Way back in the dark ages of the late 1990s, I had an idea for a personal website. I had been sending out a personal newsletter full of humour and quotes, sometimes movie reviews, and I was also running a trivia game by email. It was just a small distribution group for the humour and stuff, larger for the trivia games, and I even got a few movie reviews posted on a local movie times site. I found that I really enjoyed it. But I wondered if I could move it from email to a website.
Over the years, I tried multiple layouts, formats, even types of back-end software to display it, but most of the core content elements remained the same. Somewhere in there I thought, “What if I posted book reviews too?” After all, I was reading a lot. But I tended to finish the book, throw it on a shelf, and move on. I wasn’t looking to become a reviewer for a newspaper, just some personal thoughts shared, well, somewhere other than a journal.
Last year, I finally said, “Okay, let’s figure this out right this time.” I figured out a layout, I figured out a workflow for myself, and I figured out where I wanted to post them. Plus, just for fun, I started updating my approach to book reviews (i.e. a personal “review” philosophy, if you will). Again, I don’t want to be a professional reviewer, but I also don’t want to be an online equivalent of grunting “Book good”.
I managed to figure all that out, but I didn’t get many posted with the full workflow. My goal for this year was to clear the initial backlog…thirty-six reviews that were written, posted somewhere originally, and relatively ready to go. Just not in the new format. I have been steadily munching away at them, a day here and a day there, a book review here and a book review there, and plowed through a whack of them today to finish it off.
I finally have all 36 up on the site, fully linked to the various review sites out there. I even have an index designed for all the book reviews, just need to populate these 36 in the list. It’s a bit tedious, but it was easier to wait until all 36 were done before trying to populate them all into the multiple indices.
I have a few more sitting in the wings, waiting to be finished, polished, or reorganized from notes into an actual review, but the bulk of the work? I’m calling it done like dinner. Woohoo me! 🙂
Warren Murphy is and will always be my favourite author.
I was looking for one of his books in e-form today, and just reading through the description of a book I hadn’t seen before, I came across a small phrase that struck me cold — “Warren Murphy passed away in September 2015”. I missed the news entirely. Heck, I heard from him on FB sometime early last year I think, certainly less than a year before his death.
That makes it almost sound like I knew him. I didn’t. I just knew his books.
The first ones I read were the Destroyer novels. My father used to read The Executioner series, Mack Bolans, etc., Nick Carter. So I read them too. And in some pile of similar books at a used store, I came across a pulp-style novel about a killer named Remo. An expert in the art of assassination, courtesy of the House of Sinanju, the basis for all martial arts. It was a glorious premise — the cop who gets framed for a murder, goes to death row, dies (almost), and is resurrected and trained by a small organization that only reports to the President in an oblique way, designed to take on the forces that would destroy the country and who operate outside the law so far that the law has no chance of stopping them. The most lethal of all lethal weapons who could terminate with extreme prejudice.
But the pulp format belied something deeper — the books were fun. The banter back and forth between the student Remo and the trainer Chiun was rapid, insulting, brutal — and hilarious. I loved it.
Murphy wrote them with Richard Ben Sapir and I started collecting books by both of them, including the Destroyer series. Eventually, I found one of Murphy’s Trace novels. It was like striking gold. To be honest, I didn’t find Trace first. I found Digger. If that sounds confusing, it should…they are two series by Warren Murphy with different publishers. Both contain:
a lush of an investigator who wears a wire for all his important conversations;
insurance investigations for a big company that keeps him employed because one of the senior people likes him for a favour he did him once;
an Asian girlfriend who frequently shows up at the end of the novels, listens to the tapes and identifies an important clue to help solve the crime; and,
an ex-wife and two children that he doesn’t remember the name of and so calls them by generic nicknames.
