The Sticky Review

[sartorias]

Here's a question I've been asking in person, where I can see the answerer and where I tend to get a blunter answer. Only the answers I keep getting have so many other hands on it, it's pretty much got universal tentacles

Comments

Gosh Wow

[lsanderson]

I want reviewers I somewhat trust to tell me why they liked the writing and the book. Some why is nice. Some synopsis is nice. Some comparison is nice, but I'm really looking for that "I enjoyed this because..." preferably without two hundred "buts."

Re: Gosh Wow

[sartorias]

I actually like the "buts"--they act like triage for me. If the "but" is something that I don't care about, or actively disagree with, then I feel closer to the book. If the "but" is one that would cause me to balk, then I read on with intensified interest.

Re: Gosh Wow

[mayakda]

I like the buts too. Makes me wonder more about the book.

[skogkatt]

Ooh, good question!

My favorite movie critic is Mark Kermode, who does a radio show on the BBC (I get it as a podcast). Here's the first review I heard of his, which made me decide to see Mamma Mia back in 2008 (and which also made me think I really needed to hear more from this particular reviewer). It's a video, and about 12 minutes long. There are tangents and rambles, but if I break down what exactly made me want to see the film under discussion, it's something like this

[sartorias]

This is extremely helpful, yes, and thanks. What I'm getting (among many other nifty thoughts) is that reviewers don't have to necessarily avoid putting themselves into the review. When I was taught to write book reports, you supposedly stood at a neutral pinnacle, and if you made a statement of judgment, you could offer a quote. But I came to dislike that kind of review, or to distrust it. My emendation was to try to identify the type of audience who will like a book. (I still sometimes do that, if doing a short review of something that I personally didn't care for, but I think I know who would. Other times I think, keep the "me" out of it, that's just boring. Stick to the piece.)

[skogkatt]

I find it really helpful when reviewers let their experiences into the review. Impersonal reviews can be helpful if I just want to get a small summary of a story's premise, but if I want to know if I'll like it, I do best when seeing how someone else responded to it. It's absolutely best when that someone else is also interesting (I love listening to Mark Kermode talk about movies I know I won't ever see), but honest reactions presented clearly and with some context are really the most helpful thing to me.

[sartorias]

Thanks--this is great. (And you've given me someone new to try.)

[sartorias]

Thanks!

Here's something I've found about author blogs myself, is that I can't always trust them. I figured out why recently. I don't mind that authors pimp their friends' books--in most cases they wouldn't have become friends in the first place if they hadn't shared similar tastes.

What I object to is the implication of judgment, in other words, "This is the greatest book!" rather than the person saying "I loved this book because . . ." The "This is the greatest" squee can cause me to slid right by after two sentences--it's like listening to a piece of music with the volume turned all the way up.

[3rdragon]

Speaking of author blogs, I was hooked by Robin McKinley's reviews of Maggie Stiefvater (sp?)'s Lament and Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon, both of which I was quite pleased with.

[sartorias]

That's good to know!

[blackhanddpants]

I like to know a) what the premise is, because that tells me genre and something about the plot, and b) whether it's done well. If it's a genre I read, a plot that sounds compelling and the reviewer believes it's written well, I'll probably give the book a try.

That said, I actually rely a lot on buzz. I read The Thirteenth Child because I kept hearing about it, all over the place, and what I heard was mostly positive (and what I heard that was negative didn't sound substantive to me). Interestingly in that case, I didn't care for the book. "The Hunger Games" was not on my radar, but people who don't usually read genre fiction kept asking me about it, and people who do read genre fiction were giving it positive buzz.

Your review of the princess/horse book, just a few posts back, intrigued me enough to pass it along to my ten year old, who has preordered it. What does that provide? It tells me what the book is about, and that it's done well. We are going to obtain and read that book.

[sartorias]

I mostly agree, with the caveat that one person's "well-written" is another's "stinker alert!"

But I think this is the type of sorting that one does when one has been reading for a zillion years.

I was actually thinking of your ten year old with reference to House of the Star--I so look forward to her thoughts on it!

[blackhanddpants]

Well, but knowing something about the reviewer helps sort "well-written" from "stinker alert." And it is possible to know something about the reviewer by observing his/her own usage. Someone who gushes "I loved this book it was about this girl Katniss whose best friend Gale calls her Catnip and well anyway she gets sent to the hunger games which is kind of like survivor only if you want to survive you have to realy kill people and they are realy trying to kill you and this book is realy well written buy it now!" is not going to impress me, but someone who can write coherent sentences that are spelled correctly who says many of the same things.

[3rdragon]

I will say that I mostly rely on friends for my reviews. I have a collection of people where, if they tell me something is good, I won't necessarily like it, but it's always worth looking at, at least. And, I don't read that many reviews.

But when I do -- hm. I think the thing that makes me note down a title is when the review catches my interest somehow, piques my curiosity. This would be an interview about Lewis's "truth breathed through silver," about liminal spaces, about real life and what we take into fiction, did that for me, and now I'm curious about it. I picked up Operation Mincemeat because it seemed a tale so ridiculously intricate that I could hardly believe it was true (and I put it down again because forty pages in, there were upwards of half a dozen white middle-aged men, and I'd already lost track of which was which before anything had even started happening . . . and, well, the review had summarized the plot pretty well, anyway). I picked up Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things because there's

[sartorias]

Oh yes, I totally comprehend. I will also get caught by some passing detail that has resonance with my current interests or my life. I guess the devil is in the details, eh? *g*