Tag Archives: book reviews

Why Review Books? A Personal History

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Why review books? What’s the point? To what useful end is one reader’s take on someone else’s art beyond her own delight, neutrality, or regret for having engaged?

One might return a question: why review ANYTHING? Opinions, everybody’s got ‘em, right? So.

So. Memory . . .  

In the 80’s and 90’s, my brother and I rocked the summer reading club scene at both libraries we frequented. That’s right, we competed in reading against other, unseen children, jockeying for the coveted position of Most Books Read. My brother and I weren’t opponents –these races were more like track and field where one challenges his history: his past record, his younger self.

At summer’s end, we’d conclude with fistfuls of Pizza Hut personal pan pizza coupons and, for me at least, zero memory of what I’d read beyond titles listed on a colorful sheet of paper, forgotten ever more deeply as summer’s expansiveness compressed into rigidly structured fall.

Learning . . .

My brother has four years on me and, other than a few shared Spider-Man and Garfield comics, a Robotech novel or two, we didn’t have many cross-over reading interests. Despite this, I hold dear titles that I myself never read, such as Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. The book reports he wrote for school were as amazing and sophisticated sounding to me as what he was reading. I felt eager to compose my own reports–craft construction paper covers, hand-letter the titles, staple along the edges, and present proudly to a teacher one neat bundle.

Sadly, my schooling was not his; I didn’t score any grade school teachers who assigned book reports. By the time I was invited to commune with literature, I was in high school where the culture was less about connecting with written words and more about strategizing to achieve A’s. I loved and identified with novels and poetry but still removed myself from an Honor’s English class because I didn’t care to compete and had a growing dislike of lit-tret-ture.

Memory . . .

I have a micro-myth, goes like this: I was reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, so into it, awww YEAH! This book is GREAT, this book is fantastic. Nearing the final pages, situations started to feel a tad . . . familiar, and then really familiar, and then. Oh, no. I’ve already read this book. I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. 🙁 🙁 🙁

Thus, I started keeping reading journals in high school, hardbound books usually gifted to me by my brother. Curiously, the practice failed to save me from accidentally reading The Hero and the Crown a third time (consistent, that kid), but it did help cement the awareness that I shouldn’t attempt to keep everything in my head. I quickly devised my own rating system consisting of smiley faces and frown-y faces and wavy lines. The journals doubled as a study of the writing field and I recorded authors, illustrators, publishing houses and imprints, and award-winners.

Learning . . .

The result of eight-straight-years of writing instruction in high school and college is that I’ve learned systems and strategies for analyzing the narrative arts. I peek behind and betwixt typeset words for clues about work and writer both. The why of it: to read deeper, write better, understand our lives and our world(s) in the moment of the narrative, and then again and again with each unique book-poem-play, even as those books-poems-(comics!)-plays sometimes meld together into a mash of ideas. They soak through, get integrated and because of my . . .

. . . Memory, or lack thereof, I review books and STILL forget them. Alternately, there are poems I’ve heard just once that stick with me. It’s unpredictable. It’s delicious.

When the Internet arrived (for me) in college, so too arrived ingenious applications like Goodreads. At current count, I’ve posted approximately 400 reviews. Sure, one such review (for Microcrafts: Tiny Treasures to Make and Share by Margaret McGuire) is a simple exclamation: “So cute! So tiny!” but that’s an honest reaction, yeah? It’s me talking back to the writer/artist as much as my six-paragraph rant about Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Sometimes other Goodreads users click the thumbs-up button, declaring their affinity with my analysis and I get a nice energy boost.

Aaaand learning . . .

