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How Goodreads Saved (and Ruined) My Reading Habits

Image by stilfoto on Flickr.
Image by stijlfoto on Flickr.

First of all, just so you know, I am not going to talk about Amazon buying Goodreads. That’s a conversation I am totally enthusiastic about… never having again. With anyone. At this point, my position can best be summed up with the words “don’t come crying to me.”

Now, if you’re not familiar with Goodreads (or, like Anna Meade, are frightened and confused by it), let me take a moment to poorly summarize it. Goodreads is Facebook for books. No, that’s terrible. Let me try again. Goodreads is a social media site for readers that allows you to add, rate, review, and share your reading experiences with others. Why would you want to do this? I don’t know. Ask the people who built it.

Now then. I am here not to bury Goodreads, but to praise it. And then bury it. You see, thanks to Goodreads, I went from a horrible, sloppy reading habit of one or two books a year to over fifty. Fifty! That’s ever so much more than one or two, yet a pittance compared to these people I see on Goodreads who go through like fourteen hundred books a year or something. What is with these people? Are they posting from some future cyberpunk utopia where they ram needles into their frontal lobes and experience all of Dostoevsky first-hand in a matter of seconds, like “The Inner Light,” but with screams and chainsaws instead of a little flute?

Well, anyway. The point is, I’m reading a lot more these days. And that’s good! Except when it’s bad. How can reading be bad, you ask? Well, it’s not. So, I admit I lied just now. It’s not so much the reading that’s bad as how Goodreads changed my reading habits — both for better and worse. Let’s examine this in detail, won’t we?

The Good(reads)

Goodreads makes it easy to discover new books. Thanks to having eleventy-billion friends on Goodreads (okay, 412 and counting, close enough), I constantly get recommendations on new books. My reading list just keeps growing. So many great new books to read!

Goodreads lets me share what I’m reading with my friends. I just finished a book and now I can share this super-important knowledge with everyone! “Like” button! Sweet validation! Virtual cookies for doing something I like doing anyway! I’m like a mouse in a lab who just got the cheese! Wait.

I can rate, review, organize and tag books! It’s like some kind of beautiful dream. If I wanted to know how much steampunk I read in 2012 for some reason, I no longer have to rely on my faulty memory. Remembering things is hard. Thank god for voluntarily submitting to data mining.

The Reading Challenge encourages me to meet a yearly reading goal. Finally, a way to feel superior to everyone else. It’s like a marathon without having to get up off my ass! Twenty books? Why not fifty? Why only fifty, Freddie, why not a hundred? Imagine the sweet Schadenfreude when all my friends fail and I metaphorically sail across the finish line… of reading… some stuff? /Chariots of Fire theme

The Bad(reads)

Goodreads makes it easy to discover new books. Thanks to having 412 friends and counting on Goodreads (feels more like eleventy billion), my reading list is growing faster than I will ever be able to read. I am going to die with thousands of books unread. Glancing at my Goodreads feed is now a terrifying gaze into the black heart of my own mortality. Now I’m reading Emotional Structure for Screenwriters. Now I sink into an alcoholic haze in a blind idiot universe that punishes and rewards without reason or mercy. I think I’ll polish off an entire bottle of wine and go watch Charmed or something.

Goodreads lets me share what I’m reading with my friends. Thanks, Goodreads, now everyone knows I abandoned that indie book I promised I’d read and the author is probably crying and defriending me on Facebook as we speak and then without meaning to I publicly admitted to liking a Dragonlance novel and now my author cred totally lies in ruins somehow only nobody actually cares so why am I thinking about this?

I can rate, review, organize and tag books! Yeah, because I totally wasn’t OCD enough to begin with. How will I know if I’m enjoying this book unless I properly categorize it by painfully specific minutiae?

