Showing posts with label goodreads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label goodreads. Show all posts
July 16, 2012
Follow me to Tumblr!
You can still find me, cyberly speaking, at the venues listed here--Heroes and Heartbreakersm Goodreads, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.--but I've taken to very short blog snippets on Tumblr. Please follow me there.
May 28, 2012
This blog is going on indefinite hiatus. Very few of you read it, and I'd rather reach a larger audience. If that mean spreading myself across multiple social media platforms, so be it. As a result I've provided handy-dandy buttons within two tables below for all the places you can follow me.
My tweets tend toward the political, and I'm progressive. Most of my library database is on Goodreads, and as it is becoming more and more the readers' social media outlet, I've just begun to post reviews there. Goodreads will more or less replace this blog, at least for now.
| Goodreads | Google+ | Huffington Post | My Jam | |||
My Facebook offers some personal nuggets and funny stuff. I try to keep my political stuff on a FB group I started earlier in the year. Google+ seems to be a more visual sort of social media outlet, so I try to post mostly photos, although when I post a review or a piece of writing somewhere, I'll link to it from g+. I pin at both Pinterest and Loveit, but since the latter is in beta, I didn't create a button. If you are a Loveit beta tester or would like to be, I'll be glad to share an invite and/or my home there. If you have a page on the Huffington Post, feel free to use the button below to link to mine. Finally, I post a weekly song to This Is My Jam. Nobody else uses it, but I try and curate my selections thoughtfully.
Though I've reviewed at Publishers Weekly since the late 1990s, other than a feature article I wrote last year, reviews remain without bylines. But it's a huge part of my work life, so feel free to link to PW, and if you are a subscriber, each week you can access upwards of 80 new reviews.
 Writer |  Blogger |  Member |  Reviewer |
After a substantial injury-related hiatus, I'm back on Heroes & Heartbreakers, with four posts in recent weeks. I've not written anything for some time at NBCC, but it's particularly interesting to those interested in literary fiction. Finally, the green leaf will [eventually] take you to my Amazon profile page, and the hundred plus reviews I've written.
And now I'm off to Goodreads to review Tiffany Reisz's The Siren.
July 29, 2011
My Favorite Authors
Back in the day I charted the authors who'd written multiple Desert Isle Keepers. I thought it might be fun to change it slightly. This new chart includes all authors with at least one DIK, and if they have [only] one DIK, they must also have two B+ reads. I may also do another chart of the next rung "down"—one DIK and [just] one B+/multiple B's (think Madeline Hunter), or authors with lots of B range grades (such as MaryJanice Davidson or Calvin Trillin), mostly at the upper end (like Anne Rivers Siddons). I'm also considering a chart of authors with the widest variation of grades, like Catherine Coulter, who has lots of DIKs, but also many D's/F's.
In the chart that follows, if you see this color, it refers to an addition over the original chart, and includes individual books, authors, and the entire "B+" column.
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Whaddya think?
BTW, Goodreads and my tags at Goodreads made this an easy task as I have a tag for Desert Isle Keepers, and separate my B+'s from other B's by star (4=B+, 3=B/B-)
March 2, 2011
That Was Quick!
By the time I finished writing tomorrow's blog entry for Toe in the Water, I received notification of a Twitter "@ mention" indicating my second piece for Heroes and Heartbreakers was live. And so, I can now reveal what primarily I will be writing for H&H: Short essays on new releases.
Through digital arcs made available under netgalley—unless the book is published under a Macmillan imprint—I will be writing about new books. These brief pieces are not traditional reviews; indeed, there is no synopsis given. Instead I will accompany back cover blurbs with a point of focus about the book from my perspective, something I liked...or did not like...about it, if that something is worthy of mention.
Because these are not traditional reviews and no grades accompany them, I've decided to omit grades on future reviews here on Toe in the Water as well so that I don't drive myself crazy. Also, I plan on using back cover blurbs in lieu of synopses as well, something I often did on my old blog. The difference between what I'll be writing here and what I'll be writing at H&H is that here, except for the synopsis difference, you'll be reading an actual review on the book in its entirety. Tomorrow's review, btw, is of the new J.D. Robb.
