrators of Beyond the Higland Mist and Born in Fire certainly had it goin’ on, as they say (the latter winning the 2008 Audie Award for best romance. Here’s a TRR article on Audies in Romance). Anna Fields does a great job with Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s books. And the female narrators of Megan Hart’s Dirty and Broken were terrific, perfectly capturing Elle and Sadie’s modern voices. But the best has to be Johanna Parker’s southern gal Sookie Stackhouse in Dead Until Dark: she’s perfect!
On the other hand, female narrators can have a tough time with male voices. Dan in Dirty sounded like a raspy voiced perv, and vampire Bill Compton sounds like an emotionless sociopath. For their part, male narrators pitch their voices higher to sound feminine, which often makes the female characters sound angry or hysterical. Racial issues are even trickier. How does a white narrator determine what a black character sounds like? (For more on this topic, read the Slate article or listen to When Audiobooks Jar the Ear, from NPR, September 2008. And if you’re looking for a good list of reliable romance narrators, check out this AAR thread).
But putting aside the question of whether it is well done, I’m wondering if listening to a romance audiobook is as good as reading it, or is it second best, or something even worse?
I found it difficult to find much on audiobooks specifically addressing romance. If you’re curious, the top five bestselling audiobook genres are:
1. Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
2. General Fiction
3. Science Fiction/Fantasy
4. Biography/Memoir
5. Classic Fiction
I suppose romance can be found in any of those. And Booklist Online‘s list of top selling romance audiobooks from 2006-2008 includes authors like Nicholas Sparks, whom I don’t consider romance writers.
Laurie of AAR wrote in a Shelfari discussion: “I have this mental block that has so far kept me from doing audiobooks; it seems like ‘cheating’ to me”. Inspirational romance author Brenda Coulter, confessed she just doesn’t get audiobooks in a 2005 column on her blog. Their worries are very common.
A New York Times article from 2007 quotes Dan Katz, a longtime author and journalist who founded Audible.com:
“When I started Audible, I was generally greeted with a level of derision”, Mr. Katz said by phone from Audible’s headquarters in Newark. “Not only did I get flak from my publishing industry friends, but my wife’s book group in Montclair let it be known that they considered listening to books to be cheating.”
First of all, let’s dispense with one myth implied by Dan’s experience: the idea that only illiterate people listen to audiobooks. Here’s some data from a September 2008 Press Release from the Audio Publishers Association,
• According to the Consumer Survey, audiobook listeners are more likely than the general public to read and purchase printed books. 92 percent of audiobook listeners reported that they have read a printed book in the past year—a third of them have read 16 or more.
• Listeners are also most likely to be college-educated.The majority of audiobook listeners are college educated (88 percent), according to the Consumer Survey.
Still, even if audioboooks aren’t the last bastion of uneducated nonreaders, I think there are some legitimate worries. An older (2005) New York Times article articulates some of them, with the help of a famous author and a literary critic:
“I think every writer would rather have people read books, committed as we are to the word,” said Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, Angela’s Ashes. “But I’d rather have them listen to it than not at all.”
Some critics are dismayed at the migration to audio books. The virtue of reading, they say, lies in the communion between writer and reader, the ability to pause, to reread a sentence, and yes, read it out loud – to yourself. Listeners are opting for convenience, they say, at the expense of engaging the mind and imagination as only real reading can.
“Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”
Mr. Hamburg, a screenwriter, says he limits his audio habit to biography, eschewing fiction out of respect for authors whom he imagines did not intend for their creative work to be read “when you’re doing 30 minutes on your elliptical trainer.”
It’s true that audiobooks allow the listener to multitask: drive, workout, do the dishes, walk. But do audiobook listeners pay less attention than traditional book readers? I often also multitask when reading: have the presidential debate on TV, the music playing, wait at the doctor’s office, keep an eye on my kids in the back yard, etc. And I have been known to skim ahead when reading, something I never do when listening: listening to an audiobook always takes longer than reading one.
