I have almost another 250 waiting to be written, but I have been wanting to get going on them again for some time. I keep shifting my approach to sharing online, but at least this last time, I stripped it way down. I don’t quite have the process nailed, but at least I’m going again.
One thing that was a bit funny tonight was that I went to write the book review, and I started thinking about “which book” was worthy of being #200? I don’t really have a good handle on the order in which I’ve read them, so that isn’t the deciding factor. When I did #100, I chose Trace by the late Warren Murphy. Murphy has always been my favourite author, and reading Trace taught me that not all detectives were like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie or even the Three Investigators. It inspired me to consider that maybe someday, I too could write a novel of this type.
For #200, I was tempted to go with another late author, Alison Gordon, of Toronto sports journalism fame. I wonder what she’d write today after seeing the Jays blow a six run lead and exit the wild card game with a loss. Janet Evanovich, Anne Perry, J.A. Jance, even Meg Cabot (more YA) would all be good candidates of the mystery genre. I considered Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark which is just brilliant.
There are some weird options too…Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui is sort of Japanese dream porn, very different from anything else I’ve ever read.
In the end, I went with a memoir. I wish it was a better one, but North To Paradise by Ousman Umar does have some compelling elements in it. It tells a harrowing journey from Ghana to Europe, starting when he was 12 years old. It reads much like some biographies of migrants coming to Canada or the U.S. in the 1800s or early 1900s — except all of his extreme hardship happens in the 2010s, not the 1910s. It’s hard to view that life against the people he encounters in Europe within days of living that life, people whose lives are very different. Alas, the book has little introspection in it, no ability to step outside himself, and some of the truly uncomfortable parts of his emotional journey are either glossed over or dismissed in favour of talking about acquiring food or shelter.
The author was born in Ghana and left his village at the age of 12 to seek a better life in Europe. His extreme journey included smuggling, trafficking, abuse, starvation, and the loss of friends along the way.
What I Liked
The story is told rather matter-of-factly, i.e., “this is what happened to me.” And as such, it is both raw and immediate at times. It is easily accessible and the journey through the desert and the eventual crossing by raft is particularly compelling yet harrowing. It reads in places as if the story is one of the 1800s or early 1900s and people coming from Europe to Canada or the U.S. The migrant who has to just make a go of it by any means possible. Yet then you see references to modern times and are jolted back to reality. This is not 100-year-old history, these are events happening to real people on the ground now.
What I Didn’t Like
I had seen multiple references to the book in international development feeds, mainly because now that he is older, he has started a literacy charity so that he can “give back” and make the journeys of other kids in Africa a little less traumatic. It is a noble sentiment, but frequently I read these “amazing tales” and think “meh”. Many of them are no more compelling than any other person’s journey, and well, I’ve read better. One of the challenges is that the level of detail is strong in some places, but with very little commentary. He glosses over serious issues with sex trafficking, sexual abuse of migrants, and some of the basic issues of how to make it in the rough world. I kept hoping for a bit of wisdom in stepping back to see what some of the experiences meant to his future “self” or personal philosophies, but there is little introspection.
The Bottom Line
Good for the international dilettante, not enough substance for development workers
I know, I know, that doesn’t sound like a very exciting topic. It probably isn’t to anyone but me. I had reorganized my content on my two websites — PolyWogg and ThePolyBlog — about two years ago after a meltdown of the servers, taking advantage of the downtime to fix some scoping and editorial decisions. At the time, I was sort of seeing myself getting more and more engaged on books, writing more reviews, and maybe engaging with more people through my little book club. But about a year ago, I started seeing some of that grouping differently. In part, it was going back to the age-old question of whether my PolyWogg site should ONLY be my formal writing (HR guide, other guides, etc.) or it should include some of my broader fun stuff. There’s no right answer to that, but I was considering trying to make it far more interactive than it was, and that wasn’t a good fit with my general personal site (The Poly Blog).
But then an initially minor incident happened last winter that escalated to having repercussions for my relationships IRL and I pulled back. I did a FB divorce from my wife — I basically unfriended all of our mutual friends, reduced my posse to basically close friends of mine and family for the most part. I’m not even friends with Andrea on FaceBook. And I withdrew from social media extensively, including shutting down my participation in the book club (PolyWogg’s Reading Challenge) that I had created. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I basically didn’t feel like I was in a safe emotional space anymore online. I felt like I was being shit on, and when I protested, I was dismissed. If I disagreed and said why, then I must be man-splaining. If I pushed back, I was a troll. I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with that toxicity in my life. Instead, I retreated quite extensively, voting with my feet. I miss it, particularly hearing from friends about what they’re reading or broader groups of her friends and family for what they’re doing, spending time on, etc. Heck, even funny memes. But I digress.
