Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/24

Q. How is this week like every other week?

A. Books have arrived in my mailbox, from publishing companies far and wide. (Though mostly headquartered in midtown Manhattan.)

Q. And what is the right and proper thing to do with those books?

A. Read them, of course. But, even before that, to describe and identify them, for the delight and edification of multitudes worldwide.

Q. Will you do that now?

A. I shall -- though first I must give the ritual weekly disclaimer: I haven't read any of these books yet, so there is always the possibility that some statements below may later become inoperative.

First up is Circle of Enemies, the third book in the contemporary fantasy series "Twenty Palaces" by Harry Connolly. I reviewed the previous book, Game of Cages, last year, and then named it one of by Top Twelve books of the year, so I'm really looking forward to this one. It's a mass-market paperback from Del Rey, just out this month, so I'm sure nearly all of you could easily make room in your book-buying budgets for it. (And I'd recommend that.)

Speaking of mass-market paperbacks, this is also the time of the month when DAW sends me their mass-markets for the coming month -- in this case, October, for those of you frantically trying to count on your fingers -- and so I should mention them as well:

• Vamparazzi, the fourth book in Laura Resnick's Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, about a struggling actress in a world full of supernatural creatures. I used to have a copy of a previous book in the series, Doppelgangster, because I loved the title (and had really enjoyed a traditional fantasy trilogy, loosely based on the history of Sicily, that Resnick wrote for Tor about a decade ago -- the first book is In Legend Born), but I think that floated away in my recent flood. So maybe I'll read this one instead.
• Magebane, a fat steampunky-looking novel by Lee Arthur Chane, an author I'm not familiar with. It's set in a small kingdom, cut off from the rest of the world, where magic still works, where a moustache-twisting villain is about to launch a coup and attempt to Take Over the World (Bwah-ha-ha!), when a young man arrives from the outside in an airship.
• And then there's Intrigues, the middle book in Mercedes Lackey's "Collegium Chronicles," the latest trilogy set in her popular world of Valdemar. (And don't atttempt to read condescension into that particular sentence, since I had read almost all of the Valdemar books up to my departure from the SFBC, and enjoyed most of them quite a bit -- Lackey is a substantially better writer than she usually gets credit for, especially when she pushes herself.)

We've reached the point where everyone wants to create manga stories -- case in point, this week, is Laddertop, Vol. 1, the first in an expected series, written by Orson Scott Card and Emily Janice Card (OSC's daughter), with an assist from the other daughter, Zina Card. The art comes from Philippine illustrator/children's book author Honoel A. Ibardolaza, who, in the typical way of manga written by a bigfoot author, gets an "Illustrated by" credit, as if this were a prose book entirely written by the Cards. The story is set in a near-future where enigmatic aliens have given humanity four beanstalk power stations -- and, in a twist both very OSCish and manga-netic, only children can fit through the maintenance corridors of these stations. (It's always sad to read about futures in which robotics and telepresence technology goes backwards so quickly.) Laddertop will be officially published tomorrow as a paperback by Tor/Seven Seas.

Ken MacLeod has a new novel in The Restoration Game, from Pyr but also officially publishing tomorrow in paperback. (And that reminds me that I read MacLeod's first half-dozen or so novels, but somehow missed most of what he's done this last decade.) Restoration Game is a near-future thriller that combines political intrigue in the former Soviet Union with online gaming -- and the back cover also promised "cutting-edge philosophical speculation," for looking for such things.

I'm very much not the audience for zombie novels, as I keep cheerfully mentioning, but I must be in the minority, because the damned things just keep coming. (Metaphoric echo intended.) This week's entry is David Moody's Autumn: Purification, the third book in a series in which 99% of the human race (including you and me, of course, but zombie-book readers never seem to mind that) has just died horribly and come back as brain-eating automatons. St. Martin's Press published Purification, in which things get even worse for a small band of survivors trapped in an underground base by an ever-increasing horde of the undead, in late August.

