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I admit that I do like getting 4 star and 5 star reviews because writing novels for a living is an ego crushing business and when all the attention, money and glory seem to go to people who are - at least in your mind - outrageous hacks, then it's nice to know that there are a few isolated souls out there in the void who, by chance, found one of your books in a remainder bin or a rummage sale, read it, and, wow, liked it too. I'll admit that I also kinda like the thoughtful but negative three star reviews too. Sometimes these people who didn't like your stuff at all will give you a well reasoned explanation for their distaste and quite often the internal logic of their dislike gives you pause for thought. ...
My least favourite review of all is the person who gives you a 1 star review because of some problem with amazon. Their book arrives 4 weeks late so to punish amazon they give ME a 1 star review which will remain there under my book forever. I'm sorry, but people who do this sort of thing are bloody eejits of the worst kind.
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Anyway to conclude this little post I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the trouble to review me in the past on amazon, amazon uk, amazon.de, audible, audible uk, good reads or library thing. As of last week The Cold Cold Ground has now surpassed Dead I Well May Be as my most reviewed book on Amazon.com; it was already my most reviewed book on Amazon.co.uk and it's starting to inch up the list on Audible and Good Reads too. Many many thanks for that and of course for everyone who's been reading I Hear The Sirens In The Street and reviewing it too: in the last few weeks the number of reviews I've gotten for Sirens has virtually doubled.
...
You take the good with the bad. Yes I occasionally get trolled by angry lunatics (or as Stu Neville discovered 1 particular angry lunatic with a lot of aliases) on amazon but in general I really do appreciate it when people take the time out of their day to go on the web and review a book one of my books. Go raibh maith agaibh as virtually no one at all says in my part of the world.
51 comments:
I almost had a marvelous v-word on a comment I posted at Declan Burke's blog a day or two ago: gra(s) mor. That and the title of this post are two of the three or four Irish expressions that I know, That, slainte, and failte are about the size of it, which leads to believe that all Irish folks are grateful, hospitable, and generous.
Peter
Well it is true that no Irish person would knowingly murder a guest. They'll kill each other, however, at the drop of a hat.
"Well it is true that no Irish person would knowingly murder a guest."
An admirable credo that is. I suppose my view of Ireland is unduly colored by the good fellowship in which supporters of Kilkenny and Waterford mingled and drank both before and after the 2008 All-Ireland hurling final.
Hurling, of course is the real beautiful game. And that reminds me that I inadvertently omitted one book from my list of recent acquisitions: Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow.
It's interesting that a theatre company will wait together unabashed for the reviews to come in after the opening--or that's the myth of it, anyway--but I think there is some sentiment among writers that it is unseemly to be too interested. I'd say it's human nature. But I think it's also human nature for writers to obsess over the bad reviews more than the good ones. Read 'em if you want, but don't let them shut you down.
Peter
The reason why the hurling supporters or rugby supporters or AFL or NFL or MLB supporters can mingle and drink together before the game because they are safe in the knowledge that their sport is ultimately meaningless. Football however is war without the blood. Football matters no other sport on the planet really counts.
My favourite sport of course is rugby and I get quite worked up about the Ireland V England game every year, but ultimately it doesnt matter because its only rugby.
Seana
Yes I suppose for some writers there is something unseemly about caring what the proles think of your book. I fortunately/unforunately dont have that curse/blessing.
As a former editorial assistant at my newspaper used to say, "Football sucks." He also used to say, "Basketball sucks" and "Hockey sucks."
Peter
Its not that they suck. Its just that they're irrelevant. For whatever strange arbitrary reason the rather tedious game of association football has become the favoured substitute for war amongst most nations of the Earth.
Well, it is better than war, apart from the brain injuries.
No, it's not unseemly to care what the proles think, the idea is that it is unseemly to care what anybody thinks, including the critics. It's not about the other people, it's about not being self-absorbed. Possibly it's a Puritan thing. Although I did read something Peter Handke wrote once about how excruciating it is to be so presumptuous as to write anything. Not that I could find it now.
Seana
Ahh yes now I think I understand. Its vulgar to try too hard to be liked or to care about what anyone thinks of your art...is that the idea?
You're right though, in the theatre they're all gathering around looking at the reviews on opening night...
with regards the hate-filled one star comments. Take a look at the first review this poor bastard got for his poetry:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/That-Day-I-Found-Out/dp/1424153328
"Its not that they suck. Its just that they're irrelevant..."
