Good?

[threemonkeys]

Y'know I don't actually read that many book reviews. I used to, but as the years have rolled past, I find myself reading less and less of them. I still read a few such as the ones contained in lobelet's regular column, but that is at least as much if not more about reading the personal anecdotes than the reviews. But for the most part, the motivation has gone. So why is that.

Well, the first reason is easy - I don't need to read reviews to find books to read, I have more than I can handle as it is. In any case, I find the buzz about good new authors reaches me anyway. I don't need to read reviews to find out how the genre scene is moving at the moment. There are plenty of people around who will tell me that stuff directly - that goes for the previous point too. In fact, that may well be the key - I have enough sources of personal recommendation that I don't need to seek out other ones. I don't need to seek out validation of my opinions either. There was a time where I would read reviews of books that I had read to see if the reviewer agreed with me or not. Now I don't care - I'm happy to have my own opinions, knowing that others have theirs and that they differ and I can accept that.

So, I don't read so many reviews, yet I still write about what I read. The distinction is that I'm not going out to write something that is a review as such. I'm just writing a blog here about (part of) my life which happens to include books and the opinions that arise from that. It is a much looser and freer form of expression I think and often lets me concentrate on one little element of a work rather than the whole thing. It works for me anyway.

So what brought that on? Well, it is by way of a kind of apology to a number of people on my flist as this constitutes my blog entry for ASIM #32.