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I am a GRamazon refugee, dismayed by the developments there. For the time being I am keeping a foot in both sites. I don't even read the "literature" by the authors who sent up such a stink in GRamazon; indeed, the authors I usually read have been long dead. I was beginning to feel comfortable in GRamazon, having found some interesting friends and groups. (sob) Maybe it won't be so bad over there after all (whistling past the graveyard).
Over there, I am Steve - that's a unique descriptor, right? Over here, I am ferocious... OK, maybe not.
I have my "guilty pleasures" (science fiction, mysteries and crime set in foreign lands, some kinds of historical fiction), but I actually love serious literature and non-fiction. I hope that I might find a few persons with strongly overlapping interests here.
I spent the first few months on GRamazon tediously adding books, but I stopped after having recorded enough of them (1) to make clear I am a fairly serious reader and (2) to indicate the range of my interests (excepting my interest in physics and mathematics, which I have deliberately suppressed here). I imported the GRamazon list, so it is still quite incomplete. Maybe when I really have no life I will enter the rest...
I shall write reviews only on freshly read (or re-read) books, and almost always on books with relatively few or no previous reviews. I rarely give 5 stars; 4 and 5 stars are a hearty recommendation from me. I don't give 1 star unless the book really bothered me for some, usually many reasons. 2 stars indicate one's time is better spent elsewhere. 3 stars mean I do not regret having read the book at all...I liked at least a few aspects of the book. But beware: I don't really take these star ratings very seriously. :) What I do take seriously is what I write in my reviews.
By the way, my logo is a detail of a painting which might actually be by the great poet Wang Wei (all his other paintings have been lost). I love east and southeast Asia... I lived for a decade in Switzerland, France and Germany, hence my fluency in German and French. But I'm still working on my Spanish, Italian and Dutch...