Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL): 10 Years of Book Reviewing

And Some Random Thoughts
* The actual number, 277, is misleading, and makes me look way more literary than I actually am. In reality, within this 277 are several graded readers, two graphic - novels, several short novellas, lots of children's books (including 7 Books in the "World -Leaders: Past - and -Present" Series --a series of picture books about world leaders intended for children) and lots and lots of audio books.

* Given how little I actually read, I sometimes feel guilty about maintaining a blog dedicated to book reviews. "Who do I think I'm kidding?" I sometimes ask myself. "I'm trying to appear cultured and literary by maintaining a book review blog, but I barely get through a book a month!" (Although most likely I'm the only one who's losing any sleep over this issue.)
On the other hand, if I was the kind of person who knocked off a book every few days (like some of my friends are) then I would never have time to write detailed book reviews on each one. So in that sense, this type of blog is only possible for someone with my reading habits.

* I discovered audio books in my early 20s, and I've had a number of positive experiences with them (both before and after starting this book review project). A number of books I've done only by audio book, and yet I feel like I've absorbed them every bit as well as if I had read the actual pages. In some cases, I think I might even get more out of the book if it's an audio. (My eyes can tend to glaze over sometimes when reading the printed page, but a skilled voice actor can bring the words to life. And also something about the spoken word tends to stick in my mind more than the written word.)
However, over the years my opinion on audio books has evolved, and I've decided that they're not ideal for every situation.
There are external factors that can detract from audio books of course (how noisy it is outside, how distracted I am).
But there are also just some books that can't be absorbed as easily orally--books where the author's prose isn't so straightforward and simple, for example. Also books with lots of characters to keep track of.
There are a few books on this list that I did on audio book that I now have to admit I got very little out of.
The one I feel most guilty about is Anna Karenina . I did it as an audio book back in 2006, and today I can remember just about zero of it, and I feel really guilty having it on my list of books that I've read. I haven't really absorbed it, so I shouldn't really be claiming that I've read it. At some point, I need to go back and re-visit that book. Until that point, I'm living a lie by having that book on my list.

As time went on, I started to get more anal retentive about my audio books. Instead of just listening once and writing a review, I would try to listen to them 3 or 4 times before I truly counted them as "read". But even in this case it should be noted that there are certain authors I still have trouble absorbing audibly, even after 3 or 4 listens.
I've also decided to try to be more forthright about which books I did as audio books, and to make this explicit in the review now. (Something that was absent from the first few years of this project.)

* In my 10 years of blogging retrospective post, I mentioned how embarrassed I am by all the bad writing on this blog over the years.
This is true with my book review project as well.
As I type the words onto the screen, I think everything I write is absolutely brilliant.
When I re-read old posts after a few years have gone by, I'm appalled by how clunky the writing style is. I often have difficulty following my own train of thought, because the sentences are so mangled, and the transitions between ideas are unclear.
And all the typos! So many typos!
There's also the problem of a intelligent commentary--or lack thereof.
When I first started this book review project, I didn't have a lot of intelligent things to say about the books I was reading. For example, my review of The Postman Always Rings Twice is so vague and aimless as to be pretty much just a waste of cyberspace. (I can't imagine anyone getting anything out of that review.)
In more recent years, I think I've gone to the opposite extreme, and started writing way too much about the books I've read. There are several examples of this, but I guess the most infamous one is my review of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, which totals 46,375 words. That's an exceptional example, but there are plenty of others. This review on The Age of Reason was pretty dense. This one on At War With Asia went on forever. And many more examples.

* I like having all the books listed in order of date read (as opposed to alphabetically) because they form a bit of a biography over the last 10 years. As my interests and ambitions changed, so did my reading list.
When I thought I was going to go to graduate school in Japanese studies, my reading list was all books about Japan.
When I thought maybe I would go to school for modern European studies, my reading list was all books from this period.
As with most people who like history, I like pretty much all of it, and I do kind of skip around from period to period. But the area that I thought I wanted to specialize in was early modern European history. At my Alma Mater, the early modern period was defined from the start of the French Revolution to the First World War, and I've kept those dates (1789-1918) as a rough guide for my history reading. Also, since literature and history or always very inter-related, I tried to tackle a lot of literature from the same period.
Now that I've decided my career is in English Teaching, I've been trying to read lots of books related to the English Teaching Profession.
When I first started this book review project, however, I still had literary ambitions--I wanted to be a writer. And I was under the influence of Stephen King's book On Writing (A).
I never reviewed it on this blog (I read it a few months before I started the book review project), but it influenced my reading choices for the first few years of book reviewing.
In his book, Stephen King wrote at length about the importance of reading for anyone with ambitions to be a writer. All writing comes out of reading, and if you're not constantly devouring books, King said, you'll never make it as a writer.
What to read, then? Anything and everything, King said. All written works can help you develop your literary technique. A good book shows you what to do. A badly written book, however, is equally as valuable, because you can get a very clear sense of what not to do.
In other words, there is no such thing as a book that's a waste of time.
"If you're looking for permission to read all those trashy books that you've always wanted to read, but that you thought were a waste of time, then I'm giving you that permission," King said. (Or something like that. I'm paraphrasing because I'm quoting from memory.)