Sea monsters, on the other hand, are right up my alley, so Jonathan Case's debut graphic novel, Dear Creature, looks like a real kick. Somewhere in Beach-Blanket-Bingo days, a thoughtful monster named Grue lurks just offshore, torn between his urges to keep eating those tasty young teenagers (as his chorus of crab friends urges him to do) and his growing sense that there's more to life. What will he do? This one is coming from Tor on October 11th.

But we're back to zombies with Jack and Jill Went Up to Kill: A Book of Zombie Nursery Rhymes, the follow-up to the Xmas parody It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies! by Michael P. Spradlin with illustrations by Jeff Weigel. I think the title completely explains the appeal of this slim book (coming from Harper on October 4th); it's the kind of thing that traditionally sells in an eye-catching display right next to the cash register, and I wonder how books like that are faring in the ever-more-online bookselling world of today.

Most of the stuff I get in the mail is closely related to the worlds of SF/Fantasy and comics/graphic novels, and that's fine -- but I do miss seeing other genres, and quirkier stuff, the way I did back at the clubs. So I'm thrilled every time something like I ♥ Kawaii shows up, just because it's different and interesting. This comes as a hardcover this week from Harper Design, "Selected by Charuca" (a character illustrator/designer from Barcelona) -- and it's a collection of art by nearly three dozen artists and collectives from around the world, all of whom are influenced strongly by the Japanese idea of super-cuteness, "kawaii."

William J. Birnes and Joel Martin, bestselling authors of books on psychic and paranormal topics including the recent The Haunting of America, focus on the last century of local history with The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America, including stories of mediums, UFOs, out-of-body experiences, and other uncanny events. The ex-Skeptical Inquirer reader in me leads me to note that Birnes and Martin seem to believe in all of this stuff, and so, presumably, their readership is equally open-minded to every possible bit of unlikely hooey. This was published by Forge (Tor's less-speculative twin) on September 13th in trade paperback.

Publicists are essentially optimistic people, which is why one of them sent me the third book in a trilogy that I've never previously seen. The book is James Dashner's The Death Cure, completing the YA dystopian (do I repeat myself?) "Maze Runner" series, and Delacorte will publish it on October 11th.

George Mann returns with the third book in his "Newbury & Hobbes" steampunk detective series, The Immorality Engine. (I still haven't read any of them, but maybe that will change soon.) This one is coming in October as a Tor hardcover.

And last for this week is Stan Lee's How to Write Comics, a big, heavily-illustrated book cowritten by Bob Greenberger published by Watson-Guptill in association with the comics company Dynamite Entertainment. As far as I can tell, none of the illustrations credit artists, but, then, this is a book about writing comics, so I suppose that's understandable. This one is hitting stores October 11th.

Nasty Reviews, Redux

I've just set a particularly mean review to publish on Tuesday morning -- in part so that I can, if I feel like it, look it over again tomorrow and perhaps tone it down before it actually publishes.

I doubt that I'll change it -- I read this particular book (why am I being so coy? It's Mira Grant's Feed, the second-least deserving Hugo nominee of this past year) well over a month ago, and I've been seething about it ever since, so it's unlikely another day will tone down my bile. But it does seem like an official cooling-off period is in order, just to be sure.

So there could have been a major post here today, but I postponed it for what might even be humanitarian purposes. You're welcome, I suppose.

(I think of this note as a coda to the three-year-old On Bad Reviews rather than as a tease to the upcoming post, though I've just realized that you folks reading this will probably take it as the latter. To make it up to you, I'll now reveal that the book I was talking about in that old post was Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist. You're welcome again.)

Juxtaposition: Two Books for Younger Readers with Words & Pictures

Sometimes words and pictures come together in the same story. There's more than one way of accomplishing this -- comics is the most obvious, with the story told in a sequence of pictures and text (captions and/or dialogue), but there are other options -- and books for pre-adults have typically made more use of pictures than those in the more adult portions of the library.

