Thinking about writing about books
A large part of my avoiding writing 'book reviews' is because of how purely subjective this stuff is. I'm not a critic - as in, I'm not bringing a learned cultural sensibility to this. I'm a cheerful dumbass. But I do love books and I would love to be able to write about them without feeling weird about it.
There are very distinct differences between saying something is "my favourite" thing versus "the best" thing. I love a lot of objectively pretty bad things. I reject the concept of guilty pleasures but I'm not claiming stuff as High Art.
There's even more difference between me pointing at a thing and saying "I like this thing" and providing anything that might be useful to anyone else. Proper reviews are a real art form.
Plus I have an aversion to anything authoritative, including in myself. I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression I know what I'm doing - I certainly don't - or, almost worse, that I believe I know what I'm doing.
Being unable to say anything useful is also why I've never joined a book club despite that sounding like so much fun. I do try to comment as much as possible on fanfics. I have a reputation in the fandom as a frequent and enthusiastic commenter at least. Which I am proud of!
Also I really enjoy reading people's thoughts on books they've enjoyed and am always up for adding even more books to my ten-year long wishlist.
So this is me trying to put together a schema, as it were, for writing about books.
I won't be writing anything about stuff I didn't enjoy. I don't want to dwell in negativity and I don't think 'a bad review' is necessarily helpful to anyone else. What I like is subjective but at least it's nice to write and read about enthusiasm.
My opinions are going to be wrong and that's okay. I am deeply fallible and not at all omniscient. I can only do my best. I will try to fact-check and to explain my thinking. I will not always succeed but I cannot let that fear stop me completely. I hope I will improve in my abilities through practice.
A useful metric, I think, is how successful a book is at what it's attempting. Of course what I think it is attempting is likely to be different from what other people - and the author - think. This is what I will aim for probably.
On the subject of authors, I do largely subscribe to a traditional Death of the Author view. Roland Barthes argued it was more important what the reader thinks than what the author intended. Books belong to their readers. That doesn't mean I'm looking to separate art from the artist. I'm not out to support wronguns but I'm not doing full security background checks of every author I read.
Finally, here are some people blogging about books I'm taking inspiration from:
- Tracy Durnell regularly reviews books and, not a book review, but The stages of taste
- Just a queer book blog
- Jacie Reads
- Mauro has a bookshelf
- Anarchae writes about their reading in the weekly digests
- Suliman often writes about books, recently The Myth of Sisyphus
- Imaginary Inpho is reading the classics
- someone was reading public domain books? I'll add the link when I find it.
I've collected some posts about books and such on my Reading page.