As my world has expanded via the 0’s and 1’s, I’ve grown more careful with the reviews I pen. Words on a website are not the same as ideas on paper, bound by twin case covers, sitting on my shelf at home. I’m aware that the authors I watch from afar may one day be close-up peers. Taking care is a must. After all, care is the reason I’ve engaged, why I’m talking back to a writer or artist, explaining: this is how you reached me. See? Here’s how I’ve changed.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

 

Recently, I walked into a bookstore with my nine-year-old daughter and said, choose a book you want—anything under ten dollars. She surprised me by choosing Scott Westerfeld’s New York bestseller Leviathan, no doubt based on the steampunk cover and her recent interest in a movie based on books by Jules Verne. I tried vainly to shepherd her to something else—something I remembered from childhood, something classic. Then I remembered reading (though at the time I was slightly older than she is, twelve or thirteen) all the Mario Puzo novels I checked out of a beach library; I thought of all the Ian Fleming books I went through one summer. (I was also reading Jane Eyre—but still.)

Nobody ever stopped me from reading any book I picked out.

We bought it. She loves it. Ten years from now, if she’s writing anything at all, who knows what it will have taught her or how it will shape her thinking about her own work. As I now revisit the sheer number of books I read until I reached my thirties, I am intrigued.

Then I stopped and thought—well, what am I reading now? Sometimes the question for me isn’t what I’m reading, but when in this nonstop world I’ll read. So much of the time I’m reading for work (as a book reviewer) which isn’t really so bad—I think books deserve reviews and I’m glad I have a job that keeps me reading current work, but sometimes I wish I could jump into a classic book (not for a book group) or a contemporary book (not for potential review)—just for pleasure.

So what am I reading for pleasure?

1) The Sphere of Birds by Ciaran Berry, as I reconsider my thin lines, he offers examples of how lines can thicken:

Why do they bother, what is it both boys want except
          the soul sprung from the locked box of the self,
one doing his best to scale the ladder of the air,

the other rapt up in the workings of his wrist,
          and both of them reminding me of the Caladrius, that all-white bird
said to symbolize Christ, a more literal taking away

of sins, as it drew the symptoms of any non-fatal illness
          with its stare and carried them into the sun to burn.
Later in life, my brother will collect bones: skull of a curlew…

2) Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, to hear a young voice, a contemporary’s particularly fresh voice that seems also able to channel from centuries past:

October: grapes hung like the fists of a girl
gassed in her prayer. Memory,
I whisper, stay awake.

In my veins
long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come
right out of the eighteenth century
Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination
is the only word.

4) Stone by Osip Mandelstam, because of Ilya Kaminsky’s brilliant reminder:

I grew as a rustling reed
Where the pond is foul and muddy
And with languid and tender greed
Breathe a life forbidden to me.

No one sees me as I sink down
To a cold lair in the mud
With a rustle to bid me welcome
In autumn’s brief interlude.

I rejoice in my cruel pain
And in life, which is like a dream,
I secretly envy all men
And in secret love all of them.

5) (gentlessness) by Dan Beachy-Quick, for music that shapes into experience:

Teeth are this poor man’s plow
   cutting the music into rows,
dulled down by the dirt,
   this face is this poor man’s tool,
tilling the earth by trilling the song,
   melody mumming the blossom
back into itself, the initial seed
   broken apart by what it cannot
help, this force that confesses
   itself, that says I from the broken
mouth, that confesses this mouth
   has always been mine, this shovel,
this mouth, singing the flower….

6) Legend of the Walled-Up Wife by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, to hear a gifted Irish poet translate a Romanian poet who has her own mythology, but blends characteristics of Romanian folklore expertly with the Western canon:

When I was travelling as an obscure
Member of Ahab’s crew
Searching for the white whale
Suddenly I felt my right leg
Shedding its flesh and becoming
A plain artificial stump
Whittled from the sacred bone
Of the Leviathan.

WROB sitting area

What do you read? And how much of your not-because-I-have-to reading secretly feeds what you write? What voices do you trap inside for those moments when you need some structure or a gentle nudge while you’re doing your own work? If I had an equal amount of time to spare, I’d spend as much time cozied up in the Writers’ Room comfy chairs reading as I do at a desk trying to write.

-Valerie Duff, 2015 Poetry Fellow