The knock-on effect though was that with the PolyWogg Reading Challenge gone from my life, I’m not really doing any engagement on those topics anymore. I joined some other online groups, a few good ones I like to monitor, but I don’t really know anyone, and it doesn’t feel homey in any way. I see some recommendations for possible books, I guess. But I don’t get much out of it. Sooooo, without any real outlet to discuss books actively, I don’t see much point pushing my Book Reviews on the PolyWogg site that will have more interaction on it. Why bother? Instead, my approach is going to be more passive, perhaps less “open” than it was previously, I guess mainly less “public” in orientation. After I exited the book club and revamped my approach to reviews in general (more on music, TV, etc. later), I decided to just post them on my regular personal site (ThePolyBlog).
While I am sad to have lost that broader social interaction in my life, this post isn’t about a pity party, it’s about the process. I had to move my posts from PolyWogg back over to ThePolyBlog. 90% of that was easy to automate. It was a straight export and import, easy as pie. Except then I realized that for some strange reason, it was still pulling the images from the old site. The “links” didn’t update as easily as they should have. I could try and automate that, but I don’t like messing around in the system too much, it’s broken before doing that. Okay, it’s only 199 BRs. I could simply unlink the one image, relink the second, and resave. Easy peasy.
Except…that was necessarily the only issue to consider.
I also don’t really like having my raw review data from when I wrote the posts stored in an Excel file. I have never really liked it, BUT it did help me post my reviews in lots of places by allowing me to write it once and then Excel would reformat it into four other layouts so I could copy and paste to about 11 different sites. Sounds good, right? It always did. But that was when I was trying to at least lay some groundwork to drive engagement for the long-run. Now, I’m only posting to Good Reads and my own site, for the full text, and to my FB page (that anyone can join) and Twitter for links to new posts. So, why do I need to keep the Excel file?
In short, I don’t. I worry a little bit about losing the flatfile database functionality going forward, but I’ve moved the text into OneNote with a page for every author and subpages for each book review. I tried it out, I really liked the ability to have the full text ready whenever I want, all synched to my phone in One Note and resizable at will, on top of having it on my website of course.
But then my OCD side kicked in. Way back to about 1998, I used to have a small list of books that I was missing from my To Be Read pile, about 6 point narrow font, multiple columns, double-sided. It was folded up and travelled with me in my wallet. If I was in a bookstore and looking for something to read, I would pull out my list and see if I could fill some gaps in my collection. But as time went on, and the number of authors I read grew, the list became unwieldy. It grew out of date, I’d try to update part of it here or there, I’d maybe do an update of one author one day but that was as far as I got, leaving the others “open-ended” for completion.
Yet here I was updating my list of books and reviews, with a separate page for each author. Hmm…what if I put the full bibliography on each author’s page. I could list, for example, the 25 books they had written, and then when I reviewed one, I could just put the page link in that spot. An evergreen list of my TBR and REVIEWED books. The holy grail, at some points in my life.
So I did it. It added to my workload, extensively, I confess. I had to research multiple other sites to compile a good list of each author’s works, and when I was done with updating any of the transferred-over book reviews, I could paste the links too. I decided the main page should have it on the website too, not just in my OneNote file. Why not? I might as well, it would save doing it later.
It’s a huge list when finished. On my webpage, at 100% size for desktop, it is over 200 screen pages of content. I’m still playing with some navigation layout issues (separating out the letters of the alphabet a bit more clearly), but it’s basically done. And all of the 199 posts are up and running.
Now, I’m not really “done”, I never really am in a sense. I’m done “phase I” and I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. I’ve even updated my ebook collection so they’re all nicely organized. But I still have literally hundreds of book reviews pending, probably enough to keep me going until next June or so if I do one per day. And there are other authors in my collection list. I only updated the full list for those authors for whom I had at least one book review already or at least some cross-reference perhaps for a series written by multiple authors. Plus I’ll do new authors as I keep reading.
For now, I’m happy with my progress. On to actually reading a huge number of series though.
I mentioned earlier in the week that I was playing with my book reviews, and at the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean. Let me do a quick recap to show where I started from this week.
