Posting | The Musings & Artful Blunders of Scott D. Southard

I’m coming up on the year anniversary since I started doing the book reviews for my local NPR station. Soon my twentieth appearance will be on WKAR’s Current State. (You can check out links to them here). I really love doing them, and I look at each of them as not just as an opportunity to share my opinion on a book, but to also educate the listener of how to read a book or what to look for. I have even been known to throw in facts about literature and its vast history.

What can I say? I love the artform. Books are my passion.

I’ve written quite a few posts on this site about book reviews today. The good, the bad, what not to do, the questionable things, the author experience. I thought I would share the links to four of those writing posts below and give some updates as well since when I wrote them. Enjoy!

The Thin Muddy Line of Online Book Reviews. All the problems I discuss in this article still happen all the time. And I still get requests to “exchange” reviews. It makes me so uncomfortable and I am surprised how many writers are okay with it. As an NPR reviewer, I could never, ever consider such an enterprise since it would put all of my reviews into question. But I wouldn’t have considered it even before I started this great gig! Whatever the case, whenever I get an e-mail or a tweet asking me to do this I get a sick feeling in my stomach and a little angry.

The Troll Under the Bridge: How to Write a Good Bad Book Review. Trolls don’t go away. But you know, I think a lot of people don’t realize that is what they are doing, or the impact it has on other people. It reminds me of the time when I was a kid and with a friend we called a 1-800 number on a milk carton asking what color their cows are that give chocolate milk (we were 8). It’s like that mentality.

Charging the Melancholy Dragon. A lot of my heart as a writer is out there in this post. I really discuss in some spots on the difficulties of writing and dealing with reviews (good and bad).

Loving Goodreads (And Some Reviewing Suggestions). This is my most recent post on the subject. I still love the site, but I don’t know how it could be improved without some reviewers hired to review the reviewing (say that five times fast), or to “star” certain reviewers as being more “legitimate” and their reviews given more girth in the grading. That last point is definitely something to consider.

This morning I woke up to a stranger calling me a moron.

See, I have an iPhone app for my WordPress blog, and I get notifications when a comment comes in. It rarely happens that I get a comment in the late evening, so I haven’t bothered to change my settings out of sheer laziness. Well, this morning I did get a comment waking me up; actually two came in but they were from the same person, so I think of them as one. The first said what I had written was “bullshit” and the second called me a “moron.”

Do you like irony? The piece that he was commenting on (here) was about how Bruce Wayne has anger issues and could do more with his billions of dollars to help people if he really wanted to do than becoming Batman; so the fact that someone with the screen name of “Bruce Wayne” called me a moron and swore at me, kind of proved my point… Okay, maybe it’s not that funny a point but I think it is at least a little interesting to note, right? Continue reading →