Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship Book

BEEP! BEEP! I would have gotten more out of this book if I read more of the works that Coetzee discusses.

However, this book is extremely interesting because of the analysis of censoring on the writer.

The above review has been pre-empted to bring you the following review. The review below was written by Ruby Has Been Censored. She gave her permission for the below to be reprinted. Thank you Ruby!

Ruby's Most Wonderful and Brillant Review

HYDRA ALERT!




The full review is available here on my blog, since the original was deleted by GoodReads for being "off-topic". I wouldn't want THIS book review to be deleted for being off-topic, so to that end, I've provided a few hundred words on the book. Stay with me...

I read this book from beginning to end. This is a bloody awesome book about dissent. What I liked most about this book about dissent were the examples. Haha! Fooled you. That's actually all there is. Examples. Starting with an example of dissent from around 1800BC, and illustrating how dissent has been with us throughout the ages. Well, up until about 2010 when the book was published. I'm guessing they couldn't go in and add the future examples of dissent, because that would just be silly. And involve bending time and space and shit. If they could have, I'm sure they would have included an example of the Hydra, which is, in my humble opinion, the best example of dissent yet. If you haven't heard about Hydra, you need to go and see Manny Rayner. Right now. I'll wait. I have not ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER read a better one. Book about dissent, that is. Because that's what we're here to talk about. A book about dissent. You should totally buy this bloody awesome book about dissent, perhaps from Amazon, since they have been so nice in ensuring that all the reviews we see have been filtered of any off-topic content. So I read this book about dissent, which is, as I may have mentioned, a bloody awesome book about dissent. Okay, our captors have hopefully stopped reading by now, so I can probably get away with typing some random words: bookety, bookety, book about dissent. Opinion, opinion, opinion, opposing opinion, rebuttal, butt's a funny word, conclusion. Oh! Conclusion! Are we there already? Right. So in conclusion, this is a bloody awesome book about dissent even if it doesn't mention Hydra.

So yeah. My original review was censored for being off-topic. Not because it was critical of GoodReads' censorship policy at all, apparently, but because it talked about other things besides the actual book. Deleted for digression. I take this to mean GoodReads is intending to evaluate all of our book reviews from now on, in order to make sure they don't digress. After all, we wouldn't want a review that wanders into homage, satire or flash fiction now, would we? Just the product.. ahem... "book" review for us! So that's why I suggest that along with backing up our original reviews and re-posting them with the Hydra when they get deleted, we also help out poor old Kara & Co., by trawling through as many reviews as we can and flagging any that go off-topic. At all. In any way.

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Now here's my original review, so you can see what GoodReads is attempting to save us from:

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, by J.M. Coetzee

Would GoodReads Censor A Review On A Book About Censorship? Let's find out, shall we...

I've been an active GoodReads contributor for a couple of years now. I review every book I read, I run a discussion group, I'm a GR Librarian. I spend countless hours every week, (well, they are probably countable but I can't be arsed), on this site creating content for GoodReads Amazon. I won't pretend I'm happy about that last bit.

When I first joined GoodReads, I spent a lot more countable-but-not-presently-counted hours up to my eyeballs in administrative tasks associated with the book data we all use. I stopped doing that when the mountains of data and content that I had created was sold to Amazon without my seeing a cent of the profits. Since Amazon have been here they've done some pretty shitty things, and they really don't seem to value the hard work I've done for them. They seem to be quite content making out that they are doing us all a favour, providing us with a free (albeit dripping-with-advertising) service - rather than acknowledging that they're making a fortune from our content and data.

Now it seems GoodReads has decided to go hard with a policy of deleting reviews and bookshelves* they don't like. I really can't be much more specific than that, because that's about as specific as GoodReads has been. From what little they have communicated to us, it seems to be "anything anyone working for GR thinks could offend anyone else or could potentially be perceived by anyone else as an insult to a writer". There is no way of knowing what that might be. We've been told that any posts or shelves focussing on the author's behaviour will be deleted. This includes authors who harass GoodReads users, and presumably precludes us from even discussing something likeMein Kampf. This is censorship, as if you need me to point that out, and that is a very slippery slope.

The author of this book, J.M. Coetzee is a famously reclusive, reportedly humourless bloke. Am I allowed to mention that anymore?

GoodReads made these policy changes sneakily: no emails to us, no warning or notification of any kind for the people having their reviews deleted, no response to our reasonable concerns. Reviews and shelves are quietly being deleted, and there have been plenty of screenshots around to prove it. So now I am not only outraged by the knowledge that our posts are actively being policed and censored, but I'm quite frankly creeped out by the whole thing. Who is making the decisions? What are their criteria? Why do they refuse to talk to us about it? Why are they doing it so stealthily? Why can't they notify someone who's about to have their content deleted?

Most importantly of all..... where will it end? That last question I CAN actually answer: A site where the bulk of the reviews are positive and critique-free - whether or not that book deserves it. Where any negative reviews are limited to "it's my fault for not picking a book which is more suited to my peculiar tastes". A site where people can't talk about the elephant of author behaviour in the room.
A site where all reviews are suspect.

The whole value of GR has been that we can see honest reviews from people we trust. If people can't write an honest review about their experience with the book (and its author), then that review has no value.

GOODREADS: Please just do the right thing. People have invested a lot of time and effort in this site. They will cooperate with you IF you treat them respectfully. Censorship, though..... obviously that's going to go down like a tonne of bricks on a literature site.

*For the benefit of people who don't use GoodReads - "bookshelves" on GoodReads aren't just used to sort our lists of books, they are a tagging function. They are what we use to comment succinctly on a range of issues relating to that book. They are also what we use to warn each other about spammers, abusive authors, sock-puppet (fake) accounts, and anything else that a potential reader/reviewer may need to know before they engage with that book. I say "engage" because even shelving a book as "want to read", alerts the author that you have shown interest and can open the door to that author targeting you.

[edit] Postscript:What annoys me no end, is that the media and some other commentators are portraying GR users as if we're simply refusing to accept the corporate reality of a "free-service" that Amazon are providing us with. What they don't seem to be aware of is that, unlike many other sites, it's the users that created this database, including the book data, as well as all the content, as well as taking care of a lot of their administration, as well as a big chunk of their "help" functions etc etc. I don't think it's unreasonable for us to have certain expectations of the site we built & maintain.

[edit] Please also see Carol's excellent summary of ways you can help spread the word about this issue:

[edit] Must Read: Ceridwen's Brilliant Analysis of the Deleted Review Data:

This shows the authors associated with the deleted reviews & bookshelves as well as showing the real target of GR's censorship - The comments threads.

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[Updated 13 Oct 13] Just to be absolutely clear: Other GoodReads users have my permission to repost this content freely.