Hi Everyone,
I’m Will. I have been posting reviews on Goodreads since 2008, 1222 as of October 2021, if you can believe that. If you are serving a particularly lengthy prison sentence you may find reading all of them a way to help pass the time. I will not be porting all of those over here. I might need a prison sentence of my own (always a possibility) to have the time. I have provided a link to GR where you may wander through them all at your leisure, if you get that urge.
The impetus for starting this blog was the purchase of Goodreads by Amazon. I was very concerned that Amazon would alter the rather comfortable setup so many of us enjoyed at GR, and I wanted to have a safe haven for my babies before that day was set to arrive. Well, several years on, Amazon has mostly kept their hands off, so I continue to do my reviewing primarily on GR, but hung onto this site as a fall-back should Amazon decide one day to become more intrusive. As of August, 2021, after GR reduced its allowable review size in 2019 by 25%, forcing longer reviews to dip into the Comments section, and having just recently banned the use of external links in comments, (both those changes, BTW, having been made with zero notice to us reviewers) it became clear that it was time to bring my somnolent site back to life. It does, IMHO, need a significant overhaul, but for now I am leaving it pretty much as is and will just be posting new reviews.
I am a Boomer, thus the “Coot” of the title. I have had a few careers, which is not unusual these days. I retired several years ago. I have even done a bit of freelance book-editing, but am not in the publishing field beyond that and never have been. If you want to be pissy, I guess an exception might be the newsletters I wrote for the little league teams I managed. But other than that, not in publishing. Ok? Jeez!
You will not find images of me here. I have a face made for radio and a voice made for print. But there are images out there, if you know where to look and have a strong stomach.
It should be known that my book goddess, my wife, works at Harper Collins. So if you believe that negates my reviews for Harper books, be my guest. In fact, she has no say in what I write and only rarely reads my little offerings even after I post. If you have a concern about whether I am a mole, secretly flogging Rupert product, I suggest you read a few reviews and see for yourself whether you think I am an honest reviewer, or not.
The image in the header is a photo I took from Brooklyn Bridge Park of the lower Manhattan skyline. I have a couple hundred more from the park on Flickr. Also on Flickr, I started writing the beginnings of stories that insinuated themselves into my tiny mind while looking at some of the photos I had posted. I have made a set there, called Beginnings, and have ported those to the Beginnings Menu item here. I hope to add more to the seven I have written so far, both on Flickr and here.
What else? I am a native Noo Yawkah, and do the accent quite nicely when upset. I have lived or worked in all five boroughs (and a few parts of Joisey, as well). My undergrad semester in London back in the 70s was my only break from living in NYC. These days, I live in Wilkes Barre, PA. I had an embarrassing moment in 2018, when I got to meet Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf (we love him) at a public event here in WB. We exchanged some intel on New York items. Two of his kids live in NYC and his wife was born in the same Brooklyn hospital as my youngest. When he asked me about my fifteen months of life in Pennsylvania, (at that time) “Well, what do you think?” I drew a blank and emitted some form of huminahuminahumina. He offered a very sensitive reply about it being quite a change from living in NYC. But there are some things about living in Wilkes Barre that are pretty cool. In the 2018 political season my wife and I met a lot of interesting people, via being volunteers for PA Dems, canvassing, volunteering in phone banks, running phone banks, doing data entry into the state Democratic Party database, attending many gatherings of diverse sorts, parties, rallies, fund-raisers, arts awards ceremonies, protests, meet-and-greets. We feel a connection here to our elected representatives that was much less the case back in NYC. I have nothing against my NY politicians, one of whom even helped me get a job in a desperate time, but the connection here is more personal overall. It will be very interesting to see if those connections persist beyond the election seasons. I am optimistic. We intend to remain politically active to some degree.
I have been a baseball fan since gestation, I expect. A die-hard (emphasis on die) fan of the New York Metropolitans since before their birth. Even managed teams for thirteen seasons of little league baseball/softball.