Since I started following soccer when Toronto FC started playing in MLS a few years ago I discovered a big difference between association football and North American sports - clubs vs. franchises.
The "Eurosnobs" as we North Americans call them, still think that they are members of a club while we know that our teams have owners who don't really care about us beyond how much we're willing to spend.
I don't know the history, but I'm told there was a time when rich Americans and Russians didn't run the big teams in England (we're mostly talking about England, right?) and TV rights and sponsorships weren't the main concern.
Now, of course, we're all members of the same, er, club... ;)
Adrian ,I think it quite normal to care for reviews as word of mouth may and will spread knowledge of an author's talents.The problem often is those who are highly successful pander to masses craving facile plotsand/or morality plays with a dash of gratuitous sex and violence.Often one would hear when young "if what you do is important why aren't you rich."As for sport,it would seem to me that Soccer allows for discredited nationalism to be still fashionable,not to mention sectarian rivalries e.g. Glasgow Rangers vs. Celtics.U.S. Football fans have few illusions that they are watching more than paid professionals whose allegiance is to the once "Almighty Dollar.Best Alan
One of the joys of reading is discovering "insights," social commentary or sometimes comments on the human condition that hum in your mind, and linger with you long after the main plot of the book is forgotten.
Jack Burden's insights in ALL THE KING'S MEN have hung with me for decades now, despite seeing the two awful movies made from the book. I can pick it up again, anytime, and immediately be there with the protagonist.
For comfort reads, I do not turn to cozy mysteries but to intelligent protagonists like Adrian McKinty's Duffy, say, or like Stephen Greenleaf's John Marshall Tanner.
You watch the tabloid propaganda on the news and the world seems full of psychopathic demagogues and idiot beauocracies. But in a quiet hour you can get into a novel and connect with another civilized voice--at least with certain novelists.
Comforting, that.
Adrian, that same assistant would have said, "Soccer sucks" and probably did so every four years.
From across the ocean, it looks to me as if European soccer fans have more illusions to lose than fans of the major North American professional sports. North American sports have nothing like the European soccer club systems. And at least some teams, such as FC Barcelona, really do bring players up through the system rather than just buying them.
North American teams, of course, realized years ago that a gulf had grown between between teams and fans. Hence the concerted effort to pretend that the gulf did not exist. The increasing tendency of sportscasters and sportswriters to refer to players by their first names is one example of this. And even today, when the average salary in major league baseball is $3.2 million, one will occasionally see a sportswriter refer to a player as a "blue-collar player."
It's funny, Peter, when Branch Rickey first developed the farm system in baseball he was heavily criticised.
We've talked about this before, how pro football in the US was for decades on the same level as pro wrestling and the NCAA was held in higher regard until about the late 60s. What happened? I sometimes think that European football has more in common with NCAA than with North American pro sports.
I am avoiding any discussion of bad reviews online...
John, insofar as farm systems represented the beginning of the end of independent minor-league baseball, the criticism may have made sense,
As to what I was getting at,yes, that's right. Although of course everyone, or almost everyone does care what is said of their work to some degree, and not reading reviews is just another way of caring.
It does seem strange that football still attracts tribal loyalty when so many of the big teams have become playthings for dodgy billionaires and advertising vehicles for faceless multinationals. And in the lower leagues every other game seems to be fixed! My game's hockey, and its quirk is that due to the cost of playing the game as a kid, a significant number of NHL players come from upper-middle class backgrounds; it's rapidly becoming a sport played only by the economic elite at the pro level. Reviews? I just posted my review of I Hear the Sirens in the Street. Nice work, Adrian.
Giles
Jesus.
John
Certainly the EPL is the plaything of oligarchs and Singaporean gambling syndicates. At the lower divisions less so but I was really talking about national squads Holland v Germany doesnt matter in a handball competition but the football match...
Alan
I'll admit I do think that why arent you rich thing about psychics. If you really can see into the future how come you're sitting here in this ratty little booth dispensing knowledge of the future for a few coins...
Richard
You'd be surprised - or perhaps you wouldnt - be the amount of people whom I meet who proudly tell me that "they never read" because "books are boring". Its not just young people either, its whole sections of the demographic. About a third of the time when I tell people what I do for a living thats the response I get.
Despair is the only response I can muster.
Peter
Well yes at the elite club level it doesnt really matter much anymore does it? The owners are billionaires, the players millionaires, few, very few, are actually from Manchester or Liverpool or wherever...but at the national level its different, unless you're talking about the Republic of Ireland team of course which on any given day is a majority English side.