We all know about different learning styles: some of us are aural/auditory while others are better suited to print/visual media. There’s an immediacy to the audio that I love: I am more in the moment when I listen, than when I read. That may be due in part to the “enhanced” features of the audiobook: the performance aspect.
On the other hand, that performance locks the listener in, not just to a specific voice, but to a certain way of saying things. The narrator is constantly making choices, choosing one interpretation of the material, that may not be what I would have chosen. S/he speaks quickly or slowly, loudly or softly, in anger or exasperation or anxiousness, emphasizes certain words.
Here’s some great insight into the process from the point of view of narrator Wanda McCaddon from a March 2008 post at Word Wenches:
Some narrators (and some publishers) prefer a straight read without voicing the characters (in the trade, “unvoiced reading”). I’m in the other camp. To begin with, in an audiobook something has to take the place of visual cues the reader would see on the page– paragraph breaks, quotation marks etc.– to alert them to who is speaking. And luckily, I can’t help it – when I read a work of fiction I hear different voices.
The narrator’s job is to interpret to the ear all the author has packed into the words – what I call “teasing out the nuances.” It’s collaborative, and largely non-intellectual, and when the writer and narrator are in synch it can be astonishing.”
If the narrator is making these choices for the listener, I guess I can see why some would think of it as being “spoon fed” and requiring less imagination on the listener’s part.
The audiobook constrains listeners in another way: it’s either forward moving or stopped. You can’t reread and savor particularly moving or important or confusing passages. You can’t even bookmark to go back to them later. That’s actually my biggest irritation with them. In that sense, it’s more like a performance, like going to see a play or a poetry slam.
The engagement may be more intense in some ways, but it’s a one off. I never re-listen to audiobooks. If I really love an audiobook, I go out and buy the book. I can’t say the reverse is true.
But maybe we are not intellectually shortchanging ourselves after all. Here’s what a neuroscientist had to say in the 2007 NY Times article quoted above:
“If the goal is to appreciate the aesthetic of the writing and understand the story,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, then there won’t be much difference between listening and reading. “The basic architecture of how we understand language is much more similar between reading and listening than it is different.”
We know that oral narration is much older than the written word. Can we view audiobooks as a continuation of that venerable tradition? Or, because audiobooks are recordings of printed text read aloud, are they merely derivatives of their pure form? Does it matter that the creator isn’t the storyteller?
And are there genre-specific concerns? For example, most romances focus heavily on a heterosexual relationship, and most audiobooks have one narrator of one gender. Is that a built-in problem?
Specifically, what about the sex? On the one hand, steamy scenes on the printed page are squirm inducing enough — either because they are very poorly written or very, ahem, well written — without adding a female narrator grunting in sotto voce or a male narrator keening in falsetto.
On the other, we’ve all talked about how romance, in every subgenre, has become more explicit, and how the sexier the book the better it seems to sell. Apparently, this is true for audiobooks as well. In another New York Times article (this one from 2007), which — brace yourself — refers to romance novels as “bodice rippers” (yeah, cause there are so many bodices in the contemporary Harlequin to which the article refers, Carly Phillips’s Simply Sexy) the popularity of audible erotica is highlighted. According to an Audible.com spokesperson quoted in the article, there’s a hidden benefit to audible erotica: “One of the things that makes erotica sell better for us than other places is that when you’re on the subway listening to your iPod, no one knows whether you’re listening to The Wall Street Journal or a Penthouse book.”
A final issue, although one not really relevant to quality, is cost: until the advent of the MP3, audiobooks, on cassettes or CD cost way more than their paper counterparts. Even now, audio downloads tend to be more costly than printed books: Megan Hart’s Dirty is $17.95 at Audible and $11.16 at Amazon, for example.
If I cut audiobooks out of my life, I would read about about 1/3 fewer books a month. While the format has its shortcomings, I think I’m leaning towards the view that listening to books is different — but not necessarily inferior — to reading them on the printed page.
Contest Winner
The winner of the “Winner’s Choice” contest is Violet, who chose Seduce Me At Sunrise.
Violet, please send me your address at romanceroundup@romanceroundup.com so I can get the book to you pronto!
