The One Star book Review Guessing Game

There's a tumblr that picks the best of Good Read's one star reviews (there must be a tumblr for everything). It is GOLD. No, I won't link to it just now because then you'll know which books these reviews refer to.

What I want to do is to play a guessing game. We'll start with something easy:

"Maybe my main issue with this book was just that it wasn’t lighthouse-y enough.”

Ok, you got that (surely you did?). Try these:

“I wish I could meet a lifelong love by vomiting through his window.”

“Even if you read this book 500 times, it has always the same plot line.”

"it might be a satyr and all but I did not like it."

“not interested in books about Satin.”

And from my top 5:

“I didn’t really get the cookie thing.”

“I don’t know if my book was incomplete or if this whole thing was some kind of weird joke.”

“Reading this story is like taking a cold bath with someone you dislike.”

“A 24-foot dirty old man creeps down the streets late at night, when all the grown-ups are asleep, peering in through little children’s windows. No, not the subject of a court case, just a momentously popular piece of fiction by the much beloved [name redacted].

“HOW MANY BOOKS HAS SHE WRITTEN ANYWAY HUNDREDS RIGHT ? WAY TOO MANY I TELL YOU — STOP THIS WOMAN”   

Okay: you can start guessing now.*

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*Answers here. 

July

The end of June and all of July is like a ferris wheel that slows down as it reaches the top, is immobile for a minute and then hurtles back down.

July is like the stairs that remain to be climbed.

I can't wait for the rest of the year to begin.

Reading over, reading back

For most of last year, I faithfully kept a journal. I didn't write in it every day, but I made a concerted effort towards putting my thoughts and observations down on paper (yes, paper; not screen). There were off days - even weeks - when I didn't write a thing and hid the journal from myself so I didn't feel guilty about my slacking off.

At intervals, I wondered how I'd ever be able to find anything if I should want it later. I devised a method by which quick ideas, lines I wanted to use in poems and so on, could be identified. All obvious strategies, but not having kept a journal in years, I needed to reinvent the wheel.

As it happened, I never looked at anything I wrote again. Until this morning. I wasn't looking for anything specific; I was idling through those old pages. I admired my writing which, out of respect for this shiny new object called a journal, was immaculate; I noticed mood shifts and how they related to gaps in writing days; I noticed I'd left myself allusions to things I refused to even put on paper at the time of writing.

It was and is an interesting snapshot of a person at a moment in time. If I was anyone of any importance, I could imagine that my journals would be an invaluable resource. I realised afresh, that I would have to devise a time frame and method by which this object could be destroyed before it found its way to other people.

If reading over and reading back casual writing can make me squirm - as it invariably does - then it can only be useful as catharsis*. Yes? Or am I to understand by it that I shouldn't be so involved with and tied to the production of my persona? Sometimes I feel one way and sometimes another. (I also know that while I might leave the blog be, I will definitely destroy the journals.)

What do you lot think?  

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*It occurred to me that photographs also make me squirm. The closer in time they are to the present, the more I dislike them for not coinciding exactly with my self-image. For instance, I can now look at the big hair, big glasses and pleated jeans and the quantities of plastic jewellery of my teen years and not turn a hair, horrific though those images are. I've never kept any letters I wrote from that era - that is to say, the parents didn't - so I have no way of knowing how I'd react to words from another decade. I suspect I'd be tolerant enough. 

Call no woman happy until.

6 Down (Cryptic)

Once again it's a Thursday.