Café Quito: 'pub' thread for general discussions Showing 101-150 of 1,427

[Marc]

Well, I had to laugh at myself--apparently, I've never scrolled down far enough to realize there were "Community Reviews"! I'm finding this rather comical given the amount of time I spend on GR and the number of years I've used the site, but I do have a habit of sort of artificially ignoring certain parts of websites to keep from going insane or from being too overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available.

I guess most of my GR friends are pretty active, so those reviews are always at the top for me.

[Jibran]

Marc wrote: "I guess most of my GR friends are pretty active, so those reviews are always at the top for me. "

Friends' reviews are always at the top whether or not they are currently active as long as they have reviewed/added the book. Community reviews appear only after your friends' reviews end.

[Marc]

Good to know--thanks, Jibran!

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Marc wrote: "I do have a habit of sort of artificially ignoring certain parts of websites to keep from going insane or from being too overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available.."

Useful, frankly! GR is an endless sprawl with no centralised structure, so it's a good one to apply this habit to in order to save time.

[Jibran]

Antonomasia wrote: "Useful, frankly! GR is an endless sprawl with no centralised structure, so it's a good one to apply this habit to in order to save time."."

I have lost the joy of scrolling through my feed ever since they changed it from the old format to this nonsensical thin stream of data with awful empty spaces on both sides.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Must admit I've got used to things like seeing the book summaries in the feed now. But IIRC it did used to display more lines from a review before you had to click 'more'.

My bugbear is now the difference between the desktop and mobile feed, and the way that stuff you removed from one isn't removed from both.

[Jibran]

I guess all these glitches will never be fixed. I still don't get notifications for comments posted on book progress updates. I have to manually open the link to see if someone has left a comment. And I have stop counting other similar problems. I also noticed that if you update an already written review it doesn't show up in your feed and displays the old time stamp. I think I am only discovering the changes made during the previous upgrade.

I only access GR when I'm on my laptop, so no idea how it works on (android) phones.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Jibran wrote: "I also noticed that if you update an already written review it doesn't show up in your feed and displays the old time stamp.."

It will only show up again at the top if you deleted it from the feed.

Any rating or change to a rating will, though, put the book (and the review if there is one) into the feed on mobile, even if it doesn't on desktop. If people are liking a rating you just made but thought you didn't post to the feed, that's why. Mobile also displays any new friends, even if you've got it set on desktop not to display.

[Jibran]

Antonomasia wrote: "If people are liking a rating you just made but thought you didn't post to the feed, that's why."

Oh yes, this has happened a couple of times. Thanks for explaining.

GR works in mysterious ways...

[David]

A trend I have noticed in the last couple of years is that it seems to have become more and more common for authors to dispense with quotation marks when writing dialogue. I am wondering how recent this trend is and whether anyone knows why it has become so common.

My guess as to why authors do this is that they want to emphasize that the story is being told by the particular character who is narrating, and so we can't really count on any of the dialogue to be exact quotations of what people have said. Rather, they are the narrator's recollection of what was said. But maybe there is another reason. I really don't know.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

David wrote: "My guess as to why authors do this is that they want to emphasize that the story is being told by the particular character who is narrating, ."

Interesting theory.

I thought about this too during a couple of recent books. I like it as I find it smoother to read, somehow. Hadn't thought of any solid reasons though.

If authors were writing novels on phones and tablets it would be understandable, but I very much doubt it. Unless it's an influence from that - people getting used to using fewer punctuation marks due to writing a lot of messages on phones.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Unlikely to be of interest to anyone else, but I have been letting this unfinished review of Homage to Catalonia get in the way of other more important things. This is pretty ridiculous and I don't think there's even much more of it to write. Posting about it in public to make myself get on with it, and so I don't post anything else until it's done.

[Jibran]

Antonomasia wrote: "Unlikely to be of interest to anyone else, but I have been letting this unfinished review of Homage to Catalonia get in the way of other more important things. This is pretty ridiculous and I don't..."

And I have a backlog of 5 recent reviews to cover before I start forgetting things I resolved to write about and took a mental note of. The reason, an unconscious unwillingness to stop reading and start typing. So much so that I was in two minds whether I should even type up these very lines...