Remember: adults are dull and staid, and must not be upset or disconcerted by mere pictures in their very, very serious books. Children are more mentally flexible, and can handle the shock of the pictorial.

Teens are somewhere in between: they usually want to be adults, but they're still young enough to question that dull stolidity, and still, sometimes, will gravitate to books with pictures in them. The two books I have in front of me today were published to be read by pre-adults of various ages -- though I think the first had an older expected reader-age than the latter -- and they're chock-full of pictures. In fact, both of them are stories told through and about their pictures, in different ways -- and, more interestingly from my point of view, neither of these books use the language and techniques of comics. They both use pictures as part of their storytelling, but come at it from different traditions, and don't tell their stories from image-to-image the way that comics do.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is the more conventional of the two books; it's a novel by Ransom Riggs (his first), illustrated by a sequence of real, mostly unaltered vintage photographs. (Riggs is clear about the "mostly unaltered" stipulation, since some of these are quite odd photographs, as with the cover shot, showing a hard-faced girl standing rigidly still a foot off the ground.) Those photos are part of the story in the most basic, literal way -- every so often, a character talks about looking at a photograph, and then, lo! the actual photo appears on the next page.

In fact, that's the main problem with Miss Peregrine: it's a fantasy story about people with strange, unlikely abilities living among us -- the "peculiar children" of the title -- but the story is slow and plodding for more than its first half, and the reader comes to feel that Riggs assembled the pictures into a sequence first, and then made up a story to fit that sequence. That story chugs along in a low gear for most of the book's length, ambling slowly from one picture to the next, when the reader would really prefer fewer pictures -- or fewer interruptions for "and I have a picture of that as well!", at least -- to get a story that picks up the pace a bit.

That story is told by young Jacob Portman, a quiet and mostly solitary teen in modern-day Florida. His paternal grandfather used to tell him unlikely and amazing stories from his own youth, but stopped when Jacob insisted that those stories were lies. But then Jacob finds his dying grandfather in the woods near their home, and catches a glimpse of a tentacle-mouthed figure that may have killed the old man. Of course everyone insists that Grandpa Portman was killed by a wild animal, but of course Jacob doesn't believe that.

Jacob spends time with a psychiatrist, Dr. Golan, but still has regular nightmares, no matter how many drugs Golan prescribes. Eventually, he convinces his dreamy father -- whose latest, soon-to-be-abandoned project is a book about birding -- to take the two of them to the remote Welsh island where Grandpa Portman grew up during WWII, for the one to investigate the waterfowl and the other to find the titular institution, and possibly track down people who knew his grandfather.

There, he finds the orphanage ruined, the victim of a bombing raid on September 3, 1940. Only one person emerged from the wreckage: his grandfather, who set off immediately to fight. But of course it's not that simple: there are peculiar children, and he finds them, in the place they fled to, or created, that fateful day in 1940. And where there are good mutants, there must be evil ones as well, so the monsters that his grandfather killed -- after a long life spent hunting and killing those same monsters, as Jacob learns -- are soon found to be hot on  his trail. Eventually, after lots of backstory and vaguely-interesting old pictures, there's a confrontation, a battle, various choices and dramatic speeches, and an exodus that I expect will lead to a sequel.

The bones of that story could easily be exciting, and Riggs makes many of his scenes exciting -- but the overall sense, for most of the book, is of plodding from one photo that isn't nearly as eerie or evocative as it should be to yet another one. Riggs also has an occasionally tin ear for invented terminology -- ymbrynes being the worst offender -- and the kind of lack of imagination that's only startling in retrospect. (It's been nearly 70 years since the bombing raid, and one must wonder why the peculiar children haven't changed at all since then -- Riggs has in-story reasons for part of the lack of changes, but seventy years of accumulating days, all very much the same, cannot but have an effect on those children.)

