Okay, I just started a GoodReads Account.
I’ve added the widget to the sidebar of this blog, and if you go check out my profile you will see that I pretty much have rated everything five stars.
Well, I realize that probably isn’t terribly helpful, but it’s just that I don’t have time to rate everything. I love books. I am just absolutely crazy passionately stupidly in love with stories and characters and the written word. I mean, we’re not talking about married for thirty years and sleeping in twin beds love, we’re talking cross country crime spree and going out in a fiery crash because you can’t bear the thought of being separated kind of love. Shakespearean tragedy body count kind of love.
Just marking the books that I honestly believe deserve five stars is going to take years. Heck, just finding all the authors I adore is going to take a while. Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Roald Dahl, Samuel Delany, William Burroughs, Tim Powers, Tanith Lee, G. K. Chesterton– I realized that I haven’t started listing Chesterton yet and I want to go back and start searching for his books, so I can rate them five stars. Well, What’s Wrong With The World and The Man Who Was Thursday, at least, a lot his collections of essays are sadly dated. (As an aside, the name Catskinner is actually a reference to one of Chesterton’s books, Orthodoxy.*)
I love books. I love reading. I love writing, except when I’m actually doing it. When I’m actually doing the work of writing I hate it, and I think it’s the stupidest thing ever, but I am usually happy about having written something. (Except when what I’ve written is actually the stupidest thing ever, which does happen.)
Anyway, GoodReads is a great site, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who reads. Of course, probably everybody who is reading this already has a GoodReads account and is chuckling at me because I am, as usual, the last one to the party.
*“If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.” –G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.