Book Reviews - My Personal Criteria

Since Jacques has already posted his personal rules (excellent ones, by the way - I couldn´t agree more), I decided to let you know my criteria to review books. And not only for online blogs and magazines; As a journalist, I´ve been reviewing books (and, for a brief while in the late 1990s, movies as well) for more than 20 years now. So I developed my own set of rules for this very delicate game of sorts:

1. I NEVER, EVER write about a book I didn´t like. Maybe it sounds corny, maybe it seems even the way of the coward - but, really, I don´t think there´s much bravery in listing all the typos, narrative flaws, errors in character and world building. That sounds to me more as a bravado than as a brave thing to do. This is a thing I learned with my late aunt Hermínia: if you don´t have anything good to tell about something, then don´t tell anything. Sometimes, silence is the best answer - you don´t create unnecessary polemics and thus you don´t publicize a book you feel that doesn´t deserve publicity.

2. I DON´T TELL THAT A BOOK IS GOOD if it´s not really good. In journalism, we use to say that objectivity is a myth; there´s no such thing, because there´s no way a journalist, who is a person just like you and me, can stay completely out of his/her way when writing a story. But that doesn´t mean you can simply write "oh, it´s good because I like this kind of stuff" and that´s that. No way, José: if I like a certain book, I try hard to find elements in it that may be helpful not only to me and my age / gender / genre group, but to whoever is reading me.

3. I ALWAYS STRIVE TO BE CLEAR AND CONCISE in the reviews I write. As much as I love references, comparisons, similes and the like, I do try to make myself understood as much as I can. Not being pretentious, as Kathy Sedia puts it very well here, may do wonders for you.

4. I TRY NOT TO BE A SPOILSPORT who ends up disclosing everything that happens in the story just for the sake of dissecating it. Sometimes you can´t tell almost anything of the story so as not to hand the finale in a silver platter - in this case, I simply use the most expedient rule: honesty. I tell my readers that the story is worth reading for this or that reason, even though I´ll not write too much about it.

5. I TRY HARD NOT TO BE NEITHER AN EVANGELIST NOR AN INQUISITOR of the author or of the story. For example, just because I´m a huge fan of Thomas M. Disch, it doesn´t mean that I´m always going to love unconditionally everything he did or wrote. The same applies to Orson Scott Card, whose Alvin Maker stories I like very much, even though I disagree strongly on his view on homosexuality. (I used those writers as examples to illustrate how first impressions can be deceiving: I´ve met both Disch and Card personally almost 20 years ago, and, though Disch wasn´t in a very good mood when I met him in a lecture in Rio, he also was willing and able to talk about his writing and SF in general. And, though Card was almost always in a very good mood when I met him in a convention in São Paulo in the early 1990s, he can also be very strong-minded concerning his opinions.)

I´m pretty sure there is much more to be said on that subject, but I don´t have the time for working on it now - I need to finish some reviews! ;-)