Miss Peregrine is one of those fantasies written by an outsider, with an initially intriguing idea that turns out to be the oldest of hats -- a cousin of X-Men and Wild Talent and Zenna Henderson -- and that has not been thought through, or integrated into the world, quite as thoroughly as the reader might hope. It's nice enough, but the kind of book that inevitably reminds the experienced reader of a dozen better things. So the ideal reader for Miss Peregrine will have to be someone who is really, really impressed by those old photos.

Wonderstruck is the second book by Brian Selznick in a format that he, as far as I can tell, invented: a story told in alternating sequences of prose and pencil drawings. The drawings are not comics -- they each take up an entire spread or page, and the transitions from one to the next are always cinematic, with an imagined camera clearly moving through space. Unlike The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which I reviewed here in 2008), the two stories in Wonderstruck are initially separate -- but any reader of an experience knows that a book with two separate plotlines must eventually see them intertwine and merge; it's an iron law of literature.

In the summer of 1977, Ben Wilson is twelve years old, living in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota with his aunt and uncle mere steps from the house he used to live in with his single mother, until her recent accidental death. Fifty years earlier, Rose Kincaid is the same age, living unhappily in her father's home in Hoboken, dreaming of her run-away movie-star mother. Both of them are deaf -- Ben at first just partially. Both of them are unhappy, in the care of family members they don't like or connect with as much as they should. And both of them dream of other things -- those those "other things" are still unformed.

Both of them make their way to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, connected by a love for museums and the things they celebrate, by unexpected family ties, and by Selznick's current enthusiasms. And, for all of Wonderstruck's over-600-page bulk, it's a short, slim story -- they both run away, they both find family, they both fall into better lives.

Rose's story is told in pictures and Ben's in words, up until the point when they meet -- after that point, Wonderstruck has a single narrative thread that bounces back and forth from words to pictures, as Selznick did in Hugo Cabret. Selznick's pictures are excellent, though his aping of the film camera does become monotonous after a while: comics have developed so many other techniques for transitions between pictures over the past century that it can be annoying to see Selznick ignore all of them in favor of a late-talkies swooping camera. His words are serviceable, though, here and there, they can feel overdone.

Wonderstuck, in the end, has less at stake than Hugo Cabret did, and that makes it feel smaller -- even when Ben is cast adrift in New York, deaf, knowing no one and nearly aimless, he doesn't seem to be in real danger, and he swiftly finds both a friend and a safe place. It's a sweet book for middle-grade readers, though, and may be particularly good for reluctant readers -- it's a massive book that even they can charge through in no more than a few hours.

Quote of the Week: Tests

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."
- Maya Angelou

My Favorite Song As of This Exact Moment

I've listened to this at least four times today...which is impressive for an eight-minute song.

The band is Low, the record is C'mon, and the song is "Nothing But Heart."

It's even more impressive if you turn up your speakers and get to doing something else (driving is particularly good) while the song builds up to about the five-minute mark.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

I just realized that this book -- which I read last month -- was due back at the library today -- so I should probably write about it now, before the book's out of the house and my memory gets even worse.

I will type the whole title just once; it's long but perfectly captures what's enticing and glorious about the book, and immerses the reader in Valente's version of that old-storybook style: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

This is a book with a story; it was originally a nonexistent book-within-a-book in Valente's adult novel Palimpsest -- a book she had no real intention of actually writing. But people kept asking about it, and she found herself in a tough financial position -- so common these days, especially for someone trying to work a freelance life -- and so she wrote the book, chapter by chapter, in public, for free, on her website. (A huge chunk -- not the whole thing, anymore, but more than enough to get the flavor of it -- is still there, free for the reading.) It was one of the more successful examples of the new online "tip jar" culture -- it apparently made enough money to help keep Valente's family going as long as it needed to, from donations by readers. And, along the way, it won the Andre Norton Award, for best young adult book, from SFWA. And, this spring, it turned into an actual book, with covers and illustrations (by Ana Juan) and everything.

