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On Friday, GoodReads posted this announcement. Essentially, reviews and shelves that are focused on author behavior will be deleted. Indeed, GR immediately began deleting, without warning. One of my friends on GR had 78 reviews deleted. 78. With no chance to get them back or save them before the deletion.
I don't post a lot of reviews talking about authors themselves, because usually there isn't much to say. They wrote the book, I read it, I liked it or I didn't. End of story.
Most of the time.
But the Author isn't always dead and sometimes it is necessary to bring them and their behavior and attitudes up in a review. Readers should not be penalized for warning friends of authors who attack reviewers, or authors who are bigoted, etc...
For an example, this debacle led me to reread Ender's Game to see if I still liked it as much as I did when I first discovered it, despite knowing now that Orson Scott Card is homophobic to the extreme. The answer is: I don't. I can see his bigotry and biases seeping into the text in little ways and bigger ways, and I know my review will reflect this fact.
And will violate GR's new terms.
Knowledge of the author can color a reading. This is not necessarily a bad thing, indeed, it is simply a fact of writing. It should not be surprising that an author's biases are evident in their work, even if they try to disguise it. And readers should be allowed to discuss these traces of the author.
I will not be leaving GR, not entirely, but I will no longer post reviews directly to the site (except like...2 more, one of 'Ender's Game' and one of a book I got through a giveaway).
Just my 2 cents. Happy Banned Book Week.
I don't post a lot of reviews talking about authors themselves, because usually there isn't much to say. They wrote the book, I read it, I liked it or I didn't. End of story.
Most of the time.
But the Author isn't always dead and sometimes it is necessary to bring them and their behavior and attitudes up in a review. Readers should not be penalized for warning friends of authors who attack reviewers, or authors who are bigoted, etc...
For an example, this debacle led me to reread Ender's Game to see if I still liked it as much as I did when I first discovered it, despite knowing now that Orson Scott Card is homophobic to the extreme. The answer is: I don't. I can see his bigotry and biases seeping into the text in little ways and bigger ways, and I know my review will reflect this fact.
And will violate GR's new terms.
Knowledge of the author can color a reading. This is not necessarily a bad thing, indeed, it is simply a fact of writing. It should not be surprising that an author's biases are evident in their work, even if they try to disguise it. And readers should be allowed to discuss these traces of the author.
I will not be leaving GR, not entirely, but I will no longer post reviews directly to the site (except like...2 more, one of 'Ender's Game' and one of a book I got through a giveaway).
Just my 2 cents. Happy Banned Book Week.
