My Purely Reactive Goodreads Rating System
5-Stars: Amazing. It resonated with my soul, man. A keeper. I’ll loan it to friends but want it back and will get sad when they inevitably lose it. I will maintain delusions that I will one day reread this book. Certainly I’ll take it into the can with me and skim it to be reminded of my favorite bits on occasion.
4-Stars: Also did the resonate thing or was a ton of fun, but I don’t mind if you don’t give it back to me when I loan it to you. Really, I should declutter and downsize, rise above my attachment to material possessions and all that. Might also reread it on the can.
3-Stars: A decent afternoon or three spent on the couch. Greasy kid stuff and comfort reads.
2-Stars: Never use it. (I lie as this proves.) What the fuck is 2-stars?
1-Star: Used rarely, but for books I hated and which made me angry and question my relationship with the person who recommended it to me. Normally, I’ll quit reading a book and move on before giving it only a star. But it does happen. Most recently used for Anders Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers, a book that takes itself way too seriously even though it’s about a planet-sized toupee.
Favorite Reads: February 2017
A simple month…
The Fury of Black Jaguar by Angel Luis Colon: Blacky Jaguar is an ex-IRA thug recently returned to New York City and this pulpy short novel details the havoc he unleashes when some criminals think it’d be an easy score to steal his car. What follows is a splatter-saturated ultra-violent comic strip in prose form.
The New Weird, assorted Ann and Jeff VanderMeer editors: I’m skipping the essays here, or maybe saving them for a later time, and focusing instead on the fiction. A lot of these authors are among my favorites writing today, but I kind of feel like the New Weird never fully materialized, getting swamped under the twin rising tides of Steampunk and GRRM knockoffs instead. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the weird/new weird should be sort of indefinable and hard to pin down. And it might never be something to pin a whole genre to and more a strain within a genre. Whatever it is, this is a great collection and a fun one. Track it down.
And a last, sad note…
I think the days of the expat bookstore have come and gone. I’ve rambled about these stores before. Fewer teachers, shifting demographics, and ebooks have all done their part, but their days are numbered and I’m sad to see these stores fade away. They were one of the few places I could go and roam and have that thrill of finding some odd/fascinating/sought after book while in South Korea. (It’s not like I can go to the library.) A lot of them also served as a community hub, holding classes or having a movie night. While I doubt What the Book in Seoul will disappear anytime soon, the fact that larger cities like Busan or Daegu can’t support such a store anymore makes me pause and bow my head in memoriam.
Yesterweird 