Thanks, everyone, for making it the best contest ever!
Comments are off for this post
Review: Broken Wing, Judith James
Cover comment: Look closely at this cover: it tells you more than you can imagine about this book, including how hero-centric (but not in a bad way) it is. I never would have picked this one up if it hadn’t been for Kristie(j)’s enthusiasm, but I am so glad I did.
Series?: No.
Setting: Napoleanic era (very early 19th century) Paris, London, Falmouth, the high seas, and the Barbary coast (north Africa, especially Algiers)
Heroine and Hero: Sarah Munroe, the “Gypsy Countess”, an unconventional, pantaloon wearing, intelligent, mentally healthy, and loving young widow, and Gabriel St. Croix, beautiful but deeply wounded and socially inept young man, orphaned and raised in a Parisian brothel, trained to service every sexual desire, no matter how sadistic, of both women and men.
Plot: This is an epic, sort of like Outlander, and it’s almost two books in one. Sarah and Gabriel meet in the very first chapter, when she and her brother, Ross, come to a Paris brothel to collect their younger brother, Jamie, who disappeared 5 years earlier. Realizing that Gabriel has protected Jamie, and that his presence will make Jamie’s transition to normal life easier, they invite him to their seaside home in England for one year. Once there, the focus is on Gabriel’s adjustment to post-prostitute life, and his growing friendship with and love for Sarah. Eventually, they are parted again — for a good 125 pages (1/4 of the book) – as Gabriel takes to the seas, and the adventure aspect of the book dominates as he fights to save himself and return to Sarah.
Distinctive Features: This book is really Gabriel’s story, told from his point of view, and he is quite unusual for a romance hero, not fitting in to any of the old categories (alpha, beta, gamma). The romance, while strong, takes place against a very elaborate historical backdrop.
Word on the Web:
The first entry has to go to Kristie(j), of Ramblings on Romance, who loved Broken Wing so much that she not only gave it 6 out of 5 stars (Is this kind of like Spinal Tap’s amp volume dial that goes to eleven?) but emailed me and every other romance blogger out there to encourage us to read it. Her partner in crime, Katiebabs, also is also giving it positive feedback so far.
Rosie, Nobody Asked Me, “a very good book”
Wendy the Super Librarian, C-
Amy C., Romance Book Wyrm, excellent
Barbara, Happily Forever After, 5 of 5 hearts
Anna Vivian, 5 stars
Kati, Romance Novel TV, 5+ stars
Leslie’s Psyche, A
Dear author, Janet, B- (I fully expected some soberness from the DA review. I’m not sure why.)
Amazon.com, 5 stars after 2 customer reviews
My take in brief: Although not everything in this book worked for me, I am really glad I read it, and am excited about discovering this new author.
The Racy Romance Review:
Right away, I was hooked on the plot, the hero, and the writing, and Broken Wing kept me interested all the way until the last — 434th — page. In the Prologue, we meet Gabriel, the hero, sitting outside of the Paris brothel where he has been basically imprisoned since early childhood. His character’s internal conflict is immediately set up: he wants love and human relationships, but feels both that he is unworthy of them, and at that they will only cause him pain. Here are the last few lines of that chapter:
Taking one last look at the angry sky, he sketched an elegant, mocking bow to whichever almighty sadist ruled the universe. Crossing his arms over his chest, shirt wet with blood, rain, and tears, he made his way back toward the sounds of shrill laughter, and the soft moans of men and women in pleasure and in pain. Opening the door, he stepped inside. Moist and seething, it smelled of whiskey and rum, tobacco and semen. It smelled like sex and desperation. He grinned. It smelled like home.
Gabriel doesn’t know it, but he will soon be leaving Paris to live with the family of the young boy he has protected for the past five years. The bulk of the book is spent on Gabriel’s journey from tortured young man to mature loving and productive adult. It doesn’t come quickly or easily, despite the warmth and inclusiveness of his new hosts. James does a great job of communicating Gabriel’s social awkwardness and self-loathing, as in this scene:
They’d invited him to join them, of course, several times; they were nothing if not polite, but he had no desire to perch, awkward and sullen, an ugly cuckoo soiling their nest, spoiling the intimacy of their evening.