[MisterHobgoblin]

I have given up on writing a review of everything I read. If it happens, great. But if it doesn't happen within a few days I find I have lost the precision of thought to make the review worth anything anyway. Even assuming that my other reviews do have some value.

[WndyJW]

With some books I need a few days to let it settle and gather my thoughts, other books I know exactly how I feel after the last word, which is all my reviews are, my response to them, I can’t write the intelligent critiques some of the members here can write (you know who you are) and I don’t think a summary is needed from me. My audience is my future self.
Often I’m too eager to get on to my next book to take time.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

More often I need time to winnow out excess. (like that: https://www.goodreads.com/user_status...). I write long enough posts as it is. I don't want to be writing a book's worth of notes in response.

There are also some books (though not this one) which I read more as writing prompts than for the experience of reading them in itself.
It can be a nuisance when I have a lot to say about the idea of a book, because I think I should then go and read it, especially if it's short - yet I'd probably rather read something else for the actual reading experience.

I'm glad that other people have already said most of the things I think I'd want to say about some books, especially Normal People, and possibly Crudo. Less (self imposed) work for me.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Question for other UK readers who may remember / know more about the Sunday Times bestseller list than I do currently. Sometimes it seems like there's so much I've forgotten and possibly used to know.

Over the years I've noticed quite a lot of popular fiction described on the cover as Sunday Times bestsellers, but which has pretty small numbers of ratings and reviews on GR.
(There are several examples of Christmas-themed women's commercial fiction novels by these sorts of authors on UK Netgalley at the moment from the big 5 publishers.)

Is this simply because these books aren't marketed in the US (just UK and occasionally the odd Euro translation), and are aimed mostly at an audience that doesn't have a lot of heavy GR users (unlike YA romance, fantasy, literary etc that have sizeable reviewing communities; sometimes they are marketed as 'me time' for the tired or busy, who implicitly wouldn't have time to join in wider GR communities and write long reviews) - or is there something else about the way those charts are compiled which would explain it, and which means the books aren't actually that popular? e.g. charts not accounting for Kindle, or self-published hits, or certain publishers?

[Hugh, Active moderator]

My knowledge of the Sunday Times is very limited, as I only ever see it when visiting my parents and I don't visit paywall websites. GR reading stats are often surprising! Apart from one written by an IRL friend, I think my record low was 7.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Yes, the paywall has made the Sunday Times a lot more obscure than it used to seem, and its paper bulk means it's not very suitable to browse when it's available in public places.

Some very British non-fiction (e.g. Stuart Maconie) also gets low numbers of ratings which wouldn't really be expected given how ubiquitous some of these books are in libraries and shops both new and second hand. I guess these, like the commercial women's fiction, are the sorts of books for which other countries have their own equivalents and have limited appeal and marketing internationally.

It still seems to be Nielsen Bookscan compiling the charts but as for which stores and stats they do include now, not sure if that's changed. I remember they didn't include Wordery for example. Can't remember what their situation was re. Amazon. And they do about 9000 bricks & mortar shops. (keep wanting to abbreviate that to B&M but not sure if that would confuse anyone, as B&M obviously aren't a bookshop)

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

There seems to be a new look for Penguin Classics:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nobody-Leave...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unwomanly-Fa...
These are both modern classics, but it only says 'Penguin Classics' on the cover.

Can't immediately see anything on the Penguin website about which books are going to be getting these covers, or if these two are from some kind of sub-brand or imprint.

I really like the design, but at the same time I wonder if it's too retro for such a major range.

[WndyJW]

Antonomasia wrote: "There seems to be a new look for Penguin Classics:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nobody-Leave...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unwomanly-Fa......"

I love books as art and I don’t think I like these covers.

[David]

WndyJW wrote: "I love books as art and I don’t think I like these covers."

A single, square photograph on a monochrome background with plain looking text. I'm with you. These are boring.

[MisterHobgoblin]

They look cheap and make the books look self-published.

