I think I’ve mentioned before how much I hate discussions about reviews. I generally end up ranting about it once a year. The thing that bothers me isn’t the reviews themselves – I do in fact use the occasional review in information gathering about a book – but what bothers me is the plain fact that whenever reviews get discussed terminology get so confusing. Any and every comment from a simple “I liked/disliked the book because . . . ” to full-length critical analysis gets called a review.
Bah, humbug.
Seriously, it’s all I can do to sit on my hands and not respond in big letters “I DO NOT REVIEW!” whenever some poor sould calls my ramblings reviews. If I ever decided to review books, honestly and truly give it my best shot, you’d know because the things would be so long they’d be unusable. Which is probably why I prefer to simply ramble. (G)
Okay, I feel better now that I got that out of my system for this year and can happily go back to my current project of cataloging/recataloguing my books. I’ve started working my way through my author collections, largest to smallest. First up, Agatha Christie. It always amazes me that I have as many of her books but I’ve found a discrepancy between what’s on the shelves and what’s in my database. Apparently I count 78 paperbacks on the shelves but only 64 in the database. I could’ve sworn I’d put all of them in there but it gets really confusing because so many of her titles were renamed when published in America and most are too old to have ISBN’s unless of course they’ve been reprinted. Which doesn’t always help in finding accurate publishing data on the ones I have. I may have to dig out my Christie compendium just to figure out what I’ve got and if I’m actually missing anything.