Generally, I wrote my reviews in … dun dun dun … Microsoft Excel. Huh? I know, it doesn’t sound like it would make much sense to write in a spreadsheet. But here’s the thing. I was sharing the reviews i.e., publishing the reviews on multiple websites and accounts. And each website I shared it with had a slightly different format and layout. Some separated the “one line review” aka summary from the main text; others just had one box; others had a spot for tags or categories or genres, oh my. Some had the same boxes, but in relatively different order. So I could write it in a normal word processor program of some type, and then play “paste the text” all over the place each time. Or I could put MS Excel to work for me.
I set this up and tweaked it over the last 20 years, with the current version divided the review into several fields, like a flat-file database. There was a field for:
Review number;
Title;
Author(s) or Editor(s);
The Plot or Premise of the book/story;
What I Liked;
What I Didn’t Like;
Relevant disclosures, if applicable;
The Bottom Line;
Rating;
Year of Publication;
Date of the Review; and,
Tags, combining any particular special tags (like a reading challenge), the websites it was being posted to, whether it was standalone or series, the number if it was a series, format for paper or ebook or audio, the source of where I got it, what format I was keeping it in if I had a copy, etc.;
The advantage of having it in different fields was that I could then generate four different layouts in subsequent pages, and then copy / paste from there to the relevant “groupings” of reviews:
My website layout to make it easy to copy and paste into the webpage editor in the exact order I wanted it to appear for the final page…this version was the most detailed, and had the most categories separated out;
My Good Reads layout which dropped a few things from the list, and combined others into one box for pasting;
My “Main Multi” layout, suitable for Amazon, Chapters, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and the Nook sites, mainly as it had a box for a “title/summary” of the review, for which I used my “The Bottom Line” field; and,
My “Ancillary Multi” layout, suitable for just about everything else, including the Ottawa Public Library, Google Reviews, and Library Thing, with most of the content going all in one box.
Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. It sounds anal, but once I set up the main review page, and added the cross-refs, all the layouts self-populated for me. After that, it was just copying and pasting large chunks instead of small chunks. It was still time-consuming though, and as I noted earlier in my musings in recent weeks, very little of it was generating any sort of interaction. I was posting into the abyss with virtually no feedback.
Which means I decided to stop pasting “everywhere”. I’ll keep my website, of course, and I’ll share it with Good Reads I guess too. Maybe I’ll post links to my reviews as part of FB discussions. But I don’t need to keep multiple separate fields and layouts. Which means maybe Excel isn’t the best tool anymore for helping me manage my reviews.
A new set of tools
I confess, when I set my Book Reviews up on PolyWogg.ca a little over two years ago, and rebuilt them last year, I said it was the last time. Which is mostly true. I am not, surprisingly perhaps, doing anything whatsoever to change the format or layout. The reviews are in the format I want for the future, and if I ever tweak that, well, it will be “going forward”. I will not go back to change these 200 reviews just to be anally-retentive in my “consistency”.
However, I was also using Excel in a slightly different way for something else, and it wasn’t particularly great, to be honest. After I entered all the review information, I would then copy / paste / transpose it into a spreadsheet so that all the info was retained in the spreadsheet. While the “review writing” happened basically on page 2 in a normal vertical layout for ease of writing, that didn’t “save” the info anywhere, nor did I want hundreds of spreadsheet “tabs” to have separate reviews on them. Instead, I copied it all into page 1, pasted it into a simple horizontal flat-file layout, and voila, one page of all my book review information in a simple little spreadsheet. My list of all my reviews.
Awesome, right? Well, no, not really, as I wasn’t really using it for anything. I could copy it back to page 2 if I needed to recreate an original copy of the review for some sort of editing, perhaps, but the file wasn’t very user-friendly, and certainly not web- or mobile-friendly. 200 reviews, 200 lines by 12-15 columns of info. It was useful for being able to do a bit of statistical analysis, sure. But what I’ve really wanted for a long time is a simple copy of the review on my phone. A way to SEE the review, without having to go to the website and use my data. Just a viewable copy.
But I needed Excel to make my life easier for publishing multiple formats, and it wasn’t worth creating a whole bunch of extra files, right? Why have a third version? I had the web, I had Excel, that was good enough. Except if I don’t really HAVE to use Excel to generate all those different layouts, and the only versions I need are web or Good Reads, and the web version is virtually the same as what I want on my portable device, what if I write and store it in some other app?
Like One Note. I’ve been putting more and more info into One Note, including our vaccination records for COVID. I just created a simple page, pasted in the PDFs for the three of us, and any time I want the info, I can just open the page, double-tap and voila, one record. It’s been working PERFECTLY for me, and no need to create shortcuts on the phone, etc. I’ve already converted my entire approach to To-Do lists into One Note as well, representing some 30+ years of keeping a long-term and short-term set of To-Do lists, i.e., a very ROBUST approach that very few tools work for me to manage, so if I was successful with THAT converstion, maybe I could use One Note for this too?
