(I know a lot of you have been over this, but I started this blog to work some things out for myself, and that’s what I’m doing here. Apologies for reinventing the wheel, but it’s my speciality!)
Arguments against:
A Change in Blog Policy
Readers of this blog know that one of my goals is to link more reviews together than is usually done. I think it’s unfortunate, in a way, that the online romance community has flourished as series of separate fiefdoms (blogs) rather than a big town hall (fora). Thanks to Google reader and conscientious blog hopping, we do all manage to get around, but when it comes to posting reviews, they are often islands unto themselves.
The result is that, even on the big blogs where everybody can be found on one thread, conversations about books tend to be conducted the way some professors run their classes: one main speaker holding court and several students talking one at a time to her, but not to each other.
Why this blog?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want this blog to be. I know the blog will meet a personal need to keep track of what I read. But as I was driving to pick up my kids from camp yesterday, listening to the Audible.com version of Susan Mallery’s Irresistable, it hit me what else I want it to do: be a meta review site.
Being an academic, I research everything. I hate to be a walking (typing?) stereotype, but it’s true. So, when I am thinking about whether to buy a romance novel, especially by an author who is new to me, I read lots of reviews.
When I am deciding whether to purchase a book, I read reviews on Amazon.com (often this makes me feel a bit icky afterwards, but I have to start somewhere), then on to my favorite romance review websites (see the links on the sidebar). It is no surprise that reviews on Amazon.com are all over the map, what with authors’ husbands, BFFs, critique partners, and pet parakeets vying to get the raves in before disgruntled former fans, competing authors, and evil pet monkeys skew things with their one star slams. And then you have the batch of folks who wandered in from some other genre, complaining that the book focuses heavily on the central relationship between the heroine and hero, that there is sex (!), and that everything gets resolved in the end. So, not so reliable.
