Today I closed my Goodreads.com account. I know that many folks use and enjoy the site, bur for me it’s become more of a nuisance than a benefit of late, so I’m bidding Goodreads goodbye. Why?

• I just don’t have the time to write thoughtful, interesting reviews of books these days. I’ve barely got enough time to read books at all these days, so what free time I’ve got I’ll devote to actual reading instead.
• While some folks on Goodreads write lots of great reviews that I look forward to reading, (SLG editor in chief Jennifer de Guzman is apparently a reading machine, and writes good reviews of most of the stuff she reads, for example) the majority of the folks on my friends list would often bulk submit dozens of “reviews” at a time that were nothing but rankings of books as on a scale of one to five stars. This isn’t particularly useful and it results in frequent email notifications about new “reviews” that turn out to be just a laundry list of star rankings.
• The one review that I wrote that seemed to attract some attention was my review of The Golden Compass, which I thought I reviewed pretty favorably–but apparently comparing it to the Harry Potter series in anything less than glowing terms is cause enough for Compass fans to gripe at you regularly… resulting in yet more email notifications. If, for some bizarre reason, you want to read this review, it’s posted after the “more” break.

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