Seana
I like that. Yes its true, deliberately not reading the reviews is a way of caring too much about the reviews.
Cary
But you still do see people playing hockey in the street, even believe it or not, in St Kilda, Australia - saw em last night in fact.
MANY many thanks for the review mate, it is much appreciated.
Street hockey in Melbourne? Are they Canuck ex-pats? Yes, street hockey's cheap to play, but, unfortunately, it doesn't get you into the NHL.
Cary
Only 1 Canadian if my accent spotting is correct. The rest are Americans and East Europeans and one or two keen Aussies.
Ice hockey in the U.S. has traditionally been associated with elite prep schools and Ivy League universities. In Canada, while everybody plays or follows the sport, the traditional association is with farm boys stuffing their socks with old magazines to improvise shin pads, and playing shinny on a frozen pond. Hockey in Canada lacks the upper-class associations it has in the U.S.
Adrian, at the elite level, you're right, though Barcelona, for example, has more Spanish players than I think top-level English sides do.
For a crime novel that mourns the effect of money on a lower-level soccer team, try Off Side, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.
Peter
What are you telling me? The so called miracle on ice wasnt a triumph of blue collar American gutsiness over an evil Empire?
I think most of those guys were from Minnesota or went to Boston University, which is not up there with Harvard. Hell, I have a degree from there.
Peter,
You're right about hockey in Canada having a populist flavour, but increasingly it's only the middle and upper-middle classes who can afford to pay for their kids. Enrollment in junior hockey programs in Canada has been stagnant for quite a few years now. Of course, the game's violence is also scaring off some parents.
I'm reading a book now called, "Stayn' Alive - the 1970s and the end of the working class," so maybe the Miracle on Ice in 1980 was the last gasp...
Hockey was certainly a working-class sport in Canada when we had a working-class. But since the early 60s it's been middle-class - the same as everything else in our world. I've heard rumours that the working-class once produced writers, too, and possibly even stories they might be interested in, but maybe that was just my union-member dad and his stories...
John, what backgrounds do Canada's NHL players come from these days?
Cary, I wonder to what extent this has to do with the increasing organization of children's activities. I was a middle-class kid who used to play puck-up baseball, hockey, and football all the time. My nephews, on the other hand, play computer games all the time, and it took me a long time to realize that maybe they do this because they're taking time off from all the organized sports they play.
Peter,
You're right, the couch potato/video game factor is important, but the cost of equipment ($300 for skates!) and fees for leagues and tournaments, which can add up to thousands, is pushing the working class out of hockey. Dig into the backgrounds of today's pros and you'll see that a lot of them come from well-off families. One example: Mike Comrie, who played for Ottawa, Pittsburgh and Edmontom, is the son of the guy who owns the The Brick chain of furniture stores. I think the main reason for soccer's popularity is that all it requires is one ball and a pair of legs.
Yeah, even in my day, you'd hear kids talking about their "Tacks" in ways that they would not talk about equipment brand names in other sports. And that was well before the nauseating phenomenon of Air Jordans.
P.S. I'll be returning to the ancestral homeland of Montreal for a short visit soon. I'll look out for pickup hockey games.
Good time to visit Montreal: the Habs are in first and look to stay up there.
The cost of equipment is a big part of it but has it really gone up that much or is it more a case of working-class wages flatlining a couple decades ago? I suppose it doesn't really make much difference.
Organized sports are too expensive for a lot of kids. So is after school tutoring that's almost a necessity for kids from some school districts to get into university.
Still, Comrie is an outlier. Well, maybe him and Eric Lindros ;). There will likely be a few more Nazim Kadris and PK Subbans (in fact Subban's younger brother Malcolm has been drafted by the Bruins) than there will be more Comries.
Some of this depends on what we call working-class. As I always say, there's a difference between poor and working-class. Any unionized worker (TTC drivers, cops) are working-class but can afford sports equipment. And mortgages.
When I was a kid my dad was a telephone installer for Bell Canada and had enough money for equipment and so on. Today many of those installer jobs are farmed out to contractors who may not make enough.
Hockey in Canada was never easy for poor kids. I think the difference now is that the working-class isn't what it once was.
The populist sport here is football, as Friday Night Lights, the television series, so aptly portrays.
The middle class and lower class guys are often to be found as linemen in football, with the upper and connected guys playing the choice positions, quarterback. receivers, etc.
We never watched the series when it was on because we don't like soap operas, we don't like teenagers, and we don't really like football.