It is through Gabriel’s friendship with Sarah that he becomes human again, and their many scenes together, often watching the stars from her balcony, are very romantic. Gabriel has to learn to turn everything he hated to have to use as a whore into something good – his sexuality, his humor, his musical gifts, even his looks, and Sarah sensitively helps him with all of it. In fact, reading this book made me realize that it’s not too common in this genre to watch a true friendship slowly unfold between the hero and heroine, and also, that, while sex is in abundance these days, it’s rare to have so many poignant scenes of platonic caring and sharing with one another. While Broken Wing is an intense book, and things get worse before they get better for Sarah and Gabe, I hope readers will not be put off by the sexual sadism, the bloody battles, etc., because there is a genuine, heartbreaking, and very rare sweetness to be found in these pages.
Sarah is somewhat naive, not realizing at first what an invitation to her bedroom to watch the stars must seem like to a man with Gabriel’s experience of women, and while she has her own semi-tragic back story, it pales in comparison to the personal growth and struggles of Gabriel. She’s spunky and independent and caring and kind and intelligent and endlessly giving and patient: she’s just about perfect, actually, which makes her a lot less interesting (aside from falling in love, her character really doesn’t grow or change), although she’s probably exactly what Gabriel needs.
There are other interesting and well drawn secondary characters especially Sarah’s family, including the somewhat uptight and disapproving Ross, the semi-wild pirate (or privateer, depending on how you view it), Davy, and Gabriel’s sardonic friend and fellow mercenary in Africa, the disgraced nobleman Valmont. Davy eventually takes Gabriel under his tutelage, and this sets the stage for the lovers’ long separation, during which we hear very little of Sarah but instead follow Gabriel out to sea on his many adventures.
I am probably wrong, but I feel like I can understand why the author did this: Gabriel has been buffeted by events his whole life. Indeed, as a hero he is the most passive I can recall. Things aren’t helped by so many other characters referring to him as young, childlike, boyish, lithe and lanky, awkward, and angelically beautiful. Given Sarah’s matching naivete, I almost felt at times as though I were reading YA, rather than romance.
Gabriel’s adventures away from Sarah give his character a chance to do all the things a young man is supposed to do on this kind of hero quest: deal with his childhood, become mentally stronger, and establish his own career and wealth. However (I don’t want to give too much away) things don’t turn out quite as we expect when Gabriel finally does return to Europe, and in many ways his character is back to square one, for reasons I found unclear or at least unconvincing. While Gabriel is tortured, needy and basically a good person, his character did not leap off the page for me.
I felt, all the way through this book, that there was a slight distance between me and the goings on. I wasn’t completely moved as I should have been. I think this was partly due to the author telling us a lot of what was going on rather than showing us through the characters’ own feelings and actions, and that was partly due to her having such a complex and long story to tell. Lines that quickly describe the passing of great swathes of time, like, “they fought throughout the rest of the winter and into the spring, for Mashouda Murad Reis, who fought for the Sultan Mulai Slimane, who fought for control of Morocco…” were common. And sometimes, those time leaps were present in the most intimate of scenes, like Sarah and Gabe’s first kiss, one of those deeply touching scenes I mentioned above:
Not much experienced with kissing, he was nevertheless a sensual man. He’d thought it a curse until this moment. now he surrendered to it, trusted it, softening his kiss as he stroked her lips with his tongue, dragging his full firm mouth back and forth across hers, gentle and slow, then hard and deep. Mouth, tongue, soft whispers and tender caresses, they continued long into the night, drugged and lost in each other.
I remember feeling very jarred out of the moment by the words, “they continued long into the night”.
But it’s also probably just one of those things, that subjective element of reviews I keep trying to minimize or explain away. This book has so much to offer, and I am betting this author does as well. I hope you will give it and her a try.
New contest — Winner’s Choice
Ok, I have never had more than three people enter any one of my contests, and I have really enjoyed sending off my books to fellow romance lovers, so to increase participation, I’m offering the winner a choice of any one of these three books, all of which I have reviewed (see the list of reviews on the sidebar for links).