I can.
I created a blank template in my One Note, and decided to upgrade to something else I have wanted for a very long time but have not done in almost 7 years or so, and really if I’m totally harsh in my assessment, almost 15. I want a list of not only the book reviews that I have written, I want the list of all books by those authors if I’m “collecting” them, so to speak. Not physically, but if I’m trying to read, say, everything by Agatha Christie, then I want the full list of books by her — her bibliography of all books published — merged with my list of books reviewed.
In an ideal, anal-retentive world, I’ve love a simple table that would look kind of like this:
AGATHA CHRISTIE
NEED
HAVE
READ
REVIEWED
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
x x x x
I would have the full list in the first column, and as I bought them or collected them, I would move them to column 2. Then when I read them, they would go to column 3, and when I have finally reviewed them, column 4. Makes sense, right?
My list of books I’m looking to find are in column 1, the ones I have in my to be read pile are in column 2, the ones waiting to be reviewed would be column 3, and when I’m done with them, they’d be in column 4 — a whole column showing all my reviews in one column.
Except that table is a pain in the ass to maintain in a decent layout. I could do it on a spreadsheet, sure. Hell, even a simple Word Processor could handle that well enough. There might be some issues with the length of individual lines in individual cells, but the real issue is that when I try to look at it on my phone? Forget about it. The table is just way too wide to keep anything other than the name of the book, and even then it’s tight.
I played with a few alternate formats, tried out a few layouts. I even considered simply putting them vertically such as:
Author name (in big headings)
NEED (in slightly smaller heading and different colour) HAVE (same) READ (same) REVIEWED (same)
But that’s a lot of extra text to throw into a list. Yet that’s how I used to do things when everything was in paper. I would have a list of books, I would get a paper copy (move to column / section 2), read it, and then review it. I have even considered there might be another column in there for ones that I merely borrowed from the library or a friend, or perhaps one to track how I disposed of them. Maybe way back in the old days I might even have thought about tracking books I loaned to people. I lost Harry Potter and Twilight books that way, not keeping track, but I rarely lend books except once I’m done with them. And in the age of the purge, I don’t really care anymore. Once I read it, and perhaps pass it along to Jacob or Andrea, I’m mostly “done” with it.
Plus, if I want a book on the list, I’m likely to get it electronically these days. Or even order it electronically at the most. So do I really “need” those other categories? I don’t.
I did, however, decide that if I’m not trying to “publish” the book reviews in the normal sense, with a view to wide-spread sharing, and instead am really only sharing them with my immediate page followers, then perhaps they shouldn’t be on my PolyWogg site as writing examples. Instead, I decided to move them back to ThePolyBlog where they fit much more cleanly as simply my musings about books. Shorter, cleaner, less muss. Which means I can spend a bit of extra time adding in the other features I do want to the list — my To Be Read list, which is, well, everything ever written by the authors I follow. I will retire sometime, and when I do? I’m hoping to average a minimum of about 200 fiction titles a year. By my current calculation, that means if I live to about 272 years old, I might put a small dent in the TBR pile. 🙂
The new approach
Basically, I will write the reviews in One Note against a simple format that exactly matches my layout for the website. It will have a slight bit of extra text in it for tracking some other details (a short-form version of tags, if you will), but I even made the title of each page in both One Note and WordPress IDENTICAL, with the following format:
BOOK NAME by AUTHOR (Year of Publication) – BOOKREVIEW # (Year of Review) – RATING
It seems silly, but I started off with slightly different formats and layouts, partly because I perhaps was still stuck in an Excel mindset, until I was like, “Why? Why am I complicating my life?”. If it works in one format on the website, why not the same for One Note? And if it looks right in One Note, why not the same for the website? Brain fart or something.
I am allowing for one slight difference between the two, and I worry it might not work out on the website as well. In One Note, I have a single index that lists all Book Reviews with links to them. After that, for the books by each author, I have a separate sub-page that lists only the books for that author. Unfortunately, doing that on the website is a lot more complicated to manage over time. For now, I’m just throwing it into one long list. I’m not sure that’s the best way to go, but I can tweak it later if I need to…I’ve dropped a whole bunch of cross-referencing that I had previously, which makes the layout and design far cleaner.
