But I realise that once people cry “sexist” (or some other such politically correct term), they’ll believe what they want to believe, and pull whatever evidence they can find to support their rants.

The biggest reasons people got up in arms was because he was apparently discriminating/belittling/being rude to this woman. Yet everyone thinks it’s totally okay to tear pieces off Hugh and hang him out to dry.

The whole post was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and an authors way of making light about a crummy encounter. I mentioned in my blog post (http://belindapepper.com/stop-bashing-hugh-howey/) that because Hugh didn’t win the Hugo, one of the most prominent occurrences (related to the Hugo) in his mind is this incident. If he’d won the Hugo, I’m sure he wouldn’t have given this woman a second thought- getting acknowledgement from his readers trumps all. But he didn’t, therefore one of the most prominent memory he has of the Hugos is being publicly shamed and belittled in public by a woman who was behaving rudely for her own selfish gain.

The way I see it, everyone who sees Hugh as a horrible person (and in turn publicly shooting him down and slurring his reputation) is just as bad, if not worse. After all, Hugh apologised (and if you know ANYTHING about him, you’ll know that apology was genuine), yet everyone else don’t feel they have to apologise for all the horrible things they’ve said about him, keeping in mind that he didn’t ACTUALLY commit any wrong to this woman- he was nothing but polite to her in person, and he didn’t “out” her identity in his blog post.

My 2 cents, for what it’s worth.

TBR piles breed exponentially. One book is always replaced by at least two more.

If there was a Bookworms addiction group, I should probably join.

I’m not interested in the Cowan, especially now that the hype is so magnified by the controversy, but I am very interested in your review of it. This has become one of those books I will read anyone;s commentary on, but never the actual book.

And on that note, I really try to separate the real life person from the book (because I’d be depriving myself of a lot of good reads otherwise), but still there are a few authors I can’t bring myself to read due to online drama, and I am sorry to say Elizabeth Bear is one of them.

On my TBR? Making my way slowly through Caitlin Moran’s very funny How To Be a Woman, and reading a whole slew of Harlequin Medicals because I am working on a project.

Happy reading everyone!