The story is a very traditional one -- since that's what it was supposed to be, back when it was a piece of furniture in another novel -- in which a girl named September, close to a hundred years ago, is ravished away, very much of her own will, to fairyland by a Green Wind and a Leopard. They, sadly, cannot accompany September into fairyland, so she sets off to have her own adventures. Fairyland turns out to be more dangerous, and tricky, and changeable than she expected, but September is a girl with a strong will and a good heart, so she comes through it all in good shape -- though not unscathed, and not without losing an important part of herself.

It's a very episodic book, as one would expect from a book written in separate chapters, so I don't want to talk about the episodes -- you can just click that clink, up above, and read the first half-dozen of them, anyway. (And I hope you do; Fairyland is one of those books that reads just right, and that you sink into like a warm bath.) Valente does not entirely give up her usual tough and slightly jaundiced view of the world just because she's writing for younger readers, and Fairyland is stronger for the fact that there's plenty of bitter mixed in with the sweet.

I found Fairyland to be inspiring -- it made me want to write a book something like this, about a different young person thrown into a strange and fantastic situation. Not because of any flaws in Fairyland, but because it's all done so well -- Valente makes it look like so much fun that I couldn't help but want to do it myself. This is a lovely, thoughtful, and subtly subversive -- in the way that all great young adult novels are subversive -- novel for young people, probably the best YA novel to come from an fantasist for adults since Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

2011 Heinlein Award Goes To...Connie Willis?

First, you must remember that the Robert A. Heinlein Award is specifically awarded to -- and I quote -- "outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space."

And then you get to react when I tell you that this year's winner -- as chosen by a mysterious cabal of SF writers led by Dr. Yoji Kondo -- is Connie Willis, whose work has hardly ever been set anywhere but Earth.

So...she's getting this award for "All My Darling Daughters" and Uncharted Territory? She's a fine writer, who has done some excellent work, but none of it in any way inspires the human exploration of space, or depicts it.

I have to admit that I'm thoroughly puzzled by that choice, and, in my cynical way, have to wonder what the panel is thinking, and what other writers they might possibly have considered and rejected.

(I also note that the Heinlein Award wasn't given to anyone at all last year, and that there are usually two winners each year -- I have no idea what that means, but I note it.)

[news via Locus Online, as if often the case]

Random Political Comment of the Day

Rep. Ryan is complaining about Obama's proposed "Buffett rule" by saying that if you tax something you get less of it, which is the one piece of economics that people on the right can consistently remember.

Thus, Obama wants fewer billionaires who pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.

Does that mean Ryan wants more of that? That, perhaps, mere millionaires will pay lower tax rates than their secretaries?

If You Must Talk Like a Pirate in Public, Today Is the Day

Yeah, yeah, International Talk Like a Pirate Day has come around again, even though we were all tired of it at least five years ago.

See my dismissive comments from 2010, 2009, or 2007 for proof.

Aargh, I suppose. Hoist high the whatever, and set sail for a less tedious and fresher Internet meme.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/17

Publishing is starting back up for the fall, after its summer doldrums -- though, from the frenzied activities at my house, you'd never know summer doldrums existed, and others at other companies may feel similarly -- and so a few things made their way to my mailbox this past week. And so, as usual, I'll tell you what I can about them, from prior knowledge and a quick glance and a deep sense of disappointment in all human endeavor.

Down the Mysterly River is a young adult novel from Bill Willingham, most famous these days as the creator of the Fables comics series. (Though some of us old-timers persist in remembering him for his first big success, the early revisionist superhero team Elementals.) It's also, as far as I can see, his first professional foray into mostly unadorned prose [1] -- though the book is illustrated by Willingham's Fables collaborator, Mark Buckingham. Mysterly River is the story of a Boy Scout, Max "the Wolf," who  mysteriously finds himself in a strange landscape populated by talking animals beset by a relentless group of human hunters called the Blue Cutters. Since this is explicitly billed as a middle-grad book, I expect this will be less nasty to its characters than Willingham's work sometimes gets -- particularly since it's also described as a tribute to the Boy Scouts. Tor Starscape published it (in hardcover) on September 13th.