I am still pondering what to include in this blog, whether to expose some short pieces of fiction and non-fiction I have written, and poems I wrote for my kids (three, all grown) some years back. The downside is burning them for potential use in an actual magazine or journal. Publishers of such things tend to reject anything that has previously been posted, and I still have aspirations. I am also pondering re-naming this to something else, and wondering if I need to do a total redesign.
As of October 2021, this blog is still in transition, as I expect it will always be. I am not entirely comfortable with the WordPress interface, and am not interested in learning enough CSS to be able to roll my own. (I was a programmer for over two decades, so could, if I wanted to, but my life is a busy one, and I would rather spend my time doing other things.) The site has been in a suspended state for four years. But it is time to wake up. Part of this is to repair the many broken image links. I counted over 100 reviews requiring repair, and am seeing to those in a slow-but-steady manner. Currently, I am over half-way finished. I am posting on Coot’s some of the reviews I posted on GR in the four years I have been away. It is another slow-but-steady process.
I have a considerable number of readers (more than 120K) on GoodReads. One result of this is that I receive an ungodly number of review requests, enough that I felt it necessary to ask that authors with review requests pass me by. I simply cannot take on any more than I am already doing. Sorry.
So, that’s me. Welcome! Hope you enjoy the site.
Coot's Reviews 
Get with the times old man, your reviews are garbage. I proudly buy all my books on amazon and so should anyone reading this. Old man Bill should smoke a joint once in a while.
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What courage! A weenie getting high in his mother’s basement, so scared of an old man he has to hide behind anonymity. Pathetic, dude. Get a life.
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Please take it someplace else.
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Still hiding. Still got nuthin’. No one forced you to be here. Pound sand, loser.
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To Whom it may concern, I signed on, rather late in the game, to the 2021 Non-Fiction Readers Challenge
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Hello Will,
I hope that you are well.
Just wondered please if you might take a look at one of my latest novels, now available on Amazon in both electronic format, but also in paperback.
THE ITALIAN TRAP By.- K.E. Heaton.
The second world war is almost at an end, but the father of facism “Benito Mussolini” is on the run, and must be detained to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
Can Dick Charlesworth from S.O.E. capture the monster, and bring him to justice?
The story is complicated… but simply… it must be told.
And… its free to download an electronic copy from Amazon, on Saturday, 27th, November, 2021.
So grab yourself a copy, and if you’d be so kind, please, let me know what you think.
Thank you for your time.
Kind Regards
Keith.
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Thanks for thinking of me as a possible reviewer for your book. As you might imagine, (or might not) I receive many such queries, to the point that I put a line near the bottom of my profile above that I am not accepting author-review requests. My wife being in publishing and bringing home books all the time, incomings from several other houses, and buying books, added to the fact that I am a relatively pokey reviewer, cranking out only one new review a week, all combine to make accepting review requests problematic. So, sorry. I will not be able to take on your baby, but I truly wish you the best of luck finding readers. There are a a gazillion reviewers out there who, I am sure, will be more than happy and better able than I to have a go with it.
Best,
-Will
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Thank you for your comments Will.
You’re a good man.
Kind Regards
Keith.
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I have nothing to do with amazon. They don’t pay taxes.
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It’s even worse than that. In 2017 Amazon received a rebate of over $130 million. Talk about corporate welfare.
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Absolutely disgusting.
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Hello WIll,
Hope you are doing good. You have an amazing blog here, loved it. I am writing to you today, looking for an honest review of my suspense, thriller, sci-fi story-book “Time Crawlers”, published on June 14, 2018, via Kindle Direct Publishing. The book is 118 pages long.
Alien Invasion, Dark Artificial Intelligence, Time-Travel, High-Tech Hindu Mythology, Djinn Folklore, Telekinetics and life-consuming Cosmic Entities are some major themes in my book which has 6 tightly-knit, fast-paced Sci-Fi stories.
