Tagged: discussion

Discussion: Your Christmas/Holiday Plans

Seeing as I celebrate Christmas and this is the last discussion post before Christmas I thought we’d have a fun discussion this week.

This Christmas I’m fortunate enough to get two weeks off because my bosses are taking a holiday down in southern Saskatchewan.  Work isn’t very busy around this time of year anyway, so all of us employees get two weeks off as well!  It’s sort of a relief considering how burned out I’ve been lately and I’m glad that my poor workaholic bosses are taking some time to take care of themselves.  They certainly deserve the time off.

Other than that, there’s not much going on for me.  I’ll be working on my second job sporadically (seeing as I’m my own boss there) but other than that I’m not having any large amount of company over.  It’ll be a quiet Christmas with my immediate family, just how I like it.

I should probably start my Christmas shopping, come to think of it.

So if you celebrate Christmas (or are getting holidays around this time) what are your plans?  Are you having company over?  Or are you like me at my previous job and working most of the holidays?

Discussion: Are You an Introvert?

Most of the people reading my blog are pretty well-read, be it fiction or nonfiction.  What I’ve noticed over the years is that most people who are big readers are introverts.  This could be for a number of reasons I don’t feel qualified to talk about, so I’m going to talk about my own introvert experiences.

I’m not the necessarily shy and socially awkward type of introvert that movies and television seem to portray.  I’ve learned to fake it because it’s not possible to behave like an introvert in my line of work.  I do enjoy the occasional night out, but stuff like that exhausts me.  Four or five hours out is pretty much my limit and that’s on a good day.  On an average day I can’t tolerate much more than two hours.  (This is on top of a full day’s work, mind you.)

So most Friday nights you’ll find me sitting at home watching TV or reading.  It’s not because I don’t have friends/a social life but rather because for the most part I prefer my own company.  Social stuff drains me and frankly I find most people to be boring and/or annoying.  (This is likely the side effect of living in a tiny community where I’ve known everywhere for my whole life.  Outside of my own community I do love talking to people and hearing their stories.)

Because I don’t really like to go out, I read a lot.  At the same time, I make time for reading because I really do enjoy it.  Is there a correlation between being bookish and introverted?  My anecdata says yes, but I’d like an admittedly slightly biased survey here on my blog.

What I want to know is this: Are you an introvert?  Can you describe your experience(s) as an introvert for any readers here who are extroverts?  If you are an introvert, do you find that you read more than your extroverted friends/colleagues/family?

Discussion: Insta-Love

If there’s one thing I hate about YA (and depending on the day, there are multiple things) it’s the fact that all of the main characters seem to fall in Insta-Love.  There is, of course, no formal definition for Insta-Love so I usually define it as: “A type of attraction in which the main character becomes obsessed with another character within a short amount of time, usually in under a week.  Can result in ridiculous declarations of being ‘soulmates’ or some other variation of the word.”

Okay, I get that you can be very strongly attracted to someone you just met.  It’s happened to me before.  However, you can’t proclaim ‘love’ on the basis of someone’s looks alone, as seems to happen in YA so much.  The (usually) female main character will look at a boy and immediately think of him as ‘cute’, ‘hot’ or ‘handsome’ and spend the next few days mooning over him and generally making a fool of herself.  Then, when the boy seems to return her interest, she proclaims that their love is real and everlasting.

Yuck.

Teenage love can be more than a little obsessive because of hormones and a general lack of life experience.  But really, not all teenagers are immediately going to fall in love with the nearest good-looking person.  That’s why it baffles me why Insta-Love seems to occur in so many YA novels.  Of course the polar opposite of Insta-Love is the now cliché Slap-Slap-Kiss when main characters hate each other and then suddenly start making out and proclaiming their love.  But that’s a discussion for another time.

Now I want to hear from you: What do you think of Insta-Love?  Is it healthy for novelists to portray this as a legitimate type of love when their books are aimed at a teenage audience?  Are you as tired of Insta-Love as I am?  Or do you think a little Insta-Love is okay?

Discussion: Book Memes

A lot of bloggers do memes and book bloggers are no exception.  Waiting on Wednesday, Musing Mondays, Top Ten Tuesdays, the list goes on and on.  But memes are interesting in that not all bloggers do them or even like them.

As you guys have noticed, I’ve kind of stayed away from memes (other than my failed attempt at a Spotlight one).  This is not because I hate them but rather there are other things I want to talk about.  I want to do my own thing; I always have.  If I want to post a discussion on a Friday rather than a Saturday, I can do that.  If I want to do a top ten list, I can do it whenever I feel like it.  I know you’re not obligated to post memes weekly, but it is sort of expected.

As for other blogs, I don’t mind memes.  If someone does only memes that gets rather annoying, yes, but for the most part I see nothing wrong with them.  I just don’t want to do them.  They’re not for me.

But what I want to know now is: If you’re a blogger (particularly a book blogger), do you do memes?  Why or why not?  As a reader, do you like reading meme posts?

Discussion: Do Reviews Affect Your Book Buying Decisions?

Due to the fact that I’ve had a lot of free time this week, I’ve been thinking about my blog a lot more.  What is the point of reviewing?  Do people read my reviews?  Is having a lot of reviews from book blogs a plus for self-published authors?

Of all of these questions, one really stuck in my mind.  Do reviews affect your book buying decisions?  For example, if you see that a book has a lot of five star reviews on Amazon that sound legitimate and offer reasons for their praise, does it make you more likely to read the book?  Or, if you find that your favourite book blogger has reviewed a book do you go check it out and maybe buy it?

Personally I look at books that interest me and then look at the reviews on Amazon and/or Goodreads.  What were some of the pluses?  What were some of the things reviewers didn’t like?  Reviews aren’t the be-all end-all factor in my book buying decisions, but they sure do have some influence.  Another thing I’ve noticed is that if one of my book blogger friends has reviewed a book and I think it sounds cool I am much more likely to go out and buy that book because I become aware of its existence.  Maybe that’s just me.

So my question for you guys is this: Do reviews affect your book buying decisions?  Why or why not?  And if so, to what extent?