BOOKWRAITHS REVIEWS

I love blogging.  While I'm no professional, I try to be fair, point out why I liked or disliked a book, and tell others to try it out for themselves.  I don't generally respond to haters, because nothing I say will erase their anger plus they are entitled to not agree with me.  But the thing I find hard to understand is the depth of love or hate fanboys have these days for their favs.

Back when I was young, I and my buddies loved books.  We considered ourself fanboys.  We would go to cons, try to meet our favorite author, get an autograph, and talk about how cool the book was with fellow lovers.  What we did not do was be belligerent toward anyone who didn't love our favs.  We might scoff, snicker behind your back, but at the end of the day, we did not care if anyone else loved our book, character, series, or genre.  Your opinion was yours as long as we could keep reading what we wanted.

Let us compare back then with now.  Authors attack reviewers for negative reviews.  It actually happens.  Fanboys will curse, name call, grieve, cyber attack, and berate a person for not loving a book or author as much as they do.  People will fight on other book sites through comments because . . . you guessed it, one criticized the others prized book.  Some sites are even used to post others blogs so the haters can then spend 100 comments eloquently expressing why the writers of said blog was a complete idiots.  It goes on and on.

And this situation takes turns angering me and depressing me.  Really, we are such fanboys now that a book, character, series, author, or whatever means more to us than giving our fellow human beings the common courtesy of not attacking them for not liking what we like?

Wow.  What a shame.  I love my favorite books, but I'm not going to kick my neighbors teeth in because he doesn't enjoy Tolkien as much as I do.  Guess I'm just old school.  You know, back when people were actually allowed to hate things and say so without fear of retribution from fanboys.

Sorry.  Had to get that off my chest.  Let the grieving begin.