To enter, make a comment indicating which book you would choose if you won, and why, or post a link to the contest on your own blog. Do both, and you are entered twice.
Be warned: while these are in excellent condition (I am one of those people who cannot stand to break the spine) I did fold over several pages.
Enter by midnight eastern standard time on Wednesday, and I’ll use random.org to pick a winner. More info here.
Review: Seduce Me At Sunrise, Lisa Kleypas
Cover Comment: Luscious, and the models in the stepback are perfect
Series?: Yes. This is the second of the Hathaway series, the first of which was Cam’s story, Mine til Midnight, and the next installment is (I think) Poppy’s story, followed by Leo’s.
Heroine and Hero: She’s Win Hathaway, serene virginal young woman, newly recovered from a dread illness, hopelessly in love with Kev Merripen, orphaned Rom gypsy who came to live with the Hathaways after a horrendous and violent childhood, leaving him more beast than man, but man enough to be hopelessly in love right back with Win.
Distinctive feature: Requited love from page 1. Name another romance that has that! Oh, and the heroine is described as a “fastidious little cannibal” during one of the love scenes.
Word on the Web:
KMont, Lurv a la Mode, 5 scoops
Jane, Dear Author: B-
Romance Rookie, Jill D., A
Cheryl, AAR, A-
Ana, Book Smugglers, 9 out of 10 (check out the comments thread for a long comment by Ms. Kleypas herself about Merripen!)
Ramblings on Romance, joint review and chat, Kristie(J), 5+, and Katiebabs, 4 out of 5
CindyS, Nocturnal Wanderings, B
TGTBTU, Gwen, A
Holly, Book Binge, 4.75 out of 5
Nath and Lori, joint review at Breezing Through, Nath: “mediocre to good”, and Lori: about the same
Lawson, TGTBTU, A
Drusilla, The Romance Bureau, C (and check out this site for the most unique romance review set up I have yet seen!)
Kati, Romancenovel.tv, 4.75 stars
Romance Novels, “absolutely adored” it
Romance Vagabonds, A
Leslie’s Psyche, A-
Stacy, Stacy’s Place on Earth, 4 3/4 out of 5
Amazon.com, 4 stars after 24 reviews
Harriet Klausner Falsoid (you know, like a factoid, only false): Too many to list, which is actually kind of impressive for a three paragraph “review”, raising the question of whether there is a kind of excellence in wrongness. Animegirl’s comment puts it best: “Get your facts straight before embarrassing yourself with sucky, uninformed reviews.”
My Take in Brief: Very good — great if you like your heroes angsty and your dramatic tension high — but not my fave by this author.
The Racy Romance Review:
Like most romance readers, especially lovers of historical romance, I adore Lisa Kleypas. This is the seventh book of hers I have read, and I have enjoyed them all. I can’t say this ranks up there with her best — for me, Devil in Winter, Dreaming of You, or It Happened One Autumn — but the emotional intensity of the lead relationship, combined with a winning heroine and Kleypas’s trademark strengths in juggling ensembles and subplots, made it a very good experience for me overall.
SMAS opens with an intense scene between Win and Kev: she is leaving for France to complete her recovery from scarlet fever, and she wants Kev to acknowledge his feelings for her. I thought it was terrific that the reader is introduced to these two this way, in the middle of things. Their emotions are so strong — love, lust, fear, anger — that they seem uncontainable in the small room in which this conversation takes place. Those who’ve read Mine til Midnight, in which Kleyaps provided glimpses of their relationship, will have been primed for this type of scene, but I found it believable and compelling even though I skipped Cam and Amelia’s story.
Win is terrific. In an earlier post, I noted that heroines can be strong in a lot of different ways, and Win is an example of that. She is consistently the more honest, mature, risk taking and even dominant in their relationship, despite all of Kev’s bluster, while remaining traditionally feminine in demeanor and appearance. Her illness has sharpened her awareness of the precariousness of life, and has given her hopes for marriage and family a kind of focused intensity. It’s what she wants, and if Kev cannot get over his unexplained reluctance to be with her, she will find someone else.