The Reading Challenge encourages me to meet a yearly reading goal. Yes, thanks to Goodreads, I have totally  turned my own reading into some kind of perverse commodity. I think twice about reading anything if it doesn’t contribute to my abstract and totally meaningless Reading Challenge goal. Beta read your manuscript? That’s valuable time I could be putting toward collecting more Goodreads brownie points! Disappear into that thousand-page epic novel? We can’t do that, dude, it messes up the averages. I could fall behind schedule, committing to a long book like that. Are you crazy? Go outside? See people? I’M IN THE GOODREADS CHALLENGE HERE PEOPLE.

Of course, none of this is the fault of Goodreads. This is a prime example of digging a hole, throwing oneself in it, and then complaining about this hole somebody dug that one is now stuck in. And then clicking “Share” so everyone knows you’re miserable about being in this hole. I could walk away from Goodreads tomorrow and make my reading habits less pathological almost instantly. Reading challenge? Sir or madam, I submit to you, schmeading challenge. I can quit anytime I want. I just don’t want to.

So what do you think, reader? Goodreads! Balm or scourge? Threat or menace? Chicken or fish?

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Box Set Recollections

It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage.

I imagine every writer has one indelible moment that defined their reading lives — a single book or reading experience that eclipses all the rest and becomes the moment of “that’s when I knew.”

For me, that moment was my twelfth Christmas, when my mom bought me the Foundation Trilogy box set. I hadn’t yet read any Asimov when I unwrapped that gift, but the colorful, evocative Michael Whelan covers fascinated me instantly.

I remember ignoring most of my other gifts and disappearing into the spare bedroom. My grandparents kept that room closed off and unheated year-round, so it was freezing, but I didn’t care. I curled up on the garish purple bedspread, surrounded by my grandmother’s collection of creepy dolls covered in protective plastic, and started plowing my way through the Foundation books.

It took me days to get through them all, of course, but when I finally finished Foundation’s Edge, returning to my own life seemed foreign and almost bland. I lost myself completely in the story, the way only a kid can.

In some ways, I feel like I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since — the rush of completely immersing yourself in a story, letting the outside world fade into an irrelevant fog. It’s happened a few times since — in my later adolescence, I raced through Dragonlance: Legends in a similar fashion, even shedding a manly tear or two at the end. (It’s easy for my older self to wince and snicker with embarrassment at that, but I still wouldn’t trade that memory for anything.)

I’d love to say that reading Lord of the Rings provided a similar experience, but it didn’t — as a youth, I found Tolkien hard to get through, and only began to appreciate his work later in life. (As a kid, I skipped over everything but Gollum and the end, and didn’t get through The Scouring of the Shire until I was about twenty-five.) I did, however, listen to the Mind’s Eye Theater adaptation of Lord of the Rings on cassette a hundred times or more, and to this day will get very cranky when people lambast its shoddy production values in favor of its presumptuous, snooty cousin, the BBC Radio adaptation.

All in all, though, I can probably count those experiences on the fingers of one hand — the aforementioned trilogies, a handful of Stephen King novels, and a random assortment of fantasy and sci-fi books that I can still pick up today and read straight through without ever putting them down. I still bear a love for the paperback boxed set that borders on the fetishistic — I’ll buy a series just because it comes in a box. The boxed set has gone into full remission these days, mostly replaced by the omnibus, and I miss it dearly.

As life marches on, obligations swell while free time seems to wither, and youthful enthusiasm sometimes gives way to jadedness or cynicism masquerading as wisdom. It becomes harder and harder to get caught up in a good story and ignore the world until it’s over. The lengthy book gives way to the movie or the half-hour sitcom, story delivered up in inoffensive bites, the Wonder Bread of narrative. That’s how it often is with me, anyway. I find reading every day now takes conscious effort in an age of easy, shiny distractions.

Of course, if you’re a writer, there’s a whole other peril to wade through — learn enough about craft and it’s easy to start analyzing every story you read, breaking it down into its component parts, clinically examining its merits and flaws, dissecting rather than digesting. Those childhood blinders are awfully hard to get back on once you’ve taken them off, and flipping the “critic switch” can seem downright irresponsible. Some people rediscovered that joy with the Harry Potter books. I didn’t — but I do sometimes envy those who could.

