Saturday Reading Wrap-up - 7/12/25

 Not the best reading week I've ever had, but not the worst either, so let's get right to it.

No new books.  I still have 6 unread ebooks - three urban fantasy, two thrillers, and a YA action/adventure.  And of course, I have scads of unread hardcopies in case of emergency. ;o)

Books Read: 

27) Space Academy Dropouts by Phipps & Suttkus (7/6/25) - SF humor*# - 5 stars. New to me and underappreciated at the time of download.  Free off the Book Barbarian newsletter.
Review: "This is a pretty neat story, with loads of fun characters. I really enjoyed reading it."

No DNFs.

Currently reading... the next story in that Poirot omnibus.  I'm on The ABC Murders.  I'll probably finish it today and then read another ebook.  The omnibus has two more stories after this.  Unfortunately, I didn't notice when I bought it that Death on the Nile has damage to the last third or so of the story - like the top quarter of all the pages was ripped out.  I won't be able to read that.  Good thing I've already read that story in other formats, and I've seen the movies.  Still, damaged books make me sad.  =o(

Okay, your turn.  What's been on your reading plate this week?

My Reading Mission

 I know it's late in the year to be accepting new reading missions, but with the holiday season approaching, what better time of year would there be for this particular mission?  What is it, you ask?

Well, when I was searching for ebooks to read, it occurred to me that I had a mission once and I have forgotten it and its importance.  Here's the best way to explain it... My self-appointed mission to find underappreciated books, read them, and if they warrant it, give them the love they deserve.  So, I went to the Top 100 lists on Amazon and scanned through them, only picking books with a low # of stars - ideally less than ten but never more than 50.  

I ended up with five books that fit the bill in Suspense/Murder.  I finished the first one yesterday and it was really good (from an entertainment aspect, although it was also well-written).  I typed out a glowing review for Goodreads, posted it to Amazon, then to Facebook, then a truncated version to Twitter/X.  

And I feel really good about it.  I get to read a great book and I get to maybe help the author sell a few books.  I got these book for free, but I hope to, in some small way, pay these authors for the stories they gave me by posting reviews.  Win win.

I don't care if they ever know or even notice.  I'm only talking about it here to encourage others to try doing the same.  There are a boatload of awesome, underappreciated authors out there, slogging away with no feedback.  New reviews are at an all time low.  Most people just leave ratings and most of the new ratings seem to suck - like people only bother when they didn't like something and not when they did.  It's sad really.  So, in my own way, I'm striking out against that and leaving credit where credit is due.  

Hopefully, when I have a little extra scratch, I can purchase these authors' other books and support them in a monetary way, too.  We do what we can.  

Anyway, keep your eyes on my Books Read post and my weekly Saturday Reading Wrap-up posts and find some awesome things to read, too.  Or if you have FB or Twitter, follow me and see what I have to say about the books I'm reading.

Oh, and for the record, I don't finish a book if I feel I won't be able to give it at least 4 stars.  And I don't review books I don't finish.  I think that's only fair.  (Also, I don't give the titles of my DNF books - just the reasons. I can get kinda snotty with my reasons and there's no need to harsh some poor author's day because their book didn't suit me.)

Have a great day and keeping on reading!

Checking Things

 Part of getting back to writing... a big part of it... is the business side.  To that end, I went into Amazon and was scrolling through my books, checking to see where they're all at with reviews, ratings, etc.  I immediately noticed that one of my books had more than it did the last time I looked, so I zipped over to see if any new reviews were left or it was just those silly ratings*.  Sure enough, there was a new review.  But it wasn't actually a review of the book.  It was someone saying that the file must be corrupt because it's blank when they open it.  

So, I went in to see if everything was okay with IDW.  Looks okay to me.  Nothing especially hinky.  :shrug:  Oh, well.  I re-uploaded the book anyway, just in case.  Last night, I got the idea to check whether this person was a Verified Purchase.  Nope.  Then I went into the person's profile and it appears as if they have only done a few reviews - several of them were bad and those were due to some technical issue with the book.  I went into one of those and from what I can gather, the person is using the Kindle for iPad app.  Therein probably lies the problem.  

Unfortunately, authors have no control over whether our books are available or work right on anything but the Kindle.  In those cases, the reader should probably contact Amazon customer support and work it out there.  Leaving poor reviews - or even taking a star off a good review - does the author a disservice.  Those stars are our lifelines to sales.  The more we have, the better our books do.  And conversely, the fewer stars the poor the sales.  

I thought I'd leave a little note saying, ever so nicely, that the issue is with the app, but I can't find where I can reply to reviews.  Maybe that's an ebay thing and not an Amazon thing.  :shrug:

And yes, I do remember that I'm not supposed to address reviews, but I hate having incorrect and potentially sales-damaging information out there.  

Anyway, I'm getting back in the swing of things.  Checking things out and working to rebuild my writing career.  It's not going to be easy.  I'm not sure if I can ever get where I was with the old books.  I guess the only thing to do is write new books.  To that end, I'll be doing a NaNoWriMo type thing in July.  Fingers crossed.