Digger is Trace; Trace is Digger. But apparently there were issues with the first publisher (for Digger), and Murphy wanted to go higher end with the novels while the publisher was going pulpy. Murphy took the books elsewhere, they were more full novel length, and Trace was born. I still have the email from him where he explained some of the details (I posted about it on a list, said I’d love to find out the real story some day, another person on the list knew him and forwarded it to him, and he responded directly to me). Getting an email in my inbox from WARREN FRICKING MURPHY was like winning the lottery. I responded, and I totally acted like a fanboy. Never heard back again. I’m sure I went in the “loo-loo” pile.
But I was seriously hooked. I read Destroyer books even after Sapir died and Murphy wasn’t writing them anymore. I read all the Trace books. I hunted down Razoni and Jackson and the Digger novels. I read his King Arthur books, and Grandmaster (swords and modern mysteries!). I found out that he had written others under a pseudonym — Dev Stryker — with his then-wife Molly Cochrane, and gobbled those up too. Hard to find, and he wasn’t blazing the ebook road, so paper was the way to go (some hard to find ones I got through inter-library loans). But every once in awhile, I’d go searching and find a new one by him. Like gold, every time.
I even remember going to see the movie Lethal Weapon 2, and loving the banter, etc. For no real reason in particular, I stayed behind so I could read the credits. I partially wanted to see who the writer was to see if there were any books out there — and there it was. Warren Murphy’s name. Of course. No wonder I loved the writing. It was him.
I didn’t know for a long time that he wasn’t a secret. That he had two Edgars and two Shamus awards. That he’d been a president of MWA. That he was a screenwriter with multiple hits to his credit. That he was actually quite famous.
He was just the writer of the most fun books I had ever read. It was Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries for grown ups, and without the noir or the cozy or the modern forensics focus. Sure, I moved on. I read about V.I. Warshawski. I met Stephanie Plum. I devoured Kinsey Milhone. I fell in love with Susan the guidance counsellor that Spenser loved, and that Hawk seemed to have a warm place in his heart for too. The gumshoes, the sleuths, the professional detectives.
And it is what made me want to be a writer. For the first time, I saw a genre that I loved. Not kids mysteries, not series like Rick Brant or Tom Swift. Not sci-fi. True mysteries. Series that built a genre. Not an Agatha Christie-like sleuth, not a Sherlock Holmes. A plodder. Who got the right answer by hook or by crook, and by plain straight stick-to-it-iveness. My writing may never see the light of publication but if it ever does, if I ever get to introduce my protagonist, you can damn well bet that the dedication will be to Warren Murphy.
My library took a hit today. Five months after his death at age 81, but still a hit. I’ll miss his stories…
I have struggled over the past 15 years with multiple incarnations of my book reviews online. These aren’t your typical amateur string of consciousness reviews, I am far too anal for that. I don’t know how many times I’ve read a review by someone else on a site like Amazon and when I was finished the review, I thought, “What the heck does any of that have to do with the book? Was it good?”.
Some of the worst ones say “five stars, just ordered it, haven’t read it yet”. Or “I’m giving it one star because my aunt Bernice said she heard from a friend that their Minister was told by a parishioner that it has a bad word in it somewhere”. While reviews of those types are easy to dismiss, I am equally troubled by the people who do plot summaries with no review, say only what they like and yet give it 1 or 2 stars, say only what they hate and yet give it 4 or 5 stars, and a host of other equally useless content like “good book”.
And I confess that I have a small dream. Not huge, because I don’t have the time for huge, but small. It is to have people send me their books as advance reader copies (ARCs) because they have read my reviews somewhere else and now want me to review THEM. This isn’t that far-fetched, it has happened multiple times already. I particularly like it when someone reads my review and comments on it. It’s like creating my own time-shifting book club for introverts.