I often think that the greatest gift I could get these days would be providing that sense of immersion to another reader. If I could, just once, sweep someone away with a story, make them neglect their chores, snub their spouses, maybe even refuse to get out of bed all day, because they just had to find out what happened — well, that would probably be the best Christmas ever.

Do you have a reading memory that’s stayed with you like this? If so, please feel free to drop me a comment and tell me about it.

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Why Is Throwing Away Books So Hard?

Oh my, controversial. Photo by pcorreia on Flickr.

Like most writers I know, I have a room full of bookshelves, all of them overflowing. Some have been read. Many haven’t. Most, I consider indispensable. A few, I have resolved to get rid of, but that’s like saying I want to be the world’s first ham-juggling world champ. I can say it all I want.

I have at least two canvas bags full of hardback books in my living room, longing for a new home. The used bookstore doesn’t want them — and in some cases I really can’t blame them for not taking my complete set of Mechwarrior Saga: The Last Thing You’d Ever Want to Be Caught Reading. My friends won’t take them. I could try selling them on the internet, that’s often a losing proposition when BookBargainJackholesDotCom can undercut me by selling for a penny.

So why can’t I just chuck them in the trash?

I’ve certainly thought about it. I’ve also thought about firing them out my window at the kids who ride by on their bicycles, which somehow doesn’t seem any more appealing. I’ve thought about starting a bonfire in the parking lot screaming JESUS IS LORD as I throw some old Star Wars novels into the flames, but I figured the landlord might frown upon that for some picky reason.

Long story short, I’m still stuck with these books. Why am I so averse to tossing them out?

Books Have Sentimental Value

Yes, I am sentimental about books. I’m nostalgic about them, too. I won’t apologize. I’ve had far too many conversations with Kindle fanatics who talk about emotional attachment to books as if it were some kind of disease. Shelf full of books? When you read paper, you murder the world!

Ahem. Sorry. I should really let that go. Anyway, many of the books I own have been deeply formative to me in one fashion or another. Just because I no longer get anything out of a particular volume, that doesn’t mean no one else will. So just tossing a book in the trash feels like I might somehow be cheating someone, somewhere, out of that experience. Is that really likely to happen with this copy of Steve Perry’s The Omega Cage that I can’t unload? I’m guessing not. This is a totally irrational feeling, yet it’s tougher to shake than a rabid howler monkey.

Books Retain Their Utility

Soon to be a major motion picture with Jean-Claude Van Damme, only not really, and thank God for that.

I don’t have this issue with, say, my busted microwave or that free Amazon review copy of From Justin to Kelly some complete asshole in the Seattle office  thought I would enjoy. I’ll fire those at people’s heads all day without a single moral qualm — because their utility has expired. When electronic devices go bad, that’s it. I’m probably not going to hang on to my Kindle when it finally clicks its last, caressing its face like a dead lover and shedding manly tears as I think of those times we spent together reading blog entries on Instapaper. Okay, this is kinda creepy now.

My point is, it takes a lot to destroy a book. A book can take a hell of a beating and still be readable. Thus, the miserly curmudgeon inside me minces with snooty horror when I think of throwing something perfectly good into the trash. I keep expecting my deceased grandmother to rise up like a terrifying undead revenant and tell me about how bad they had it during the Depression. We had a complete set of the Black Stallion novels, and that was ALL, and we were THANKFUL, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl ftaghn!

And So, In Conclusion…

Want some books? C’mon, Omega Cage, you know you want it. Going begging. Anybody?

No, but seriously — I’m surely not alone in this, am I? What do you do with your old books? Do you toss them out, give them away, or do they just hang around forever, like unwanted guests who drink all your gin and put ABBA Gold on repeat?