About this Booklog

Comment Policy

I love comments. I deliberately keep comments open on every post because I love to talk about books. Comment on anything, whether we know each other or not, whether it’s a new post or not. I have only two rules for comments:

  1. You may not be grossly uncivil. This includes comments that reinforce oppressions based on, e.g., race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, size, ability, and national origin.
  2. You may not post unprotected spoilers without invitation.

I reserve the right to edit or delete comments that violate the above.

(A note on spam: ordinarily, actual people should just be able to comment, and only comments that look like spam will be served a captcha. Occasionally Akismet starts missing large quantities of spam, so if I’m going to be away from a computer, I’ll require anyone who hasn’t posted a comment before to fill out the captcha. It’s text-based, not image based, so it should be accessible to all, but if there’s a problem, please email me at knepveu@steelypips.org.)

Why a Booklog?

The day before I decided to start this, someone asked me, “So what have you read recently that’s good?” I was a little boggled to have trouble remembering, not only what I’d read that was good, but what I’d read, period.

Upon reflection, I realized that I seem to have this problem a lot, and so I decided I would keep track of what I’d been reading. Originally, I thought it would just be for my own reference—when did I first read that, do I really read that many books in a year, that kind of thing. Then I thought of something else, the number of book reviews I’d planned to do but hadn’t, yet. Since I would probably end up noting opinions on the books in my log anyway, and since this might, in theory, be of interest to some people—even if not as helpful as a full review—I decided to put it up on the web. A little brainstorming for a good title [*], a little poking around other people’s web logs, and Outside of a Dog was born.

[*] Out of the same initial conversation, and the same brainstorming session, came The Library of Babel by Chad Orzel, my now-husband.

Thus, my goal for this site was to write something about every book I read. Admittedly, this has fallen by the wayside as life happened, but I still hope to write up most things, someday, and I’m determined to keep posting even at a greatly-reduced rate. The level of formality and detail varies, and indeed the “something” may just be a comment on the original entry if I’ve nothing new to say, but if you want to know more, that’s what the comments are for. (Thoughts about more than one book, or books generally, tend to go on my Dreamwidth journal.) To find posts, either search or browse the genre and series indexes; see the sidebar for those and much more.

Note: because this booklog spans so much time, my past opinions are not always the ones I hold today. Comments on everything are open; feel free to ask whether I still feel the same way now.

(There are also some miscellaneous personal posts from before I had a separate journal, and some site admin posts, that I only link here for completeness.)

Contact

Leave a comment on a relevant post, or email me at knepveu@steelypips.org.