The problem, of course, is if I want to build any sort of brand, I have to actually figure out what that brand is going to be. And I think I’m close. Certainly closer to final than I have ever been before. I have a layout — a link to the book’s cover on Amazon, brief summary of plot or premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, an overall one-line/tweet review, some boilerplate info on the book’s publication, my rating of course, and some verbiage to address the mandatory US disclosure requirements i.e. if I received the book in exchange for a review or am friends with the author (yep, I’m in Canada, but I think the disclosure is not a bad idea and wouldn’t be surprised if other countries adopt it too, plus as you’ll see below, some of my reviews get posted on US sites, so easier to include it upfront rather than go back and add it later).
Posting it on my own site has always been relatively easy. Figuring out how to create an index, however, which allows people to see the list of reviews by author, title, rating, year, or review order is not as easily accomplished on a simple WordPress site, particularly if I don’t want a lot of back-end programming and data entry nor front-end delays in rendering. The simplest option on both ends is to maintain the various lists as separate static pages that I just update from time to time. I found some nice buttons I like, easily added them, with some bright colour coding, and it’s good to go (Book Review Index). I even managed to include my full approach to book reviews so if anyone wants to know if they want to risk me reading their book and doing a review, they can easily see what I do.
The “building my brand” idea though has frequently overwhelmed my approach as there are lots of places to post reviews, and most of them require the same info for posting, but they all have the info in a slightly different order. I was playing with Microsoft Access to create a simple database for entry and saving of the data, with the idea that I would then generate multiple reports in the format/order that the various review sites needed, but Access was not playing nicely. Part of the problem is that what I’m doing is not really that complicated, and while Access will produce reports out the wazoo, what I really needed was it to produce a single page at a time for the latest single record, and preferably without doing look-up queries to do it. Particularly as there are multiple sites to generate reports for, and I didn’t want to create multiple reports with multiple queries all competing for my attention. I’m sure it can be done. I’m sure it can be made quite simple. But not by me without learning way more about Access than I ever want to learn. There’s something strangely ironic and equally disturbing that I could probably do it in dBase IV or COBOL more easily than I was finding my attempts in Access.
So I switched to Excel. Really, honestly, it’s a flat-file database, and there is no relational element in my usage. Exactly what Excel was originally designed for, albeit I’m using text rather than financial numbers.
My new layout is working AWESOME for me. I have:
a primary page which is my master index…it’s not what I work with most of the time, but it does have the complete list — if I lose everything else, this is the master page;
Sheet 2 is my simple data entry page — 22 fields, although technically 9 of those get combined into a big tag field later, it’s just easier to group the tags separately when I’m writing the review;
Sheet 3 is a temporary paste/staging page — this is a lesson I learned a long time ago to paste into a page that everything else pulls from, rather than pulling from the master or the data entry page…that way if something messes up on the other two pages, or I change some setting or layout, the whole set of subsequent pages are not messed up;
Sheets 4-14 are what would have been separate reports in Access but just are “links” to different sections of the staging page and are in the exact order I need to paste my reviews into:
my PolyWogg pages;
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com (they don’t link and push to .ca anymore)
Chapters-Indigo
Kobo books (a different set of reviews for paper and digital, unlike Amazon)
Barnes and Noble
Nook books (as with Kobo, a different set of reviews for paper and digital)
Google Play Books
Good Reads
Shelfari
Library Thing
I’ve already automated a bunch of stuff on the browser front too so that I can open all those sites with one click, find the book, and start uploading the review. Some of them are already on Amazon, I uploaded them previously, but most of the other sites are new and relatively virgin territory (I’ve only uploaded reviews of four titles so far, and many of them had no previous reviews or ratings). It has taken a bit longer than I would like to upload the first few, but I’m getting a bit faster now that I’m used to the page interfaces.
Once that is done, I copy the final text from data entry over to the master list, and that first page has some calculated fields on it that also generates and formats my index entries for the website and the basic outline for my tweet update that the review is posted on my own site.
Automation should help streamline the review process somewhat, and I had to figure out my business process to get to this stage. Now that it’s done, and I’ve tested the model on the first four reviews, I’m excited to upload a backlog of another 30 old ones and get started on my goal of 50 new ones for the year.