There is a someone else — Win brings him back from her two year convalescence in France – and while his presence provides a monkey wrench to get Kev out of his very stuck place, and also provides a suspense subplot, this character is not well drawn, and never, to my mind, posed a credible enough threat to be interesting. Of course, we do have the rest of the Hathaways, and even appearances of a Wallflower couple, and those scenes, which some readers may feel are overused, give the book a levity and easy warmth that serve as a welcome contrast to the intense quality of the Kev/Win scenes.
The scene stealing star of this book is actually Leo, Win’s older brother, the classic self-deprecating rake with a heart of gold, a wonderful sense of humor, and a core of darkness underlying all the mirth. Leo butts heads early on with the stern new governess, hired to help younger siblings Poppy and Beatrice — near social outcasts thanks to their unconventional family — make something out of their London seasons. Here’s a typical Leo (and Kev) scene:
“I’ve been wondering … Is [the governess] a misandrist, or does she hate everyone in general?”
“What is a misandrist?
“A man-hater”
“She doesn’t hate men. She’s always been pleasant to me and Rohan.
Leo looked genuinely puzzled. “Then … she merely hates me?”
“It would seem so.”
“But she has no reason!”
“What about your being arrogant and dismissive?”
“That’s part of my aristocratic charm,” Leo protested.
“It would appear your aristocratic charm is lost to Miss Marks.” Kev arched a brow as he saw Leo scowl. “Why should it matter? You have no personal interest in her, do you?”
“Of course not,” Leo said indignantly. “I’d sooner climb into bed with Bea’s pet hedgehog. Imagine those pointy little elbows and knees. All those sharp angles. A man could do fatal harm to himself, tangling with Marks…” He stirred the plaster with new vigor, evidently preoccupied with the myriad dangers in bedding the governess.
A bit too preoccupied, Kev thought.
Like I am sure every other reader, I cannot wait for Leo’s story.
Kev’s Rom ethnicity is probably the focal issue of the book: not just his mysterious origins, and his troubled relationship with Cam, fellow Romany gypsy and new member to the household, but also his take on gender and romantic relationships. To her credit, Kleypas doesn’t restrict her exploration of Kev’s ethnicity to mentioning his dark skin and eyes every so often. Readers come to understand how central Kev’s ethnic identity is to him, even as he integrates into white English upper class culture and wrestles with the complicating fact that his own people abused him and left him for dead as a child. Readers are also given a lot of information about the Romany people, and are exposed to the range of views of gypsies that whites — gadjos – would likely have had: members of the ton who shun the Hathaways because of it, and the servants who feel superior, as revealed in a scene in which a servant says a gypsy boy is speaking “gibberish” when Kev knows he is, in fact, speaking “perfectly articulate Romany”. Further, the villain’s evilness is signaled by his racially motivated hatred of the hero.
However, and here is my quibble with the book: Kev is, for most of the book, a very one note character. He wants Win — it is clear he is in desperate love and lust with her, and Kleypas treats us to terrific flashbacks in which this love develops – but feels he is unworthy, because he has nothing to offer her in terms of social standing, wealth, or even manners, and, more deeply, because, like many other victims of child abuse, he secretly feels he doesn’t deserve happiness.
But Kleypas’s descriptions of him sound this same note over and over and over: he’s savage, he’s a beast, he’s an animal, he’s primitive, he’s uncivilized. He’s “impenetrably mysterious”, “demonic”, a “vile tempered troll”, and “would never be more than half-tame”, and on and on until very late in the book. If you haven’t read it, it’s hard to convey how saturated this book is with images of the hero as nonhuman. I have to admit it, that even with the explanatory background of child abuse, this bothered me on both literary and moral levels.
Second, Kev’s emergence from the pit of self-loathing that Kleypas has dug so well seemed pretty abrupt, following directly upon his deflowering of Win. After the scene in which they are first together, a touching and beautiful interlude, references to Kev’s animal nature, as well as his antisocial behavior, disappear almost completely from the book. I guess this came a little too close to the “magic hoo ha” for me.