Your precious words would be a very big help to me and would enable me to write better books in the future. Please let me know if you would be willing to share your valuable review. I will share the PDF or MOBI as required by you.
Amazon link here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DRPPGK6
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40540847-time-crawlers
Please let me know how to proceed.
Very Respectfully,
Varun Sayal
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Hi Varun,
Thanks for thinking of me as a possible reviewer for your book. As you might imagine, (or might not) I receive many such queries, to the point that I put a line at the top of my GR profile (clearly need that here too) that I am not accepting author-review requests. Between my wife being in publishing and bringing home books all the time, incomings from several other houses, and we buy books too, added to the fact that I am a relatively pokey reviewer, cranking out only one new review a week, means that accepting review requests is problematic. So, sorry, I will not be able to take on your baby, but I truly wish you the best of luck finding readers. There are a lot of reviewers who, I am sure, will be more than happy and better able than I to have a go with it. Your book sounds like a fun read. I wish you the best of luck finding appreciative readers.
-Will
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Hi Will,
Thanks a lot for this response. Apologies I perhaps missed the line about not accepting reviews. I reached out because I saw that you like Sci-Fi books and many Sci-Fi readers have been saying some good words about “Time Crawlers” on Goodreads. But I totally understand that you are already packed. My best wishes for your other reviews.
Regards,
Varun
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“I have a face made for radio and a voice made for print.” with a bio like that, what’s not to like?
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Thanks, Da
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Subscribe!
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What a great blog. When you have a moment, check out this new historical novel about, of course, Brooklyn on goodreads . . . https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25942936-exile-on-bridge-street
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Hello Will, would you be interested in reviewing my novella “Pulse: When Gravity Fails”? It is a thriller with a hint of sci-fi. I can send the printed version.
More details on my website:
htttp://www.scifibookseries.com/
Thank you in advance.
John Freitas
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I do hope you will crosspost all your GoodReads reviews here. Not just due to the Amazon concern (GR may go down at any time), but just that the blog medium is far more pleasing to the eye to read long detailed reviews. There should be scripts or tools that can help you achieve this.
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Sorry for the extremely tardy response, Ashwin. First, thanks for your kind suggestion. I agree about the superior visual appeal of the blog medium over the presentation on GR. I have over 1200 reviews on Goodreads. Bringing them all across would be a prohibitive drain on my time, precluding directing adequate attention to more pressing tasks. Every one takes some work, and I have managed to mostly get it down to a system, so can do this without completely losing my mind. That said, I decided that I will copy over a significant subset of what I wrote during my absence from this site, that is, from 2017 to 2021. Not all of those, but the ones that exceed GR’s ever-shrinking review-space allowance, and others that I think merit the trip. So far (as of 10/9/21) I have been doing this at the rate of one extra review a week. It will take me a while to tote across all those worth toting, but this allows it to be done at a manageable rate. Another element (extra task) involved in cranking up this old engine is that a lot of the reviews on here have suffered significant breakage to their image files. I counted over a hundred that needed repair. I am reconnecting those at what seems a sane rate to me, five a day. So should be caught up within a month or so.
Hope that addresses your query.
Thanks for caring, bro. It means a lot to me.
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An amusing and lighthearted intro to yourself and your blog – nice one 🙂 Just a quick heads up, Ive made volume one of my poetry book free on Smashwords now so if you get chance to check it out let me know what you think – be nice 🙂
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What a lovely collection. I hope you will keep them coming…
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Thanks for the follow. Good stuff here. -ben
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Congratulations on starting this journey, Will. I, too, am interested to see where it leads.
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I follow you on Goodreads and always like your reviews. I wanted to print a copy of your review of The Son, which my wife just finished reading. Printing a copy from your blog seemed easier that printing a copy from Goodreads. Vic Carson
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I think it’s great you started this blog. I like your reviews very much!
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What a great intro. Makes me want to read your comments, reviews and general thoughts.
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