I'll be keeping up with all this new reading...all my reading regardless of the venue (if there's a venue at all) as well, on Goodreads, but if I write about a book at H&H, I won't assign a rating at Goodreads, although I will link to my essay.
P.S. Because I am required to rate books I review for Amazon Vine, I decided to keep grades here on the blog. The only grades that will not appear, then, are for those books I write about at Heroes and Heartbreakers.
October 15, 2010
Goodreads & Kindle 3 Update
I spent much of the past several days doing three things: reading; moving my book database from Shelfari to Goodreads; and working on my Kindle 3 library. I read three books and the review for the first of the three is excerpted here on my blog...the full review is at Amazon. My book database now resides in full at Goodreads and I'm slowly deleting all but my DIK's from Shelfari, after having removed the Facebook apps for Visual Shelf and IRead. And as of this evening, using the same tags I set up on Goodreads, I've re-organized more than 110 titles in my library and now have close to 300 of my 1,200 book collection on my Kindle all catagorized, thereby fulfilling my librarian complex.
While going through my old blog to catch any stragglers to add to the Goodreads database, I came across my original entries deciding on Shelfari as opposed to Goodreads. Now I remember it had to do with the rating systems; on Goodreads the one star rating is for books I don't like, the two star rating is for okay books, and the three other ratings are for levels of like. At the time that bothered me. Now...not so much. Does it really matter how much I dislike a book if indeed I dislike it? I'll continue to maintain a personal book database on my computer and will grade books on my blog, but I'm satisfied with letting other Goodreads users know which books I found okay, liked, liked a lot, or loved, and using the "didn't like" option for books I grade C-, D, or F.
I plan to review the other two books before reading anything else, and will probably spend an hour or so a day working on my Kindle library using Calibre. It's pretty phenomenal and I hope it can withstand the size of my library. But right now I'm watching Bill Maher and deleting books from Shelfari.
October 14, 2010
Changing Tastes
The other day while working at B&N, I hand-sold the entire House of Rohan print trilogy to a customer, and noticed that when I was telling her about its heroes, all of whom go over the "heroes on the edge" boundaries, mentioned that had I read the books ten years ago, I would not have liked/loved them as I do now. The customer was intrigued enough by that to buy the series.
Just now, while putting making sure all my AAR reviews were entered onto my Goodreads page, my review for Jayne Castle's Zinnia caught my attention because I remembered this snippet from 1997 (I may not remember having met you last week, but I remember just about all the books I've read, and most of my reviews): "I didn't care for the author's reference to proud nipples or to the use of such clinical terms as the c-word that rhymes with Lavoris or "vagina" when describing a love scene." That may have been true thirteen years ago, and while "clitoris" still doesn't do much for me, "clit" does. Sex at its best is a raunchy proposition, and while "clit" isn't romantic, it's definitely raunchy.
So it seems my tastes have gotten darker over the years. Is it my age, the number of romances I've read, or something else? My two favorite romances for the year - A Secret Affair and Breathless - are light years away from each other in terms of sexuality (Balogh's Regency in Disguise is mild in comparison to Stuart's book, which is based in large part on sex, though it dials back the love-making in comparison to the earlier books in the series). As far as tone, Balogh's book isn't light, and it's not as dark as some of her others, while Stuart's is on a par with my beloved Ice series...or perhaps a tinge darker. As for my third DIK of the year - which was published in 2007 - Jonathan Tropper's How to Talk to a Widower is both dark and a comedy.
Very few of you respond to the questions I pose on this blog, but I'll try again: Have your tastes changed over the last decade or so, and if so, how?