Still, this was an enjoyable read, and will certainly not be the last in this series for me.
Why Glomming May be Bad for Your Author-Reader Relationship
Or, Three Things I Learned From Library Thing
I just started setting up my Library Thing library. Gosh that’s fun!
Unfortunately, my blogging platform will not allow me to put that neato set of book covers in my sidebar (grrrrr….), so I had to do it in the makeshift way you see below and to the right. But you can click on the link and check out what else I’ve read in the past 18 months of romance insanity (although I’m not finished setting it up yet).
The process of entering my reads all at once made a few details about my reading habits show up that I normally wouldn’t have noticed. For one thing, when the hell did I read all of those Sherrilyn Kenyon books? I mean, I’ve read 7. Seven! That’s more than any other author, even authors I absolutely adore like Loretta Chase and Jennifer Crusie!
For another, I am pretty fickle. I clearly have no compulsive need to start a series at the beginning or to read it straight through. Kresley Cole’s paranormals? I’ve read books 1, 3, 4 and 5. Nalini Singh’s 
Psy/changeling series? Books 1, 2, and 4. I’ll read the first and third books in a trilogy, and not in that order. Or, as in JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood or Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander saga, I’ll trail off in the middle of the series and never return to it.
But here’s the most surprising thing: glomming is apparently not good for my relationship with an author. I was inputting books and thinking back to how much I liked them. The first Crusie books I read were Bet Me and Welcome to Temptation and I loved both of them. But then I glommed her, and my affection for each book I read diminished slightly, until the last two (Don’t Look Down and Crazy For You) were DNFs. The same thing happened with 
Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons, and with Susan Elizabeth Phillips. By the time I got to SEP’s Breathing Room, I had read 4 or 5 of her other books, and I was just SEP’ed out. I have Natural Born Charmer in my TBR pile but no idea when or if I will get to it.
Why is this? Possibly it has a lot to do with the fact that I read the best books first, based on reviews and the AAR’s top 100, for example.
But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I’ve wondered in my reviews whether it’s fair to make a great author compete against herself, and I am certainly not the only person to do that. We often say things like, “Well, [insert your favorite author here] on her bad day is better than most of them on good days.” But when I read 3 or 4 or 5 of the same author’s books in a row, I am forced to compare them to each other. Perhaps if I 
had stuck a book by a newer author or in a different genre in between all those Bridgertons I would have liked them all, individually, more.
I’m thinking that glomming is not good for my relationship with an author, and although sometimes the urge is irresistable, I’m going to try to pace myself from now on … for both our sakes.
Is a Book Review Just One Person’s Opinion?
“Readers are the best source for why a story works”
–Joey Hill
Are book reviews just opinions, like a preference for pastels, or bondage, or spicy food? Many authors seem to think so:
In an article for AAR written in 2000, Adele Ashworth writes:
“I think it’s safe to say that all authors care immensely about their readers, and write every single book in the hope of pleasing every single one of them. That isn’t possible, of course, when we’re talking about something subjective. … [E]verybody’s taste is different, including mine.”
And this from an Anon author in response to Ms. Ashworth:
“Here’s how I look at it: I get a review from Reviewer A, who reviews at a tough site that prides itself on telling it like it is, who I don’t know from Adam and, as far as I know, has no reason to suck up to me. She enjoys the book and says lovely things about it. I get a review from Reviewer B, who reviews at a tough site that prides itself on telling it like it is, who I don’t know from Adam and, as far as I know, has no nefarious plans to wreck my career. She hates the book and says unlovely things about it.
What transports Reviewer A into ecstasy absolutely incenses Reviewer B. What bugs the crap out of Reviewer B doesn’t even cause Reviewer A to bat an eyelash. Both are normal, intelligent people who believe they’re right and stand by their claim.
(Repeat this with Reader A and Reader B)
What does this ‘teach’ me, the author?
It teaches me that Reviewer A likes my book and Reviewer B doesn’t like my book.”