Mykle’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2010)

Mykle’s comments from the The Extra Cool Group! (of people Michael is experimenting on) group.

Jasmine wrote: "... although amazon gets annoyed with the language I use in reviews and commonly refuses to post them "

Right! People are always telling me their Amazon reviews of RAMPAGING FUCKERS were rejected because they mentioned the name of the book in the review. But Amazon allows you to swear all you like in the book title if you're a tasteless attention whore famous author.

Probably you could use Amazon Listmania to spell out a really rude sentence and attach it to the page of a book you don't like. Hmm ...

Word! But I think Amazon needs better reviews. You shouldn't feel the need to dumb yourself down!

Too many Amazon reviews are just play-by-plays of consumption: customer purchased the product, consumed the product, the product did or didn't meet customer expectations and the residual feeling ranges from "grumpy" to "eager for more product." It doesn't matter if it's Infinite Jest or a Ryobi Orbital Sander. feh.

It was good for me!

Jessica wrote: "How do Minnesotans feel about him?
I'm curious."

My Dad & I used to listen to "A Prarie Home Companion" every week when it was first being aired, way way back when it was only a St. Paul public radio show. Dad loved that show -- he especially loved how it sounded on his classy Telefunken all-band tube radio, a prized possession of his -- while my attention kind of faded in & out from it. I remember loving some parts. I still don't think I've ever sat down and listened to an entire episode end-to-end. But so Keillor's voice is so fully intertwingled with my post-divorce Minneapolis childhood, probably if I met him I'd call him "Dad".

Dad used to talk big about taking me to the World Theater to see the show live someday. I think I wasn't interested. Now I wish he'd forced me. It was, like, twenty minutes away.

Petra X wrote: "I joined LibraryThing and Shelfari, but GR hooked me. I like the look of white pages with minimal graphics and plain text."

It should be noted that Goodreads is the least-redesigned website on earth! Its look has stayed the same for years and years. It's like a mirror world where Web 2.0 never happened. Probably they're about to turn everything puce and blinking, but let the record show that up until now I was enjoying the boredom.

Aleksandr wrote: "www.speakitsname.com"

Wow! How the heck can I get my books reviewed on there?

G.N. wrote: "If I'm buying online, unless i can read an extract and make up my own mind, no review on earth amazon is going to to make me buy it."

interesting! do you use the Look Inside stuff on Amazon? or some other source of excerpts?

(i'm just asking out of pure curiosity, you understand. not for market research purposes at all, not i ...)

Added to favorite quotes:

"Never flew off the handle just keeping it realism." -- Lester Marrow

So much for my question.

I love every single one of my reviews more than all of my other reviews combined!

I like GR because the people are literate. Where else in this ocean of text that is the Internet can you say that?

Ha! Every author needs a reader like you!

aww ... i'm totally blushing right now ...

Lemme tell ya ... Amazon.com is the #1 book reviewing site, in terms of reviews read. That's 'cuz Amazon plants book reviews next to the books themselves, on the page where the Amazon visitor is deciding whether or not to purchase it. Online shoppers read the shit out of those reviews!

As an author, I've learned that Amazon book reviewers have tremendous power to sell my books OR convince people NOT to buy them. And I've noticed that some Amazon reviewers know they have this power, and they trip on it like little three year olds.

A lot of Amazon reviews can be paraphrased as either "THIS WRITER IZ A POOPY HEAD DUM BRAIN" or "THIS WAS THE BEST EVER BOOK I READED." GR has much better reviews -- more thoughtful, more interesting, better use of apostrophes, all that. I wish GR's reviews showed up on Amazon.com . Alas, they don't.

Moral: if there's an author you love, especially Mykle Hansen a relatively unknown author, you'll be doing them a huge favor if you copy your GR reviews over to Amazon.

Reading some of my old reviews, I find -- much to my dismay -- that I tend to review books based on how much they fulfilled the expectations I had for them when I picked them up. Which is totally unfair, really. Or at the very least, it's capricious & unscientific.

But on the other hand, I think I have the same sorts of expectations for every book I pick up: that the author will be really good at something, or have something to say that I haven't heard before ... to be unique and/or super-talented, basically.

I guess I crave novelty and want to be impressed.

Wow ... kind of amazed at my own shallowness, actually ...

Eh?Eh! wrote: "Mykle wrote: "Later we will all be jumping off a bridge together."

I design bridges, little ones, and think about things like fencing on the railing so Mykle can't jump off of them."

What, we can't even jump off the little ones? Damn you civil engineers! You're not preventing suicide you know. You're just forcing depressed people to drink Four Loco and crash cars into trees instead.

Brian wrote: "I hate to link to a review of mine in the middle of a discussion about "Are you a vote whore" (especially when I already said "no"!) but the discussion thread on my Twilight review seems relevant t..."

WINNER!

Mike wrote: "Good idea. Although, I'm pretty certain some reviewer, somewhere, would think that voting should require a comment, because it's more helpful and nice."

Requiring comments won't work. People will just say "Asdf!"

It's a paradox: a good book review needs to be honest. But an honest book review could piss off all your friends, who would then call it a bad book review. What's more important: honesty or entertainment?

I say this having dissed Karen's favorite book -- and then for fifteen minutes or so she refused to have anything to do with me! This is the same pressure that's felt by all critics who are members of the community they critique. If you don't know who you're complaining about, it's fun as hell to write about how their book sucks. If you do know them, it's instantly awkward and difficult.

I console myself with the private belief that my GR reviews are so breathtakingly honest and cuttingly insightful that everyone hates them, and that's why I don't get more votes.

There seem to be authors who look at GR as a place to promote their work, but not as a community to join. They'll make an account, use it to recommend their own book to 100 strangers, and never be seen again. I think most GR citizens take that as a huge dis. I know I do.

I'm an author too -- one of those small press authors who has to do all their own promotion. But I would never do it like that! It just seems douchebaggy. I'm still not recovered from the psychic shock of seeing the word "friend" redefined in social networking terms, and I still look at these online friendships in terms of how I like my real friendships to be.

Hello, my name is Mykle and I have a Goodreads habit. I'm joining this group because all my friends are doing it and I want to be cool like them. Later we will all be jumping off a bridge together.