I met Harriet through the Dorothy-L newsgroup back in the late 1990s. I confess that I didn’t particularly like her style of review, a little too positive without enough critique and a little too pun-laden for my tastes. She almost always posted positive reviews, partly as she said that unless the book was good, she didn’t read past page 50, and sometimes not even that far. I admired her dedication to writing and posting the reviews. And, like anyone who posts away, and in such a prolific fashion, you get the fans and the haters, sometimes in equal measures.
The fans were obvious. Legions of people read her reviews and followed her missives; publishers included her gushes on the covers of book-jackets. The haters were equally legendary, often emboldened by finding other skeptics. Most of their popular criticisms of her had little resonance with me.
They questioned how one person could read so many books so fast. I too could read 3-4 books in a day if I had the time, and have done so many times. I don’t do it very often, and it has to be a certain type of book — serials, procedurals, Travis McGee sized novels, etc. Lots of YA. My record from my mis-spent youth was seven Three Investigator stories in a go, and from my adult years, 5 Kinsey Millhone stories in a go. I don’t recommend it, as they all blend together. So I had no trouble believing she was reading them all although as with most speed-readers who are not photographic-readers, retention becomes an issue even within hours of finishing the book. Even Harry Potter, for example — many people spent hours engrossed in the pages over several days; I read the fourth one (the first big one), in a single go, one day. It’s an immersive-type experience, but there’s little time to savour the flavour before it’s done. It’s almost like fast food instead of a gourmet meal. If I went into full skim-read mode, I could finish the first one in about 1.5 to 2 hours. And, if I was really into it, I could skim read 10 books in a day. Not my idea of fun, but to each their own.
They questioned the validity of her review, often citing the fact that her reviews were short, relatively content free, and error-prone. I find those same “errors” to be more reminiscent of someone who skim-reads tons of books, then sits down to review and finds that the details aren’t as sharp as they were when she finished the book. Jim becomes John; Mike becomes Martin. I have the same problem when I’m reviewing TV episodes — if I don’t do the review right after the episode, i.e. as soon as it ends, I find it really hard to go back and write the one-line tweet review even four episodes later. They just all blend together. Add in the fact that her reviews weren’t really reviews, they were short blurbs, about the equivalent of a dust-jacket and dashed together in 3 minutes with no going back to ensure she got the name right, etc. Not my style, but she was a perfect example of a type of internet dweller — the prolific commenter, writer, reviewer who cares more about writing a review and posting it to share their opinion than proof-reading, editing, tweaking, fact-checking. It’s a quick review, not painstaking journalism.
Harriet is, in my respects, the opposite of me when it comes to writing reviews. She could dash off 150 words and consider herself done, sending it out into the world. My reviews have detailed structures — plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, a summary, info about publisher, year, stars, series, tags — and I’ve agonized over things to include or not. I’ve spent 2 hours reading a short novel, and another hour writing the review to get it down to 300 words that I think are fair, reasoned, pithy but substantive. I’m anal. If it goes out the door with my name on it, I fuss. The result? Really low volume of reviews. I have tons of books on my TB Reviewed list because they are just too time consuming. I can’t let go.
So while I could never switch to Harriet’s approach (short, formulaic, and in some cases error-laden), I wish I had her laissez-faire approach. It’s just a short review, one of hundreds. For me, even if people don’t agree with my review, I hope they find it helpful. Thorough even. In a word, professional, which falsely suggests that I think Harriet wasn’t…in actuality, I think it was just a different standard of self-analness.