[Hugh, Active moderator]

I like their white cover modern classics, so for me it is an unnecessary change. Will reserve judgment on the new ones until I see the physical books.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

I really liked the white & silver ones as designs, but white book covers (there were way too many of them about in general a few years ago and there still seem to be a fair number) look grubby and worn very easily, especially now that fewer covers are laminated.

With these new ones, if I still bought a lot of paper books, the apparent randomness of the colours might frustrate me. (Kapuscinski and Alexeyevich for instance are both non-fiction reportage from the same region of Europe, so if the colours were categorised I'd expect those books to have the same.) In 'customers also bought' on those Amazon pages there are quite a lot of other books with these new covers, in various different colours.

I see these as part of the same retro trend which is most obvious in the Dostoevsky Wannabe covers, and which is evident in a few other covers and ranges now (can't remember off-hand without browsing to find some) but I'm really liking the shift away from the twee designs and repeating patterns that were so common in the first half of the 2010s. (Penguin English library is still using those although the modern classics and black classics never did.)

[[deleted user]]

Those white and silver designs were I think the best Penguin have ever come up with.

[Jibran]

I love those Penguin Black classics, not the tiny ones they issued recently, but the full length editions. At their Indian branch they usually print some old miniature or painting on bookcovers which gives them a really classy look and makes me want to purchase every classic (in translation) they ever publish. They are churning them out by the dozens every year and I can't keep up :-/

Eg from my collection:


Penguin used to, maybe still does, produce small yellowish paperbacks of popular classics. They are cheaper and handy and I can still buy them new at bookshops over here even though sometimes they are published years, even decades, ago. Like these one:


And I'm also partial towards the red-topped Oxford classics. A new whitish design superseded later but I have many memories of buying and reading those red-ones:


Penguin can never match Oxford uni press's scholarly introductions of classics; and of less well-known or obscure classics I've found that Oxford translations are much better in terms of quality than Penguin ones, especially in the case of non-Western classics. But that's to be expected due to obvious reasons.

[Robert]

I'm a fan of the Green Spine Penguin Classics - I still have a load of them.

Then in the late 90's Penguin reissued a handful with more edgy covers! I have the whole set. Here's a couple:





I like the silver ones as well but the green editions are my fave.

[Val]

I was not that keen on the ones which reminded me of covering school books in bits of spare wallpaper.

[WndyJW]

I have been keeping up with the Hogart Shakespeare series, http://hogarthshakespeare.com/ and it bugs me that the covers are not a set, there is no unifying theme among the covers. It’s a silly complaint, but one that matters to we bibliophiles.

[MisterHobgoblin]

Most of the Hogarth Shakespeare covers are variations on a theme. Jo Nesbø is different - a similar style to his other books presumably with a view to sales and encouraging non-traditional readers into the series. And then Edward St Aubyn also has a different cover - not sure why as you wouldn't think he carried a strong readership with him.

[WndyJW]

The covers in that link are similar, but those are reprints. The first edition covers have no unifying theme.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Today is Super Thursday, the day of the year when the greatest number of books is released: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Lots of celebrity autobiographies and that sort of thing. Wondering if there's an article which lists more of the fiction and in-depth or creative non-fiction.

This seems to be the nearest UK equivalent to the Icelandic Jólabókaflóð, although most of the country doesn't get as excited about it. (The idea of catalogues being distributed to homes sounds almost like something from Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next universe, where literature has remained the most popular part of culture.)

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Has Amazon recently removed the 'not helpful' button for voting on reviews? Frustrated!

[Paul]

Amazon removed all of my reviews and stopped me posting new ones which was even more frustrating.

[Marc]

Did they give you any warning or say why they removed your reviews, Paul?

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

It is dreadful they do things like that with no warning. Many people won't have their content backed up. I hope yours already were on here.

And it is very unfair that some people are able to post dozens of reviews based on ARCs, not even Vine ARCs (some of them very unhelpful) yet others are stopped.

[Paul]

I only had a handful so back up wasn't an issue. No warning. Can't quite work out if it is posting Net Galley reviews, or reviews for independent publishers where I didn't buy the book from Amazon. Same thing happened to Gumble and the trigger seemed to be when we complained about a defamatory review of a Galley Beggar book - they took down that review but also ours with it, so wondered if they assumed we were from the publisher and hence reviewing our own books. Can't actually get any response from them.