While I am not editing the reviews, the movement from PolyWogg.ca to ThePolyBlog.ca is taking a bit more work than I would like. The copy from one site to the other was perfect, but almost a little too perfect. A few things I had set in the original kept the same information in the metadata and sub-links…so on each one, because ThePolyBlog uses a slightly different setup, I have to open the book review and note that four images in the review are in slightly different locations (cover, featured image, signature block, and a header, although I’m not using the replacement header in this case). I could do it rather “automatically”, but it could mess up the reviews. I would take the risk and do it anyway, except there’s a side benefit to doing it manually.
I can copy the text in its proper layout from the website preview into One Note, and add a link between the two docs for the future. Soooo, while it is taking a bit longer than I would like, it’s also giving me a lot more info for the REAL list of books I’ve always wanted to have on the site and on my phone. I did some test runs a few different ways, a few different uses for the data, and it all worked flawlessly. I’m missing a small element for when I start writing NEW reviews, but that’s relatively easy to fix as well.
I’ve managed to convert 22 of the existing reviews, and created copies of them in One Note as well. I’m really happy with how it is going, and what it looks like. It’s time-consuming, no doubt, another 177 to go, but it helps to do a few at a time as some obvious flow benefits crop up and I can get in a groove.
I’m also super excited about a few other things where I do something similar, such as movie reviews, music reviews, and TV reviews. I do them in Excel for slightly different reasons, but once I get through the book reviews, I’ll check them out too. I might be able to move all that over as well, albeit without the overhead conversion for images.
In the meantime, working on the book reviews is a bit like digital therapy for myself. And gets me one step closer to taking something off my “book to-do list” that’s been on there for close to 15 years, and even goes back all the way to an original list that I used to have when I was 14.
So 40 years later? I feel like I’ve got a working approach that mostly comes down to the original intent. Tracking authors, and reading and reviewing their books. Everything else just fades into the background. It’s my happy place.
Soooo, my approach to book reviews has been changing over the last couple of years. I started them long ago, sharing them initially through email and on a couple of discussion fora online. I played with format, adjusted them to be less “fun” and a bit more formal. I took them seriously, I spent time figuring out what I wanted to say, I read missives on how to write better reviews. Later, I formatted them for my website, I have tons in my backlog to “write”, as I both like the idea of writing down my thoughts and hate the idea of just reading something someone else put a lot of time and energy into and passing on to the next one with no more than a thought about what I just read. Maybe it’s the wannabe writer in me, hoping that a reader would take the time to think about what I wrote. To reflect on it or simply to savour the moment that the story “ends” when they finish.
I also liked the idea of sharing those reviews widely, encouraging people to comment on them, to get feedback from others who had read the same books. But all the posting, and I do mean ALL the posting, didn’t seem to increase discussion. I was posting them on multiple review sites…Amazon Canada and US (they didn’t use to be linked very well), Barnes and Noble (for both paper and Nook), Chapers, Kobo, Google Book Reviews, Library Thing, and Good Reads. I also posted to the Ottawa Public Library, Savvy Reader on Facebook and My Book Pledge. But none of it really generated any interactions that would justify the time and effort. A book review, however short, could easily take me up to 45 minutes to write, post to my website, share with all the other sites, and save for backup of my own. I also started off tagging the categories and themes and/or genre, but in recent years, I had cut that down simply to physical format (hardcover, paperback, e-book or audio), the source (new, used, library, borrowed, gift, or ARC), and if I was keeping it, in what format (ebook, paper) or what my status was (read/unread).
None of that really matters. I created the Reading Challenge, got a bunch of interaction going, and saw that much of that “tracking” that was taking time and energy was just me being too anal, anticipating people reading my reviews outside of the groups I was in yet that never really happened. I have killed my participation in a number of book groups, and it has made me go back and question what I’m doing with my book reviews. I want to keep doing “something”, but they are no longer a sample of my writing, which means they are more just relevant to me and my own thoughts, if that makes any sense.
In short, they aren’t particularly worth putting on my PolyWogg site as some sort of “collection” of book reviews, they’re more musings that should just be on my PolyBlog site. While I don’t love the idea of doing the work to MOVE them over to the PolyBlog site, it will let me streamline the process considerably. If the lists are not particularly relevant to other people, they can be part of an auto-generated list and I’ll just keep my tracking inside my OneNote file. Even that too is undergoing changes, how I keep track of what I’ve read or not.
I have 199 BRs to move, tweak and republish, which is no one’s idea of fun. But I’m not really going to do anything “new” with them, just move them and be done. I could probably do most of it in a few days, maybe a week at the most, but I’m thinking more like a couple per day. Once the conversion is done, I’ll work on publishing my new reviews only, but some of those will slip in too with far less format than I have currently. Onward!