I saw (but did not read) the first book in Clay Griffith & Susan Griffith's alternate-historical "Vampire Empire" series, in which vampires have conquered most of the northern latitudes and driven free, civilized men down to the hot equatorial regions. The stories themselves are steampunky adventures, focused on a mysterious figure called the Greyfriar and the Princess who loves him, and the second book -- called The Rift Walker -- emerged from Pyr as a trade paperback on September 6th.

I may have already mentioned The Monster's Corner before -- it's an anthology of nineteen original stories, edited by Christopher Golden, all fantasies told from the point of view of the monster (which may be, but isn't necessarily, the same as the "villain") -- but, if I have, then I'll just mention it again. Among the contributors are Kevin J. Anderson, Sharyn McCrumb, Kelley Armstrong, Dana Stabenow, Heather Graham (presumably not the one you're thinking of), Tananarive Due, and Michael Marshall Smith. It's a trade paperback, coming September 27th from St. Martin's Press.

And last for this week is MetaMaus, an examination of art spiegelman's classic Maus graphic novel. It's central spine is a series of interviews spiegelman did with academic Hillary Chute, but there's also several sections created by spiegelman in comics form, plus lots of sketches, artwork, comics panels, photographs, interviews with other members of the spiegelman family, and other things. (On top of that, the book includes a DVD that includes the complete Maus, audio archives of spiegelman's interviews with his father, 300 notebook pages, thousands of drawings, and even more archival/historical material.) This isn't the edition of Maus that you'd want if you want to read it in print first, but, if you're interested in Maus on any deeper level, it's clearly a vast trove of data and interpretation. Metamaus is coming from Patheon on October 4th.


[1] See comments; this is Willingham's second novel, and I wouldn't want to bet that he doesn't have a pile of prose short fiction as well. Even worse, I knew that, and forgot it as I was typing.

What Makes a Good Review?

I got a very flattering e-mail, earlier today, from a woman who wants to review books but isn't quite sure how to get started. She has specific concerns -- particular pitfalls she already sees and is determined to avoid -- but anyone who wants to publish opinions and criticism will have much the same issues. She wanted to be aimed towards good resources on the art of reviewing, not just to get my idiosyncratic advice, such as it might be, but I'm not sure there is any such body of knowledge.

I did a few Google searches, and a little poking around, since my correspondent clearly put some time into her letter to me, and I wanted to show the same consideration to her. But I didn't necessarily agree with any of the articles I found, and they didn't really agree with each other in the first place. I'm sure there are people who will teach you how to review books -- or to write criticism about any media or art you could mention -- and their methods could be excellent for their purposes, but there's nothing universal. Publishers Weekly can give you a great crash course in how to write a PW review, and I taught a dozen or so readers how to do a useful SFBC reader's report in my years there -- but neither of those things are the same as a Gary K. Wolfe review, or one by John Clute, or by Michael Dirda. The more complicated the intent and more deep the coverage, the more difficult it is to write that review "right," and the less likely -- I think -- that there's a specific, teachable skill there.

It seems to me that criticism is something that you learn by doing. The tricky thing there is that it's also something you do in public, which can make the learning more painful than you'd like. These days, we can all be critics -- blogs and Twitter and Yelp and Zagat can all amplify our individual opinions on the things we read and see and eat and do -- but none of that makes us good critics. Some of us are better critics in general than others, and all of us have some things we know better than others. And practice always helps, as does having good examples -- and, sometimes, having bad examples to steer away from.

I can only really talk about my own history, if I want to stop giving windy, useless generalities. I started off in "book reviewing" by writing internal book reports for the SFBC; I did six of them my first week at the club, back in April of 1991. I was very eager, and incredibly willing to read almost anything my boss put in front of me -- I recognize that same eagerness and enthusiasm in a lot of young bloggers now, and wince to remember when I was like that. I was lucky in two ways: those reports had a clear structure (one phrase to define a book in genre and style, several paragraphs of plot description, and then a short personal evaluation at the end), and they were internal; no one outside the company ever read them.

