Reviewing My Reviews
So it is now early October and I’ve spent probably an hour a day for the last couple of months entering reviews into this website. The sources of these reviews are some pages from a previous version of the site a couple of year’s old, and quite a few hand-written notes in my daily journals from the last year or so. And I’m only about half way through…
Has it all been worthwhile? What is it all for? Has it done me any good?
These are all valid questions so it is worth thinking about them a bit.
Yes, it has been worthwhile. I’ve enjoyed the technical challenge of writing the Jekyll scripts to organise, index and present everything. I like seeing the numbers go up on the front page of the site everytime I do an update. I’ve found the list useful to me personally (so which adaptations of ‘Persausion’ have I seen already?) and in entering the information I’ve been inspired to do additional things (check out the BBC adaptation of ‘Stonemouth’ for instance).
But hasn’t everything here been reviewed a thousand times before on Amazon or IMDB?
True, but I’ll point to a brief aside that Professor Corey Olsen made in episode 214 of the Mythgard Academy podcast ‘Exploring the Lord of the Rings’. He says that it doesn’t matter if you take a text and pose a question that has been asked before (e.g. is it any good?). YOU haven’t asked it before so it still new. And even if you end up agreeing with all the other reviewers that doesn’t matter, it is still a valid finding and adds a data point.
So you might not find anything new in these reviews, and you probably won’t find anything that hasn’t been previously covered elsewhere but this is MY review, I’m enjoying putting them together, and who knows, there might be a nugget of originality in all these words somewhere! It might be your day to come across it…