* Don't get me started on Amazon 'ratings' where any old Joe with an opinion can click one star without repercussions and there's no way for the author to even know the whys and the whats of it.  Feh.

Saturday Reading Wrap-up - 6/6/20

Hello again.  Well, I wasn't exactly burning through the pages this week, but I wasn't DNF'ing books either, so it's all good.

No new books of any kind.  Gah.  St Vinny's opened, but you can only go in if you're wearing a mask and I don't need used books bad enough... yet... to subject myself to that.

Books Read:

46) The Surrey Stalker by BL Pearce (6/1/20) - Suspense* - 4 stars.  New to me, but loads of ratings, even if it has less than 50 reviews on Goodreads.  Free from the ENT newsletter.
Review: "Very enjoyable read. Interesting premise. Thrilling. I liked the end of the plot - which was satisfying - but not the end of the book. It was probably just me."

DNFs:
Like I said, no DNFs this week.

Currently reading...  an urban fantasy of sorts.  At least it was billed as an UF when I snagged it.  It reads more like paranormal mystery to me.  Interesting premise.  Likeable characters.  I'm about halfway through and it's looking like a 5-star.  As long as it doesn't throw something at me at the end, that is.

Okay, your turn.  How did your reading week go?

Thursday This n That

I saw someone on FB talking about fake meat - like BK's 'impossible' burger.  Sorry, I don't do fake meat.  And it's seems a bit hypocritical to me that BK is pushing their fake meat burgers as if meat is bad when meat is what made them rich.  Just sayin'.

I dated a vegetarian once... as in one date.  He took me to McDonalds.  He ordered a Big Mac with no meat.  It was just special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.  It was kind of sad looking without the two all-beef patties.  I, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed my all meat quarter pounder.  Too each their own.  (And no, I didn't refuse him another date because he was a vegetarian, although that was reason enough... no future there... and not even because he took me to McD's as a date when I was old enough to know what a real date was... but because he kissed like a gagging goldfish. Ew.)  I also had a really good friend once who was vegan.  She couldn't eat meat.  Couldn't even handle if chicken broth had been used in a dish.  Except every once in a while, she had me sneak her a coney dog for lunch.  I never understood that.

Today's bird of the day is a loon.  I love loons.  I rarely see one, but hearing them out at the lake makes me happy.  They're only passing through, though.  Loons aren't year-round visitors here.  I guess that makes it extra special when I hear one.

I have thirteen pages left to edit, which I will get done today.  You know, if those 13 pages don't end up being like 30.  ;o)

Tonight, I'll be using my new Foreman grill for the first time.  Burger night!  Yay! 

Does dry creamer ever go bad?  Yeah, it's got a 'best by' date on it, but they put those on everything now whether they're necessary or not.  Sometimes I think the date is simply on there to sell more stuff.  I did toss a mostly full bottle of Western salad dressing yesterday.  The date was in January and I had a really bad experience with past-date salad dressing.   Lucky for us, we haven't had salad since last year.

The other day I saw a book advertised on FB that sounded really interesting, so I hopped on over to Amazon for further investigation.  It had plenty of good reviews and like 4 really bad ones.  Three of those were hammering it for being a conservative leaning novel, which the readers should've seen from looking at the blurb, so I assume they bought it in order to bitch about it.  The 4th bad review was all about the really poor formatting and editing.  I didn't end up getting the book, because it's not in the budget right now, but I hope by the time I have the funds, they've fixed the formatting/editing issues. 

Last night, I saw someone lamenting in a book group about getting taken by an unethical 'paid review' service.  He paid $100 for 3 reviews and the reviews were very badly written and didn't seem like they were for the books they were supposed to be for.  He tried to get his money back and was told to basically suck it.  First off, if you're trying to do business with someone who is, on their face, unethical in their business practices, you can't possibly expect them to be ethical with you.  Second, the guy had better hope Amazon doesn't find out he's paying for reviews because then poorly written ones will be the least of his worries.  I get that reviews are insanely hard to get, and the lure of paying a bunch of money to get reviews is a sweet song.  But it's the siren, folks.  Don't do it.

And that's all I've got right now.  What's up with you?

I'm Not a 'Book Reviewer'

I keep seeing people offering their books for free in exchange for reviews.  And I can't do that.  Let's forget the fact that if Amazon catches you offering books in exchange for reviews, they'll smack your little paddies.  Or worse.  I can't do stuff like that because I don't work that way.

I can't agree to write a review of a book I haven't read yet because there's every possibility I won't like the book.  And if I don't like a book, I won't finish it.  And if I don't finish a book, I won't review it.  So, accepting a free book in exchange for a review would be accepting it under false pretenses.

Oh, I love free books.  If it weren't for free books, I wouldn't have read most of the newer books I read this year.  I wouldn't have found some of the new authors I've loved.  But if those authors offered me a free book for a review, I still couldn't take it.