I wrote hundreds of those over the next few years, learning to boil down complicated plots to their essences, to take good notes on books as I read them, to keep track of characters, and lots of other mechanical skills. More importantly, I learned to read actively, to think about a book as I was reading it and to start making hypotheses and guesses about the shape and course of a book while in the middle of it. That's one of the core necessities for a critic of any kind: you need to engage with the work directly, to think about where it seems to be going (rather than where you want it to go, or where it does eventually go) and get a sense for the shape of those works.

That critical facility needs to be related to, but not subservient to, your personal tastes. An honest critic is one who can say "This is a damn good example of a kind of thing I really don't like," and mean it. I'm grateful to my years at the SFBC for a lot of things, but one of the most important ones is having to spend a lot of time, over many years, thinking about what the audience for a particular book is. Sometimes you can define that audience demographically -- girls from 12-25, for example -- but, more often, what you're really looking for are touchstones, that a particular book will appeal to Darkover fans who want some real science, too, or to urban fantasy readers who are ready for vampires to be the villains again. If you can define a work's audience that way, you can set the work somewhat apart from your own reaction to it, and that parallax gives you space to think critically.

This is all still very vague, I'm afraid; as most writing advice is. The best advice on writing anything boils down to: read as widely as you can in that area, thinking about what you like and don't like, and then write as much as you can, also keeping track of what you think you're doing well and what you can't quite manage to put into words the way you want to.

Some of my reviews come out nearly as I think they will, but that's the exception. I find that I write about books largely to find out what I do think about them, to explore my reactions and try to justify my opinions as best I can. Sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn't. One that still bugs me, several years later, is my review of Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, where I thought I had an interesting insight about the ways Stross's Hard SF pessimism and that particular book's rampant sexuality reinforced and amplified each other. But I was much less clever, and much more snickering, than I thought I was, and that buried the insight I thought I had -- most of all, the mistake I made was getting personal, and attributing something to the author rather than the book.

(Authors often have thin skins, so they can take things that way even if you don't mean them, but I always try to consider a book as an object that stands on its own. I fail at that, I'm sure, but it's an important goal to keep in mind.)

But we all find our own pitfalls; we write to find the places where we're weak, and then do our best to avoid those areas, or dance around them, or build them up from sheer repetition and force of will.

Another of my particular flaws -- I'm concentrating on those because I know them all too well -- is that I'm much too binary; my reviews fall into praise or blame most of the time, with relatively few mixed pieces. Most books deserve mixed reviews; as the saying goes, a novel is a long piece of prose with something wrong with it. An honest reviewer honors that, dredging out the clumsy bits in the books she loves and talking about the elegant moments in the books she loathed -- and, again, most rules of criticism, like all rules of writing, are aspirational, since we all break them far too often.

But that's most of it: the way to be a better critic is to read more, and write more, and think more about both of those things. And, most importantly, to never be completely satisfied with either -- no book is perfect, and no critical article is, either. There's always something that could have been done better.

I've completely ignored the usual distinction between "criticism" and "reviews" here, because I think that any review that doesn't engage in at least a little criticism is useless. Any thoughtful opinion about a work of art must contain a discussion of strong and weak points, and that's criticism.

I've also ignored the usual question of audience for your criticism, because the real audience that matters is the critic herself. We're on the Internet; we're not getting paid for this, and we have no editors to please. If you are getting paid for a review, you need to take the opinions and guidance of your editor into account, which makes things more complicated. But, if you're reading this, you probably aren't: you're your own editor, and publisher, and ad-sales department, too. So write it to satisfy yourself -- as long as you can get into the appropriate critical mindset, and never be quite satisfied with anything.

Quote of the Week: What We Know

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts. But if he will be content to begin with doubt he shall end in certainties."
- Francis Bacon