{"id":879,"date":"2007-12-10T16:06:56","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T20:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=879"},"modified":"2007-12-10T16:07:53","modified_gmt":"2007-12-10T20:07:53","slug":"goodbye-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=879","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I closed my <a href=\"http:\/\/goodreads.com\" target=\"_blank\">Goodreads.com<\/a> account.  I know that many folks use and enjoy the site, bur for me it&#8217;s become more of a nuisance than a benefit of late, so I&#8217;m bidding Goodreads goodbye.  Why?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I just don&#8217;t have the time to write thoughtful, interesting reviews of books these days.  I&#8217;ve barely got enough time to read books at all these days, so what free time I&#8217;ve got I&#8217;ll devote to actual reading instead.<\/li>\n<li>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 <em>machine<\/em>, 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 &#8220;reviews&#8221; at a time that were nothing but rankings of books as on a scale of one to five stars.  This isn&#8217;t particularly useful and it results in frequent email notifications about new &#8220;reviews&#8221; that turn out to be just a laundry list of star rankings.<\/li>\n<li>The one review that I wrote that seemed to attract some attention was my review of <strong>The Golden Compass<\/strong>, which I thought I reviewed pretty favorably&#8211;but apparently comparing it to the Harry Potter series in anything less than glowing terms is cause enough for <strong>Compass<\/strong> fans to gripe at you regularly&#8230; resulting in yet more email notifications.  If, for some bizarre reason, you want to read this review, it&#8217;s posted after the &#8220;more&#8221; break.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><!--more-->The first time I heard about Philip Pullman&#8217;s <strong>The Golden Compass,<\/strong> it came up in a conversation about the Harry Potter series. The second time was also in this same context. Likewise, the third time. You get the idea: Folks like to compare the two. Anti-populists also seem to take great joy in proclaiming that <strong>The Golden Compass<\/strong> and the series it&#8217;s a part of, <strong>His Dark Materials<\/strong>, is superior to all that Hogwarts drivel. Harry Potter is for suckers, it would seem, if it&#8217;s indeed even possible to be an elitist about children&#8217;s fantasy fiction.<o> <\/o><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Given this pre-existing comparison to Potter, I&#8217;ll do the same, though. It&#8217;s not an odd comparison to make, really\u00e2\u20ac\u201dat least in a general sense. They&#8217;re both young adult fantasy novels, they each feature an adolescent protagonist, and the central narrative trope of each is the age-old and time-tested &#8220;seemingly ordinary protagonist discovers that he\/she is actually a very important person destined for great, world-changing things.&#8221;<o> <\/o><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">So, how to they compare? I can&#8217;t say exactly. I&#8217;ve read only <strong>The Golden Compass<\/strong>, but I&#8217;m fully up to date in the Potter camp, and comparing a single book to a whole series is a true &#8220;apples and oranges&#8221; comparison. (Or maybe &#8220;orange to a whole big pile of oranges&#8221; comparison?) So far, though, I&#8217;m going to have to give my vote to Harry.<o> <\/o><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Fantasy (and SF for that matter) writing seems to me to succeed or fail on pretty much the same ingredients as any other sort of fiction writing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcharacter and plot\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut with an added feature, world-building. That is, the author must construct a unique, engrossing, interesting and internally consistent world in which the novel&#8217;s characters interact. As far as the first items go, I found the main character in Compass, Lyra, to be a bit thin. It&#8217;s difficult to really care about what happens to her because she seems to not really care that much herself. She first believes her parents to be dead, then she finds out they&#8217;re alive, then they turn out to be the book&#8217;s main villains\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand throughout it all it&#8217;s hard to know what, if anything, she feels about any of it. While I find the character Harry Potter not nearly as interesting as some of the supporting characters (Snape!), I at least know what&#8217;s going on in his head\u00e2\u20ac\u201dperhaps even overly much so in the two most recent teen-emo installments of the series.<o> <\/o><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The world <st1 w:st=\"on\"><\/st1><st1 w:st=\"on\">Pullman<\/st1> has constructed in Compass is an interesting one and its concepts are as refreshingly clich\u00c3\u00a9-free for the most part. I found myself, though, having a hard time really getting any visual sense of place, however. There are lots of intriguing concepts thrown around, but little description to give the reader an idea of what much of this stuff actually looks like. While the environment in the Harry Potter series isn&#8217;t nearly as radical departure from our own as the world of <strong>The Golden Compass<\/strong>, (and that perhaps gives Rowling an edge not wholly related to her writing) the halls of Hogwarts feel far more real to me than the somewhat ambiguous environs of Pullman&#8217;s world.<o> <\/o><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">All that being said, don&#8217;t get the idea that I didn&#8217;t enjoy <strong>The Golden Compass<\/strong>. In fact, I tore through the book in less than two weeks, which is about as fast as I can go these days given my schedule, and I&#8217;ve only stopped at book one temporarily\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 since, you know, the new Harry Potter book is coming out<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I closed my Goodreads.com account. I know that many folks use and enjoy the site, bur for me it&#8217;s become more of a nuisance than a benefit of late, so I&#8217;m bidding Goodreads goodbye. Why? I just don&#8217;t have the time to write thoughtful, interesting reviews of books these days. I&#8217;ve barely got enough &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link btn\" href=\"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=879\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[44],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p46veT-eb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}