Yeah, anyway.
I just can't deal with GoodReads right now....everyone's in the last stages of Grief and Rage and my feed is filled with those Hydra reviews and the sense of loss is overwhelming. People are deleting their reviews, deleting their accounts, going for the 'nuclear option' where even your comments are zapped, disappearing. I doubt I'll do that myself because I've zapped social network accounts before and the sense of having been eaten away, of my virtual self (is there such a thing?) suddenly being patchy and full of holes, like a bad special effect in a made-for-cable scifi TV movie, is terrible. I have to avoid really upsetting stuff, because for me it can be a trigger (that overused word, oh dear) that sets off a long-term depression that lasts days, weeks, months. I'm not exaggerating. (That's one reason I read so much. Reality is for people who can't handle books! Dickens, take me AWAAAYYY....) So I'll be there, sort of, shaking my gory locks at Otis and co, I suppose.
But I'll be damned if I'm generating any more profitable content for them over there: writing reviews, ranking books, shelving books, updating their (HORRIBLY munged) database, writing comments. No more.
This depressive little rant is because I was thinking of a review Elizabeth had written of Room with a View -- I had enjoyed the movie, of course, hadn't read the book before then (I think I read Maurice only after seeing that movie, too. And Passage to India. Mea culpa, Forster) but I didn't connect with it -- it seemed cute but shallow. I tried rereading it a few times, but never got anywhere. (Now if you want to talk about Howards End, that's my jam....) But this review was wonderful - passionate, engaged, one of those raves by a friend that make you really wonder Yeah, why didn't I see that in this book, anyway? I treasure those kinds of moments -- I love it when people give me new perspectives on books, movies, news events, whatever. It's one of the best feelings there is, suddenly seeing from another viewpoint. I've remembered that review for months, perhaps years (gee, that doesn't sound creepy).
Well, Elizabeth has just written her last review for GoodReads. She explained why. It's typically passionate yet analytical, well-written, carefully thought out but full of feeling. So you can understand why, after reading it, I felt really FUCKING DEPRESSED. (This is why I'm not doing a great job writing this post. When I get depressed, I shut down, I slip away, I become nonverbal. It's pretty horrifying. It feels like becoming a ghost.)
So, I'll be rereading Room with a View, or trying to really read it for the first time, but I won't be tracking my progress there. I won't be writing about my reading for Elizabeth, or the other friends who I love talking about books with, and she won't be writing about her own reading there either. We'll probably connect elsewhere (right now everyone is fleeing to Booklikes, as apparently LibraryThing shit the nest when people fled there after news of the Amazon buyout broke). But....it won't be the same, at all.
Ave atque vale, Elizabeth, and all my other virtual bookish friends who are so real. Goodbye, GoodReads.