October 8, 2010
Kindle
My first generation Kindle is as basic as basic can get. Yesterday I realized the memory is completely used up, which explains why I'd been unable to download, so I began to move items over to my SD card. Then I sat back and began to think about how difficult it is for me to find things now that I have more than a thousand items on the device, and said to myself, "I think it's time to upgrade." The decision made itself once LinnieGayl explained that Kindle 3 offers a folders option, which means I can create alphabetical folders and/or book type folders to make it easier to find what I want. I called my local Super Target this morning and they said they had both Kindle 3's in stock, so I decided that's where I'd get my flu shot. Alas, they lied. They had neither in stock and the only store that might was near downtown and it's Friday and getting close to rush hour. Best Buy had none in stock either.
I'd worked out what to do instead by the time I got home: I'd order Kindle 3 from Amazon and in the interim would use Calibre to change the meta tags and clean up my library. Then I realized I could get a month free of Amazon Prime, and overnight shipping for $4 an item, an ordered the Kindle 3 wifi and a cover to be delivered tomorrow.
Of course, the decision to order the wifi-only versus the 3G version took me many agonizing hours of dithering, and it was only on a call with Myretta Robens that I realized my 3G phone is always with me - if I need to order a book when I'm not at home or at an AT&T hotspot (which includes all Starbucks), I can always rely on the phone. Besides, the $50 difference between the 3G and wifi-only will pay for several books. My mom's cheapness always vies with my dad's "spend it while you got it" nature, so a decision like this does not come easy to me.
Now that I've got my new Kindle coming, I will work on a few Calibre meta-tag changes, then will do the rest slowly over time, as I learn how best to use the folders. One thing I know for certain...LinnieGayl's use of a TBR folder is one I am appropriating for myself.
But for now, I'm going to spend the next hour or so doing some final clean-up work on my Goodreads library as compared to Visual Bookshelf.
This project is likely to consume me for awhile; luckily my husband knows when I get into something like this I hyper-focus and hunker down. I work tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon, and have to squeeze in a very short book to review for PW for mid-day Monday, but since it is super short, I can handle it.
See you when I come up for air.
October 6, 2010
Goodreads, Facebook, and Shelfari
I committed to Shelfari quite awhile ago, but to be honest, have always found it cumbersome and slow. The bigger my bookshelf, the more slow and cumbersome. Up at Facebook I shared my Shelfari shelf through their app, and also used LivingSocial's Visual Bookshelf for all my reading, and WeRead for my Desert Isle Keepers, mostly because other friends used those apps and I wanted to stay connected. But when Facebook eliminated third party boxes and rendered their Boxes page useless, those apps lost their potency because I could not nearly as readily see other peoples' bookshelves, and more importantly, that Facebook had basically turned into the old AOL. Neither appealed to me in the least.
So earlier this week I set up my Goodreads page and imported my Shelfari shelf, then went through my blog and Amazon to add more books, and my PW reviews as sent via email to my editors to add even more. I'm still not entirely up to date, but I'm closer. Yesterday I changed my two star ratings into one star ratings and my three star ratings into two star ratings, and tomorrow will work on the fours into threes. I'm still figuring things out over there, and very few of my friends from Twitter and Facebook have found me, but perhaps that will change in future days and weeks. If not, oh well.
This morning I changed my profile on Shelfari to provide my Goodreads link and plan to delete all but my DIK's when I have time. As for Visual Bookshelf and WeRead, I haven't decided whether or not to delete them entirely; it wouldn't be hard to maintain my DIKs on WeRead, after all.
Slowly but surely I'm deleting most of the apps I once had boxes for on Facebook. My decision after that, since at this point I plan to use it primarily for birthdays, email, and keeping up with friends and family, is to defriend most people so that it doesn't take me an hour a day to scroll through updates in order to find the people I really care about. I'll be missing news for authors and artists and friends I used to play games with, but it'll make Facebook usable for me in a way it hasn't been for some time, particularly since I use it via my phone so often.
So I've got three choices...cut my losses and eliminate Visual Bookshelf and WeRead entirely, pick one and delete the other, or maintain them both as I plan to maintain my Shelfari shelf, with DIK reads only. Let me know what you think.
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