A frequent complaint was also that she *gasp* profited from her amateur reviews. She probably did, in at least four ways, but not in the way most people assume. There’s no evidence, ever, that she “sold” reviews, so let’s ignore that particular claim — people assume she must have been selling them to do so many, since why would she do it for free, but that was how her brain was wired. And is likely linked to the first form of profit — there is a huge selfish thrill to having people read your reviews. I love it. It’s addictive. I suspect, without knowing of course, that this was her main drive, and if so, she profited immensely. 30,000 reviews? Millions of people reading her reviews. Secondly, she was an Amazon affiliate too I believe. So if they clicked on her review site and got to Amazon to buy it, she would have got a few pennies if something sold. Is it enough to live on? Hardly. But it might pay for a few books a year. Third, she got TONS of free books from publishers. As an executive mentioned back in ’05, it was a way to get yourself reviewed when the big reviewers didn’t have space for you. Harriet would read just about anything. And did! Plus, it was risk-free — if she didn’t like it, she would stop reading it early, and not rate it. If she finished it, you would get at least 3 stars and probably 4 or 5. Again, risk free.
The fourth way she “profited” was how she got into some hot water with people, and understandably so. All those free books? She sold them off used on used book websites. And I totally understand why some people would say, “Wait, I sent that to you for free, you can’t sell it and make money!”. I get that, makes sense. But I do know there’s a larger spectrum at play, another side so to speak, which is part of what was apparently stressing her out — she was throwing them out, didn’t have room to keep them all. A pretty large volume. It’s hard to imagine a former librarian not finding that incredibly traumatic on its own. Plus, lots of people said, “Hey, shouldn’t you give those away instead?” so that they wouldn’t end up in landfill. Plus another group of more mercantile types who said, “No way, don’t give them away, sell them, you did all that work, you should get something for it!”.
Taking books out of the equation for a second, partly as it is so visceral to the soul of a reader, this is to me just human nature — some people can get quite lively about whether you throw something out like a used toaster vs. e-recycling it vs. donating it to Value Village vs. trying to sell it online. In that vein, I have a used microwave. Works fine, a few years old, we bought a bigger more powerful one. But the old one works great. Do I want to sell it? Not really. I’d be far happier to give it to someone who needs it than sell it, but I have family and friends who think that is almost heresy. Equally, I have 3000 books I need to get rid of — if someone would take them for free and use them, I’d happily give them to them. They represent thousands of dollars of my investment, so there are TONS of people who are aghast that I’m not trying to have a book sale of my own, or donating to the library (they won’t take them, too many and too old) or a host of other options because “Well, they’re worth money.” I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable selling ARCs, but I can understand that not everyone has the same reservations as me. I hate the idea of the profit, but I love the idea they’re not being recycled. I wonder if the people would feel differently if they were sold, but all proceeds went to a literacy charity?
None of these criticisms really resonate with me, because in the end, it comes down to something far simpler for me.
Some people liked her, some people loathed her. Yet for the authors of the books for the 31000 reviews she did, they generally got a 4-star review and some positive words about their story posted by someone who didn’t know them, wasn’t related to them, and didn’t profit much (if at all) from doing the review.
I didn’t always agree with her, I didn’t know her that well. But I’m saddened she’s gone from the review world…
She came, she read, she reviewed a life spent reading. There are far worse legacies.
This academic analysis of recent Canadian international development assistance is long on political economy and light on “realities on the ground”.
What I Liked
The text had a strong opening for its goals, even if the administrative context didn’t quite match their estimated / presumed political context. When it came to hard statistical analysis (Chapter 6) and mimicry of other donors, the paper was sound. Chapter 12 on children at risk, and the potential for mainstreaming, had potential but was undersold.
What I Didn’t Like
The book had a lot of rhetoric and assumptions than analysis of ethical consensus and normativism (Chapters 1-3), results reporting and power dynamics (Chapter 4, 5, 10), Corporate Social responsibility (Chapter 7, 15, 16), links to military spending for peacekeeping (Chapter 8, 9, 13,14), and soundbite announcements masquerading as policies (Chapter 11).
Disclosure
I am not personal friends with the editors, but I am friends with the author of one of the chapters.
