Cav's Place

Between 2003 and 2006, I was posting reviews on BookCrossing for any book I read that was registered on that site, which, at least after the first part of that period, meant the vast majority of them. Those reviews varied greatly in size, style and quality, tended to include a fair amount of spoilers not marked in any way and also various typos and spelling and grammar mistakes I’d be terribly embarrassed by these days, but they were all there. In addition, some of them also included personal notes or comments referring to what was happening in my life at the time, which made me want to gather and preserve them in one place for a long time.
Then, after the period of my life during which I read so much thanks to having access to so many books I was actually interested in ended in such an abrupt manner, I only made an account on another site where I could post such reviews in December of 2008. That site was Shelfari, and I continued to use it until a few days before the end of 2012, posting ratings and something which may be called quick reviews, if not simply brief comments, for anything I read between 2010 and then. Strangely enough, what I posted during 2009 were such quick reviews for five of the seven books I had read in 2008, while for some reason I can’t currently comprehend I never even added the first four books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series to my shelf, despite having bought and read them that year.
Now, since the end of 2012, I’ve been using Goodreads, and creating an account there first made me seriously plan to gather all of these reviews in one place. However, while I copied everything I had on Shelfari within days and then also added a quick review for one more of those books read in 2008, the BookCrossing reviews prove difficult to tackle in more ways than one, so I started and stopped a few times and therefore some of them still aren’t there even now. In addition, I always felt it’d be wrong to simply copy those old reviews there as they are, so on top of making the necessary corrections and hiding spoilers inside spoiler tags, or sometimes deleting them completely, I also keep those personal comments out of the version posted on Goodreads, meaning that I still need a place to gather all of them as they are. Corrected, of course, but without missing parts that are relevant to me personally.

That’s where the new Books category comes in. This week’s first post listed some fantasy recommendations and was the first one actually posted in this category, but I have since managed to copy all of these reviews originally posted on either Shelfari or Goodreads, including the two that are actually worth being called as such, here, along with the ratings. This includes the Goodreads version of my quick review for The Black Jewels Trilogy, as instead of simply making some necessary corrections I expanded on the original BookCrossing version and actually explained what I meant by the few words I had managed to throw there back when I finished reading it.
My aim is to also preserve the original dates of these posts, so at the moment you’ll notice that the one containing the fantasy recommendations is the most recent showing up under that category, but that proved particularly difficult for those originally posted on Shelfari, as the original dates were lost either when I made some corrections or additions, perhaps even to something other than the review itself, or, in most cases, when I poked around to copy all information to Goodreads. As such, I used the date listed as the date I finished reading for those read between 2010 and the end of 2012, but for those posted in 2009 all I could do was make more or less educated guesses based on any information I could still find, so most of those may be off by up to a few days, and one of them even by a month or more, since I couldn’t narrow it down any further.
What isn’t listed at all on these sites, on the other hand, is the time, so you’ll find all of these showing up as having been posted at 11:59 PM, unless there’s information saying otherwise. However, if there’s an existing post with the same date and time or there are multiple such reviews posted on the same day and they’re unrelated, I’ll set the time so they’ll be a minute apart, one after the other, at the end of the day, since there seem to be some issues if two or more posts have the same date and time. I chose 11:59 PM instead of 12:00 AM because I tend to write these during the evening or even at night and therefore that’s likely to be closer to the actual time, and in fact, depending on the time zone used by each site, it’s very possible that some of them were actually written after midnight, so on the next day for me.

Now I’ll have to move on to those originally posted on BookCrossing, in order to add them here as well, but that won’t be any easier than it was the first time around, so I won’t finish them too soon, especially since now I won’t be discarding those personal comments. I won’t be discarding or hiding spoilers either, only perhaps editing the few where such spoilers are in fact replies to reviews written by others, in which case I’ll try to make them make sense on their own. As such, anyone looking for a version that’s “safe” to read should check what is, or what will be, posted by me on Goodreads instead.
What I’m uncertain about is what to do if there will be any others like that one for The Black Jewels Trilogy, as in having a Goodreads version that has significant additions compared to the BookCrossing one. In that case, I used the date of the latest version, but it does feel weird to do so, and it’ll be even worse if some of the others will prove to be part of series. Then again, I’m not sure there are any others in this situation, as I recall specifically wanting to add something to that one because it’s one of my favorites, but if there will be, I expect to get stuck trying to reach a decision for quite a long time.