Today's guest is
Bird Brian's Ghost.
How did you discover Goodreads?In December 2008, I got an email from a high school friend I hadn’t heard from since1987, inviting me to Facebook. It didn’t take me long to get bored of FB, but I discovered the link to GoodReads there, and found GR much more interesting; I was an active user from December 2008 to April 2013.
What have been your most memorable Goodreads experiences?My most memorable GR experience was probably the Celebrity Deathmatch series which
Manny started, and which lasted a few months in the autumn and winter of 2011. It’s basically pitting books against each other in reviews, and competing with other reviewers to win more votes for which book you think should win. Obviously it is pretty subjective and not very meaningful to say that, say
1984 should “win” in a confrontation with
Macbeth, but it was a lot of fun, and some of the reviews people came up with were very imaginative and entertaining. Another great memory was the long strings of puns that
Karen,
Eh!,
Mariel,
Ian Graye and I would into with each other. That was fun too. I remember once I was trying to come up with more puns, when my wife called me to dinner. I sat at the dinner table, absorbed, and she thought there was something serious going on. She asked me, “Hey, what are you thinking about? Is there something going on at work?” and I had to admit “No, I’m just trying really hard to think of a horse-themed pun.” She’s a woman with a lot of patience.
Name one reviewer not in the Forbes 25 that people should be aware of.There are a lot of great reviewers who go unnoticed on the Forbes list. If I had to pick just one, I would name
David Kowalski, who is a gifted and insightful writer. He would probably be on the Forbes list, but for the fact he’s deleted his account several times in fits of tortured artistic melodrama. He and
Ceridwen were tied for having the most reviews in my reviews “Hall of Fame”. I would also like to mention my friend Ian Graye, who has very in-depth analyses, as well as
Eric_W Welch, who has distinguished himself as an extraordinary reviewer of historical nonfiction. The Top Lists on GR are not designed to recognize a talent like that, but that’s their failing; not his.
What was your initial reaction to Amazon buying Goodreads?Well, obviously I wasn’t happy, since it inspired me to greatly reduce my presence on GoodReads. To me, the acquisition was an unwanted step towards further centralization and oligopoly –both of book sales, as well as of moderated online platforms for discussing books. I really like what you and some friends have put together on
Shelfinflicted, by the way.
One thing the Amazon acquisition wasn’t –was a surprise. Coincidentally, I had made a group poll for some friends just a few days before the news came out, asking them what they thought GR would be like 10 years from now. Most respondents thought it would be about the same. I included choices of it being bought out by Facebook or by Amazon, but those didn’t get many votes.
How many books do you own?I would roughly estimate I have between 1000 and 1500 physical books laying around my home, including some which are not easily accessible, since they’re in boxes in my storage space. Then I have another 300-400 on Kindle (yeah, I’ve got an Amazon product- it’s from a time I was less sensitized to Amazon). That seems like a lot of books, when I see it written here. It is doubtful I’ll ever be able to read them all. I’m either very ambitious, or a very impulsive bookbuyer. Actually some of those were gifts. Also, some of them have already been read, so maybe the absolute numbers without further breakdown are a poor indicator of anything.
Who is your favorite author?These “who are your favorite” questions always kill me, because they force unnatural comparisons between genres and styles. How can I compare the incisive historical analysis of
Edward Gibbon or
Carroll Quigley with the storytelling of
Honore Balzac or
Charles Dickens? Or the humor of
Woody Allen and
Joseph Heller, with the imaginative worldbuilding of
Tolkien, or with the paranoid musings of
Philip K. Dick? I love
David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest differently than I love Shakespeare’s Macbeth, you know? I guess I’m being difficult here… sorry about that. I won’t get any points for originality here, but I guess I’d have to name Shakespeare as my favorite fiction author, both for the number of his works that I admire, and the high regard I hold him in. Is that stuck up to say? Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller,
Douglas Adams and
James Michener (that's right- haters can kiss my ass) would also be on my list.
Carroll Quigley and
Allan Bullock would be my current favorite nonfiction authors.
What is your favorite book of all time?My favorite book of all time? Again, that’s so tough. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I keep coming back to the same few titles:
The Brothers Karamazov- F. Dostoyevsky;
Tragedy & Hope- Carroll Quigley;Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace;
Lost Illusions- H. Balzac;
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire- E. Gibbon; 1984- George Orwell; and
Brave New World- Aldous Huxley. If you made me pick the most favoritest there, it would probably just be arbitrary, and I’d change my mind in 5 minutes.
What are your thoughts on ebooks?Usually I prefer paper and ink over electronic screens, but there is no denying the convenience of travelling with a compact e-reader, instead of lugging around a pile of heavy books. I also prefer reading newspapers and magazines on e-reader, because they don’t clutter up my house and they don’t create a lot of waste. So there is definitely a place for e-readers in my (imagined) “perfect world”. When I was a med student, we had to carry around cumbersome references like The Washington Manual with us on the wards. I would have loved an e-reader for that. I’m sure it has completely changed the experience of rounding on patients.
What are your thoughts on self-publishing?I love self-publishing. I love that it empowers authors to bring their product to market without having to pass through publishers who may have a gatekeeping and censoring effect. I also love that it changes the dynamic of what books make it to market. Publishing is a business, so to be profitable, publishers need to print and promote books it thinks will be commercially successful. But if you look through the catalogue of Smashwords or Lulu, it’s clear that many of their titles are labors of love, which would have no hope of commercial success, but whose authors are motivated by other considerations. That isn’t to say all those books are all well-written. Some of them are horrible, but that’s okay; you have to look through more “rough” to find the “diamonds” in self-publishing. The biggest benefit is probably narrow-appeal self-published titles… quirky and bizarre works, like the Smashwords book I found which tries to make a case that Paul McCartney was actually killed in 1966, and the performer we think is McCartney is actually an imposter. Also, of course, self-publishing has fueled a Renaissance in monster porn novella.
Any literary aspirations? I have no literary aspirations at this time.