After posting that bit on my blog from I DO AND I DON'T, a study of marriages in movies, I was compelled to send for the entire series, 27 hours or so. Maybe longer.
Then my wife and I watched it over the course of two weeks. It was mostly very good, though it made us wince once in a while.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS has a middle class work ethic, combined with a liberal social ethic, combined with a timely critique of the upper class corruption in high school politics, the pathology of sports fans, racial and gender relations, the cult of celebrity, the bi-polar morality of boot camp football coaches, and much more.
It is best at the little things it does, brave at bringing up the hypocrisy of commonly seen situations.
We're glad we saw it.
Hockey never catches on here in schools because it takes money to maintain the rink and the football powers trump it out of the budget every time.
Glad to hear you liked it, Richard. It does have it's soapy aspects, but it accomplished the incredible feat of making me root for a team. I think the first season was probably the best, though.
I wonder if working class really plays out in the same way in California. I mean, in terms of identifying it as a class. It seems more fluid here, at least for white people than it does in other places. My dad went from the farm to college to the military to white collar jobs and then to unemployment. My mom from upper middle class to college to the military to eventually working or at least secretarial class. She joined a union right at the end of her working career after being against them most of her life. There story might be a bit unusual, but probably not all that outside the norm.
As in a lot of things, Seana, California can be a bit of a bellwether. In the post-war years a lot of people moved to California for working-class jobs in the new manufacturing sectors, airplanes and other defence contractors mostly, and that led to a lot of jobs in construction and so on. But then it was a lot of the white working-class that supported Reagan for governor and then later the white working-class in the rest of the country for president. And we know how that worked out for the working-class.
So, why did they support Reagan? Lots of reasons, I guess, but one thing I think was important is that idea of constant upward mobility was sold very hard in California. The working-class never really created its own cultural institutions (like the soccer clubs of some European cities) and never saw itself as permanent.
That idea may have been pushed along. Unions are an important part of making a working-class life better but they do dip into corporate profits.
Divide and conquor can be very effective...
I never really understood Reagan's appeal. But maybe one of the things about California is its fluidity. So, we were all heavily influenced by my dad's liberalism, we were raised very close to my mom's conservative relatives for much or our lives and actually political argument was a part of the conversation between the groups. There wasn't really a clannish, closed off aspect to either side, which I think is the case for some more eastern regions, or was.
I think it was an area for upward mobility for awhile, but now isn't for many sectors. It is a state with a lot of ups and downs economically, and not just this last round either.
Go raibh maith agatsa adrian
Dear Seana ,I am convinced Reagan's popularity was in merely selling Dr.Pangloss "Snake Oil".American Exceptionalism has fared well without foreign invaders, and RUC Duffy's civil war experiences have long faded from most American memories.As For "Friday Night Lights" saw it on line and found it well acted,pretty authentic and touched many issues often left out of Cinemas view of heartland America.Yes it was a bit soapy but that too can be fun. Best Alan
Alan, I'd say he should have stuck with acting but he wasn't that good at that either. We here had him as governor, so we shouldn't have been taken in. The closing of the mental health facilities here should have been plenty of warning, One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest or not.
Although I was thinking just today about how one of discussion group leaders once spoke about seeing him on a public street. Pretty much totally opposed to him politically, he said Reagan possessed so much physical charisma that his knees buckled. Not that that could possibly be the reason so many people voted for him.
Another good post. Why is it ego-crushing writing for a living?
I like the fact that I found CCG completely by accident, and then that led me to this blog. I don't read any other blogs, I don't have my own blog - my life is very busy (listen to me)- I don't have time to die, my life is far too busy, and my electronic calendar is full for the next two months, blah blah
As for elite clubs and money (speaking as a Stoke City supporter), the points gap at the top of the Premier League says it all. I was in Manchester on Monday, walking along Deansgate with colleagues (on my way to the Toller lecture), when I saw a crowd outside the Hilton. Twas folks eager to glimpse some smartly dressed wealthy young men from Real Madrid. Celebrity is all
http://www.insidehistory.com.au/2013/03/cup-of-tea-with-adam-ford-host-of-abc-tvs-whos-been-sleeping-in-my-house/
touching family references
apropos of nothing at all
I suppose it hasn't occurred to you that the folks with the best reviews on Amazon paid their drunken eejit friends to write them...
Anon
I sincerely hope that that is not the case. Human wickedness will never surprise me but that seems like a pretty low trick.
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