today's ramble
Mar. 21st, 2005 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabI've had this running ramble in my head for a couple of days, about why book reviews aren't terribly useful, having to do with the fact that no two people read any given book for exactly the same reasons. Or like a book for the same reasons. Or like the same things about a book. No two people are ever reading exactly the same book, in fact, because no two people bring exactly the same neurons to the table when they open the book.
When I say I like a book, it might mean that I really like the writing style, or I like the plot twists, or I find one of the characters fascinating, or all of the above. Or something different. Just saying I liked the book doesn't tell you any of that. And if what you look for in a book is something else, then the fact that I liked it won't help you decide at all.
And there's stuff that bugs me that might not bug you, and vice versa. I get really ticked at poor editing - grammar mistakes, spelling errors, random respellings of names, stuff like that. Some people are able to overlook that; I find it difficult to get past that.
I'd better cut this, since this may be a longish ramble:
When I write reviews for Amazon.com, I always try to say WHY i liked something. And then to explain some of the why of the why. For example, I would say not just "I don't like this book because it's too much fantasy for me" but more specifically "This book depends on the hero suddenly having new magic tricks available to him that there has been no evidence of before, no foreshadowing, this magical ability just popped up out of nowhere when he needed it. I don't like that; I prefer that even magic and fantasy have some rules, some sort of internal logic."
There are other plotting flaws that usually make me dislike a book. One is a hard-to-define point somewhere along the slope between willing-suspension-of-disbelief and I'm-sorry-this-is-too-stupid-to-get-by. For example, Tamar Meyers has a series about a Mennonite innkeeper. The first few books were funny; I enjoyed the idea of the "Amish plan" where guests pay extra for the privilege of cleaning their own rooms. But after a while, a few books, some things started getting annoying. It was hard to pinpoint at first - was it that the author was trying to mix things that might really happen and things that could only happen in fiction in too random a fashion? When a dead body turned up nicely pickled in a giant pickle barrel, that's when I stopped reading them; the existence of pickle barrels is OK, and the idea that they might be used to hide bodies, well, OK, but the reasons given for this particular body to turn up in a barrel that was rather illogically being opened at this particular time and place, were past that point - they were not believable, even in the fictional context. Now, not everybody feels that same way. One of my friends, it took her 4 more books past that one in the series before she hit the point of "too stupid to believe" as well as "I'm tired of the same Amish jokes, the same stereotyped characters, and the same unbelievable plots" point.
Other times, it's the way people speak that bugs me. I have a pretty good ear for dialog. There are the minor annoyances, such as authors whose characters never use contractions; I can usually get through those, though I am always tempted to write to the author and explain that people say "don't" and "can't." Other things bug me more. Sometimes it's nicknames or slang - although English is flexible, we do have some rules that such things follow, unwritten though they be, and it really grates on my ear when someone proposes a word that violates those rules. A rather old example: I recently reread Robert Silverberg's "The World Inside." The giant building-cities he called Urban Monads, and he proposes that they are called UrbMons for short. Well, that's just wrong. American English speakers just wouldn't contract those words that way. We'd either call them just Monads for short (and a lot of jokes about gonads, and calling them 'nads for short) or we'd use the acronym UM, pronounced you-em. Try it. Say urban monad. Then say urbmon. It just isn't right. It's unlikely that they'd ever be named Urban Monads in the first place, but I was willing to suspend disbelief about that. I can't, however, seem to overlook the unbelievable shortening of the term. And this is Robert Silverberg - certainly a good author, right? But I don't think he ever thinks of how his stuff might SOUND.
More to be added; phone just rang.
When I say I like a book, it might mean that I really like the writing style, or I like the plot twists, or I find one of the characters fascinating, or all of the above. Or something different. Just saying I liked the book doesn't tell you any of that. And if what you look for in a book is something else, then the fact that I liked it won't help you decide at all.
And there's stuff that bugs me that might not bug you, and vice versa. I get really ticked at poor editing - grammar mistakes, spelling errors, random respellings of names, stuff like that. Some people are able to overlook that; I find it difficult to get past that.
I'd better cut this, since this may be a longish ramble:
When I write reviews for Amazon.com, I always try to say WHY i liked something. And then to explain some of the why of the why. For example, I would say not just "I don't like this book because it's too much fantasy for me" but more specifically "This book depends on the hero suddenly having new magic tricks available to him that there has been no evidence of before, no foreshadowing, this magical ability just popped up out of nowhere when he needed it. I don't like that; I prefer that even magic and fantasy have some rules, some sort of internal logic."
There are other plotting flaws that usually make me dislike a book. One is a hard-to-define point somewhere along the slope between willing-suspension-of-disbelief and I'm-sorry-this-is-too-stupid-to-get-by. For example, Tamar Meyers has a series about a Mennonite innkeeper. The first few books were funny; I enjoyed the idea of the "Amish plan" where guests pay extra for the privilege of cleaning their own rooms. But after a while, a few books, some things started getting annoying. It was hard to pinpoint at first - was it that the author was trying to mix things that might really happen and things that could only happen in fiction in too random a fashion? When a dead body turned up nicely pickled in a giant pickle barrel, that's when I stopped reading them; the existence of pickle barrels is OK, and the idea that they might be used to hide bodies, well, OK, but the reasons given for this particular body to turn up in a barrel that was rather illogically being opened at this particular time and place, were past that point - they were not believable, even in the fictional context. Now, not everybody feels that same way. One of my friends, it took her 4 more books past that one in the series before she hit the point of "too stupid to believe" as well as "I'm tired of the same Amish jokes, the same stereotyped characters, and the same unbelievable plots" point.
Other times, it's the way people speak that bugs me. I have a pretty good ear for dialog. There are the minor annoyances, such as authors whose characters never use contractions; I can usually get through those, though I am always tempted to write to the author and explain that people say "don't" and "can't." Other things bug me more. Sometimes it's nicknames or slang - although English is flexible, we do have some rules that such things follow, unwritten though they be, and it really grates on my ear when someone proposes a word that violates those rules. A rather old example: I recently reread Robert Silverberg's "The World Inside." The giant building-cities he called Urban Monads, and he proposes that they are called UrbMons for short. Well, that's just wrong. American English speakers just wouldn't contract those words that way. We'd either call them just Monads for short (and a lot of jokes about gonads, and calling them 'nads for short) or we'd use the acronym UM, pronounced you-em. Try it. Say urban monad. Then say urbmon. It just isn't right. It's unlikely that they'd ever be named Urban Monads in the first place, but I was willing to suspend disbelief about that. I can't, however, seem to overlook the unbelievable shortening of the term. And this is Robert Silverberg - certainly a good author, right? But I don't think he ever thinks of how his stuff might SOUND.
More to be added; phone just rang.
