Being a sometime professional reviewer, the one thing that this does bring is the decline of the profession. I think there will always be big-time reviewers, don't get me wrong, but the little ones (like me) will soon find themselves out of jobs/hobbies.

I actually think it's a good thing for two reasons: 1) Now the people reading the books actually get to tell the author they think the book is fabulous even if the NY Times said it's worthless, and 2) It adds checks and balances to a system that has created famous crap authors (Danielle Steele, anyone?) and ruined fantastic authors with just a couple of reviews. There is still a lot of bugs that need to be worked out before it's close to flawless, but I say it's much better than the system we have in place now.

Now that I've seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, I can't even take my opinions on the web seriously.

What else is the internet for, if not for slandering other peole anonymously?

"Do you post at MoviePoopShute.com?"

I'd give up parts for that Jay and Silent Bob power. There are some twits at certain (VN) boards that would be getting such a beatin'.

But the author taunting the reading with information like that is just annoying. Once is fine. By the time it had happened 20 times, I'd figured out most of what it was, and the "big reveal" wasn't terribly interesting at all.

I like Dan Brown, but I find some things very annoying. Like the fact that every book begins with the protaganist being "summoned" to a place to see a "thing" and it takes 100 pages to find out what that "thing" is. It's tedious and sloppy.

I also read The Da Vinci Code right after finishing Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Needless to say, it was a little confusing.

Like the fact that every book begins with the protaganist being "summoned" to a place to see a "thing" and it takes 100 pages to find out what that "thing" is. It's tedious and sloppy.

Yeah, that sort of thing makes me want to either just give up in disgust, or see if I can skip 20 chapters to get to where something happens. And it really doesn't help that he give enough clues that you can figure out just about everything quite a while before he reveals it. It would be different if anything in there actually surprised me, but thoe only "surprise" that surprised me was the very last thing, and that didn't feel like enough for spending three days getting through the rest of the book.

peole anonymously

OK JohnS, fess up - you're sending the spam with this name on it, aren't you?

Spammers, stop harvesting my genius for your nefarious activity!

Or else.

Thanks for the heads up, Frank.

Reading The DaVinci Code was like reading a crossword puzzle. I only read to find out the answers, not because I cared about the characters. The writing was very skimmable, so it was easy to read it with the goal of finding out "what happened next."

Now that I've seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, I can't even take my opinions on the web seriously.

It's also an argument for anonymity.

What, you don't want the convenience of having belligerent assholes looking to be beat up delivered to your front door?

Y'know how I've been very cynical about Stephen King turning into a hack in his later years, churning out ream after ream of rambling, unscary pages? Well, I have to take some of it back.

I just bought his recent short story collection Everything's Eventual and the story "1408" scared me, to the point that I was jumping at rustling plastic bags in my back seat last night. And after decades of Barker, Lovecraft, and Chambers fandom I am Not Easily Spooked.

I don't know if it's my recent personal connection to the haunted hotel room trope (though mine wasn't scary), the fact that the short story form suits him better, or the possibility that a brush with death and months of misery and pain put him back in touch with what's scary, but King turns in some damn good work in that anthology.

but King turns in some damn good work in that anthology.

Really? I had despaired of him ever writing anything really worthwhile for the genre again.

It was a short story of his that was actually the first King thing I ever read. I remember it vividly, a magazine piece, I think in Esquire, like, 30 years ago. A scifi-horror piece called "I Am The Doorway".

Scared the tar out of me. I kept checking between my fingers for alien eyeballs.