[Neil]

I also can no longer post reviews to Amazon. I assumed because it was reviews of books purchased elsewhere, but now I am not so sure...

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Did they also delete your reviews, Neil, or has only stop you adding more?

[Marc]

If you're interested in getting a response, try addressing them on Twitter (nothing causes a company to be more responsive these days than a little negative social media attention). Something as simple as "Can't figure out why @amazon has deleted all my book reviews--anybody else had this happen?" should do the trick...

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

Has anyone else seen Lithub's lists of 10 books that defined decades of the 20th century?

I was surprised how much I agreed, after the first 3 (which had no impact on me at the time - I think those books were bigger in America) with the 1990s one: https://lithub.com/a-century-of-readi...
The 1980s seemed to be missing some of the authors who were big in Britain, like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, but The Color Purple and the last few: Bonfire of the Vanities, Brief History of Time, Satanic Verses, absolutely: https://lithub.com/a-century-of-readi...
I didn't really hear DeLillo talked about in the UK until Underworld, and Beloved even 10 years ago seemed like one of those books that Americans seemed to regard as a modern classic but which wasn't as much of a big deal here.

Would be really interesting to see equivalents for other countries from which there's quite a bit translated, e.g. France.

[WndyJW]

The Color Purple is still very important to Black women in the US. A few women in my office had quotes from Ceilie taped to their desks last year.
I’m a little surprised Beloved didn’t make more waves in the UK since Toni Morrison won the Nobel. My favorite is The Bluest Eye, it changed the way I see the world.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

I think it has more now. That may be partly because I've been on GR for most of the current decade, but I've seen it mentioned more often in UK articles too, and international polls of authors about best books, from sources like the Guardian and the BBC.

The Color Purple did seem to be around more; I was aware of it as a teenager in the 90s as something I probably should have read if I was reading serious modern fiction (didn't manage to finish it then).

Nothing made me think I ought to read Beloved until it was chosen in the late 00s by a RL book group I was planning to go to, but didn't.
(But I also didn't think people under retirement age read War and Peace these days, until I became active on GR. It is a very different set of horizons than those formed via a couple of UK newspapers, a handful of friends with similar taste, and the contents of bookshops.)

[WndyJW]

I wish I knew even 3 people in real life that read the number, variety, and quality of books read on GR. Two of my adult kids read, but they read what I give them so they aren’t a resource like GR.

The Color Purple was a very successful movie here in the states. Oprah produced and acted in it and it did very well.

If you were only going to read one of the three: Beloved, The Color Purple or The Bluest Eye I would urge you to read the latter. Two high school students asked me for book recommendations for class. I told them both The Bluest Eye and both said it was profound and changed their world view.

[Antonomasia, Admin only]

I read both Beloved (surprised just how good it was) and The Color Purple (still didn't get on with the style) a few years ago. But I haven't read any more by either Morrison or Walker since then.

[WndyJW]

I loved them all. Morrison’s best are Song of Solomon and Sula and the two we mentioned. The only other Alice Walker book that really moved me was The Temple of My Familiar, about Ceilie’s African daughter-in-law and the toll genital mutilation took on her mind.

[Robert]

I think Toni Morrison is a genius. I love her writing style. Although I think that Beloved is slightly different than the rest of the books I've read by her.

As for Walker I adored The Color Purple and the sequel Possessing the Secret of Joy is just as good.

[WndyJW]

I think Jesmyn Ward is the emergent novel writing voice for African American life. There are a number of important black writers in the US, but it seems to me she is the shining star in literary fiction, along with James McBride.

[Sam]

Antonomasia wrote: "Has anyone else seen Lithub's lists of 10 books that defined decades of the 20th century?

I was surprised how much I agreed, after the first 3 (which had no impact on me at the time - I think tho..."

I had noticed this and was going to post a link, then got distracted and forgot to comment. There will always areas of agreement and disagreement with the author's choices, but I was somewhat baffled over the choice of William James instead of Henry in the 1900's picks, and none of Henry's novels in the also mentioned.

https://lithub.com/a-century-of-readi...