More Ponderings

 

 

Another short post.  Work is picking up again (thank goodness) but I still have time to ponder.  As mentioned before, I lost my blogging mojo and it recently started coming back and before I could manage to solve the forgotten password, I started getting a lot more active at Good Reads – kind of my pre-resume blogging fix.  I found this really neat feature.  If I gave book 4 or 5 stars, it gave me a list of friends to send a recommendation to.  Cool beans.  But with great power comes great responsibility.  I’m an author’s delight.  I enjoy a lot of what I read so I was getting this feature pop up quite a bit.  But I didn’t want to abuse it and send out a referral to everyone that pops up.  My son is a friend on Good Reads and while the thought of recommending some real hawt erotic novel is very tempting and every time I see his name I giggle, I don’t.  The most tempted I’ve been is with Transcendence but even then I resisted.  I don’t think he would appreciate the romance aspect as much as I did – heh, heh, heh.  A lot of the people that come up are technically friends but I haven’t had real interaction with them so I don’t want to send them to strangers.  So if anyone reading this has received a recommendation from Good Reads from me, I have sent it thoughtfully.

 

But even still I hesitate to do this.  I know, I know some of you long term readers are thinking. 

“Aren’t you the odd ball who emailed every romance reader you know and told them they HAD to read Broken Wing by Judith James?  And aren’t you the one who haunted blogs and at the least little opportunity told the blogger to read Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas?  And what about Ride the Fire by Pamela Clare??  That’s what we expect from you.!"

 

Yes, that was me and I did do that.  But even as I was doing it, I knew that not all readers would be struck as much as I am by some books.  While many may enjoy the books as much as I do, some may consider them a waste of time and of money and wonder to themselves ‘what’s the big deal?’  I don’t want to – and this is going to sound rather vain, but I don’t really mean it that way – lose my power of the recommendation by going full tilt and have more people than not think it a m’eh book.  Because then they would have wasted their money and I’d feel bad about it.  I know every book we pick up is a risk, even if it’s a well-loved author, but it’s kind of like a box of chocolates, we never know what we are going to get.

 

So this is really my rambling (cause that’s how I roll) way of wondering if you appreciate recommendations from fellow readers, pay no attention to rec’s or find them annoying.  I don’t seem to get that many – I send a lot more than I receive, but I do check them out to see how they appeal to me.  And sometimes I’ll get the book and sometimes not.

And if you do get a book based on someone else’s recommendation and it’s so bad you don’t know why they bothered, does it bother you?