Confessions of a Reader: Telling it Like it Is

Note: Be sure to grab this new button if you’d like to participate! It’s time for Confessions of a Reader! You can read more about the idea here, but here it is in a nutshell:

1. Whenever you have something you want to share, just spill it (you know you want to). Just create a post of your own, grab the button thingy above and then add your post link to Mister Linky below.
2. I will be here every Saturday, but you need not commit to a weekly post. Post when you have something to share.
3. Posts can be rants about something you are reading, or a deep, dark secret. All I ask is that the post relates to reading or blog reading in some way. If you want to piggy-back off of what I post, then that’s okay too.
4. Posts can be as short or as long as you like and can include more than one topic.
5. The goal is to get to know one another better.

Here’s mine:

Here’s my deep, dark secret…I’m not shy. Those that know me personally are laughing right now. Okay, I’ll admit that if there is something to be said, it will usually be said by me.  I don’t have a problem with conflict and I can discuss almost anything in a respectful way. The same can be said for the reviews I write. When I read a book and consequently write the review, I pretty much tell it like it is. Or so I thought.

When I updated my blog recently, I went through the process of transferring posts over and as I was doing so, I re-read a few of the reviews that I had written for books that were so-so, or just flat-out bad. You know what? The reviews that I posted, the ones that made me cringe a bit when I hit the publish button, were not that bad. Meaning… that I had somehow made the book look good! How did that happen?

Some of it was due to me trying to inject humor where there was none.

Some of what I was saying was said between the lines so if you didn’t know me that well, you probably missed my “I’m rolling my eyes” sarcasm.

Whatever the reason, it was not intentional. Have you ever done this? Written what you thought was a scathing review and then realized later, without even knowing it, that you caved and wrote a somewhat decent review of a book you really thought sucked? Luckily for me, I haven’t read too many horrible books since I began blogging but I am going to pay special attention to this in the future and try to accurately capture how I feel at that moment. I certainly don’t want anyone to think that I liked a book that I didn’t.

If you’d like to include your own confession, click on Mister Linky, enter your blog name and the permalink to your post. Or, if you aren’t quite ready to post your own confession then comments are fine too.

• Demi Moore