Carthasis

I vaguely remember wanting to post regularly - unsurprisingly enough I haven't done so. I'll start being better, self. Tomorrow. Really. I promise.

Meanwhile,

I shall do another thing I wanted to do for ages and that is to post my reading log. I just had a fright when I thought that I'd somehow deleted part of my notes from the beginning of the year only to realise I had them posted on LJ. Phew. Better to have it all here.

Note: these aren't formal reviews, just notes, more or less extensive, for my own use.

( Book log 2010, March - July )


Somewhat related: After reading the new chapter of the warnings discussion, I've started thinking about book reviews and if (how?) the issue should apply to them. I rarely see book reviews (professional or in the blogosphere) include information about possible trigger content and for some reason this strikes me as a bit odd. Or maybe it shouldn't, considering the resistance to warnings in some parts of fandom. Still, I always thought book reviews are the perfect place to talk about this kind of things. They discuss the quality of writing, story telling, characters, the use of ISSUES and pretty much all possible reaction the reviewer had while reading the book. What better place to share information that is normally hard to come by - especially if you are a recluse with social phobia: ask your friends gets complicated. So why are there so few of them? Am I just reading the wrong blogs? Lack of awareness?
I feel this is, or should be, a reviewer's responsibility - after all, I'm much more likely to pick up a book that somebody pointed out to me than one I just found by browsing the shelves. It seems callous to just send people in blindly and yet this is exactly what I usually see happening. Take As Meat loves Salt - I found this book very disturbing and I was entirely unprepared for it, despite having read several reviews before buying it. Why did not a single one of them mention the several rapes the reader sees through the eyes of the perpetrator? I find it... irresponsible, somehow. Especially because in the blog world the reviewer, often literally, takes the part of a friend who points me at a book and says: here, read it, it's cool!

This said, I'm somewhere on the fence about what I myself should do with my reading log. On the one hand the chances of people reading this and choosing their own reading material based on my list are vanishingly slim. I don't need any common trigger warnings myself, so why should I mention content that didn't negatively affect me in what is essentially a personal reference? I'm more likely to be bothered by several mental health related issues and narratives, in which case I'd include something that disturbed me of course. But what's the point of listing things like violence, rape etc for myself?
On the other hand, I am posting this publicly and however small the possibility of someone picking up a book based on this, it is there by nature of this being public. I feel... I don't know... an obligation to at least offer this information. Even though I feel weird (and presumptuous) doing it.
I have included a few notes of this kind on some books this time, though definitely not consistently, but I'm still not sure how I should handle this in the future.