You see, I picked up a book recently.  I got partway through and DNF'd it.  It wasn't blowing my skirt up.  When I went to the end - which I always do, so my Kindle recognizes it as 'Read' and doesn't pop it up when I'm looking for my next unread book - I noticed pages from another book by the author and I was all like 'well, shit'.  The other book was a book I loved.  Didn't even realize this meh one was one of their books.  All I knew was I didn't enjoy it and I didn't finish it.  And then I felt bad because I had enjoyed the previous books so much and I want to help this author succeed so they write more books and...  Well... Bummer.

If I had accepted it with the expectation that I'd review it, we would've both been screwed. 

So, yeah, I post reviews here every Saturday.  But I'm not a 'book reviewer'.  There's too much pressure down that road.  I read what I like and since I never know what I'm going to like on any given day, it's kind of hit or miss.  Basically, I'm a reader who likes to share her thoughts on the books she's read. 

Speaking of free books, Project Hermes is free today and tomorrow.  While I'd certainly appreciate reviews if you happen to download it, it's not expected and there's no tit-for-tat here.  It's just free.  For everyone.  Worldwide.  Do with the book what you will. 

Do you review books?  Even ones you haven't finished or didn't like? 

Reviewer's Guilt

Sometimes I can go weeks without getting any new books.  Lately, though, I've been one-clicking a lot and that's a bad thing.  And my inbox is filled with Amazon emails of unread books*.  And it's making me kind of antsy.

Now, some of you will laugh.  Why?  Because I have a grand total of eleven unread ebooks on my Kindle (recent downloads - we won't talk about older downloads that will probably never get read.)  In the scheme of things, eleven isn't really such a big number.  I'm sure there are people out there with hundreds of unread books on their Kindles, and they're downloading more every day.  But numbers like that defeats my purpose.

What's the purpose?  Well, I'm trying to snag new-to-me underappreciated books, read them, and review them to kind of help out the authors.  And when I take forever to read a book, then it takes forever for those reviews to show up.  Every review helps an author (despite what I said yesterday), but I think it might be a 'the sooner the better' kind of thing - especially when it's a new release. 

Sure, my downloading the book helped its ranking at the time.  So, there's that.  I certainly hope my reviews are helping, too. 

Okay, so I'm not the best reviewer.  I wish I wrote better reviews - full of specifics about the story and about my personal reactions to the story.  Sometimes, though, the best I can manage is 'cute story' or 'squee, I loved this so much'.  At least the majority of my Amazon reviews say 'verified' - certainly all the ebook reviews do since I only get ebooks from Amazon.  And nobody's paid me to download their books and write reviews. 

Anyway, having all these books to read and not reading them very fast is certainly a quandary for me.  I promise to get to them as soon as I can.  And I'm trying to read them in the order I downloaded them, so people don't have to wait any longer than necessary for reviews.  (Not that any of these authors are actually waiting on me.  Except in the grander scheme where they know they sold a book and might be wondering 'what the hell is taking so long?')

I guess I could call this 'reviewer's guilt'.  :shrug:  Maybe it's just me.  Anyone else feel this way?  How bad is your TBR pile?  Did you laugh at me and my piddlin' 11 books?

*I keep the Amazon email in my inbox until I've started the book, so I can keep track of them.  Otherwise, I might have ordered a book that never made it to my Kindle - it's happened before - and I'd never remember to go looking for it.

Sunday Update - Week 4

Howdy.  It's Sunday morning again.  How did that happen?  Anyway, here's a look at the week that was...

I'm editing Early Grave.  Got all the initial edit notes input on Friday and sent it back to my Kindle.  Then Saturday I sat down to work on the final read-through before this goes off to AWE.  And I kept finding things I was SURE I'd already changed.  But it was morning and I hadn't had enough coffee, so instead of thinking of a rational reason why this happened, I got frustrated and went off to do other things.  Yesterday afternoon, I thought I'd give it another try.  Sure enough, there were two copies of Early Grave on my Kindle - the old one and tada! the new one.  I'd been looking at the old one.  Derp.  I'm back on track now.  EG will go to the editor Monday night/Tuesday morning.  By then, Blink should be back and I can start the final editing process on that puppy.

I've been so focused on getting EG edited, I haven't been reading.

And the weather hasn't been right for fishing, so I haven't done that either. 

But it has been right for working in the woods, so I've been doing that.  We're tidy to about halfway down the hill now.  About at the point where it gets steeper.  That ought to be fun.  Not steep-steep, mind you, but steep enough to make my butt muscles squeal walking up the darn incline.  Which is a good thing, I guess.  I will have buns of steel by the time we're done.  LOL

I got three awesome new reviews last week.  Which was cool.  Usually, I'm just sitting here working away not knowing if anyone will like what I've written.  When reviews come in, I get to know they do.  Yay!

Okay, that's it for me.  How's about you?