For someone of my temperament (a geek) the idea of being able to read all sorts of trashy pulpy novels AND get to feel like I was being productive at the same time was a gift from heaven. And so I jumped head first into all those wonderful trashy pulpy novels: Vampire Blood Trilogy, The Stand, Harry Potter, The Left Behind series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Starship Troopers, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The Princess of Mars, Conan The Barbarian, Magician, The Golden Compass, Ilium & Olympus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Eventually, I dropped my literary ambitions. Much like my flirtations with going into graduate school for history, or for Japanese studies, it was just not a realistic career path.
(And much like graduate school for history, or Japanese studies, it took me far too long to realize this. Boy, is it embarrassing to realize how long it took me to grow up!)

So, for the most part, the pulpy sci-fi/fantasy books that dominated the early part of this book review project are over now. Although, (once a geek, always a geek), I still relapse back into them once and a while. (Just last year I reviewed Anno Dracula, and Hothouse for example.) And I'm still enough of a geek to enjoy the sheer imagination that comes from the better writers in this genre.

The one thing that I am really and truly over, however, is superhero comic books.
10 years ago when I started this book review project I still had a fondness for the comic books of my youth. I had long ago stopped reading them because they seemed like a huge waste of time. But, based on Stephen King's advice that this was no longer a waste of time, I dove back in to comic books in the form of tie-in novels based on the DC Universe (52: The Novel, Infinite Crisis: The Novel, Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Novel, DC Universe: Inheritance, Justice League of America: Superman--The Never-Ending Battle, Justice League of America: Exterminators, Kingdom Come: The Novel, Challengers of the Unknown.)
Sure, I knew they were terrible, but I loved the pulp cheesiness of the superhero world.
Now, however, I'm tired of it all.
It's a bit hard to pinpoint exactly where my disillusionment with comic book superheros began. And, as with all ex-lovers, once the spark has gone out of the relationship, it's hard to identify what went wrong, because the question changes from "Why did I stop loving her?" to "What did I ever see in her to begin with?" And it's almost impossible to get back into that old frame of mind to remember what the original attraction had been.
It's possible that after an extended adolescence, I just finally grew up. (I usually think of myself as fully cognitively mature at 27, but maybe tastes can still change between 27 and 37).
It's possible that with all the superhero overload in the media the past few years, I just got sick of the whole thing.
It's possible that with all the resets and reboots in the comic book publishing world, the thing that attracted me to comic books in the first place was no longer valid. (I used to be fascinated by the idea of one long continuous story going all the way back to the 1940s. But in the past 10 years alone DC comics has reset it's continuity several times. It's now clear that any advancements or developments that happen in any issue is just temporary until the next reset a few years later, and that takes all the investment out of the story.)
But whatever the case, I'm over it. Comic book superheroes seem stupid and juvenile to me now. And to be quite honest, I'm embarrassed to have these book reviews in my blog archives.

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Anyway, those are all my thoughts on this project in general.
Over the next few days, I'll post some top ten lists:
Top Ten Worst Books: Fiction
Top Ten Worst Books: Non-Fiction

(I'm doing the worst books first because it's very easy to identify the books I hated. Because this book review list is mostly elective pleasure reading, I don't read a lot of books I don't like.
The books I really enjoyed, on the other hand, are so numerous that it's going to be difficult to pick favorites, but I'll give it a try.)

Top Ten Best Books: Fiction
Top Ten Best Books: Non-Fiction

Stay tuned for all that.

2 comments:

dpreimerJanuary 21, 2016 at 6:42 AM
You read more, and more widely, than I do. More admirably, too. It's hard for me to gauge my own reading habits -- the "books read" category has taken a precipitous decline. But on the other hand, I still treat the internet as 98% a reading resource. Never really caught the YouTube bug, I'm afraid (until it's time to repair something -- then I'm on it).

One oddity I've noticed about myself -- if I'm in another country, my book-reading rate suddenly sky-rockets. Even one short week in Amsterdam, with easy access to wifi -- five books. I vow to protect this rekindled (arf!) passion when I get home, but nope -- the internet long-reads take over, once again.
Joel SwagmanJanuary 21, 2016 at 9:11 AM
I suppose we all have our own oddities and inclinations.

The Internet has completely ruined my reading. When I'm in any sort of domicile with Internet access, I can not get any reading done. The quick rewards of the Internet, and the fact that it is constantly updated, are all too much for me to resist. I am constantly on the Internet in any place that it is available.

For years now, I've been going to coffee shops to get all my reading done, since I can not do any reading at my apartment.

In that respect I guess we're similar.

On the other hand, the type of articles you link to are usually long reads that require a bit of reader investment. It's online, sure, but it's still genuine reading. 30 years ago, it would all have been on periodicals.

I, on the other hand, fall prey to all the usual clickbait and listicles on the Internet. (Cracked.com, for example, is pretty much my all time favorite website.) Which just further ruin my attention span even more.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

10 Years of Book Reviewing

2 comments: