After a month or so of slacking on my Blog Gate responsibilities, I have returned like MacArthur to the Philippines, sans corncob pipe, with a post all about book reviewing: Writing Book Reviews — How and Why. Since a great deal of my time lately has been going into reviews for the next issue of BG, and since I can’t think of hardly anything to blog about lately, an indepth look at reviewing seemed like a good idea:

The primary element of a book review, then, comes down to the reviewer’s opinion of the book itself. Sometimes this opinion is expressed in neutral terms, and sometimes in personal terms, and it is important to distinguish which is which. The difference arises when one is referring to an absolute standard of judgment versus a subjective one — and this is perhaps the biggest gray area, and perhaps the most reliant on instinct, in any sort of critical endeavor. Is the novel’s uneven pace an example of a failure in pacing for this kind of story, or your own impatience with the book? Is the author’s baroque style purple prose, or just something you aren’t in the mood for? Does the novel fail on points of characterization, setting, or theme — or is it just not the novel you thought you were getting when you looked at the cover?

So, I talk a bit about the do’s and don’t’s, and offer a little practical advice on how to become a reviewer for those of you crazy enough to want to and, finally, I dig into the reasons why those of us who do review, review:

But, above all, reviewing is a way to engage with books in a more alert, more critical, and more substantial way. When I think over the last few years, the books I remember best are the ones I reviewed — and not only have I retained more from those books, but I’ve understood them better as well. The act of taking notes, of thinking and evaluating, and of then actively writing about a book, is a way to take one’s reading to another level — and for book lovers, what could be a greater joy than that?

There are a lot of things I could be writing about now, as I look back over 2008 — stories I’ve written, work I’ve sold, the development of this site, or what reviewers have said about my fiction. Hell, I could even go into details about my personal life if I didn’t think it would bore us all to tears. Instead I want to talk about the reviews. This site didn’t really get moving until I started putting reviews up, and I doubt I’d have very many readers, or even much reason to blog, if I didn’t talk about books as often as I do.

From the end of March to the beginning of December, from A Night in the Lonesome October to Double Star, I’ve reviewed forty-five books. Thirty-seven of those are on this site, two on BlackGate.com, and six more will be appearing in Black Gate Magazine’s thirteenth issue. That makes my average a bit over a review a week for that period of time.

Habit Forming

For most of that time I was reading and reviewing the book the same week I was posting the review — far be it for me to learn to think ahead and save up some reviews ahead of time.  That system is less than ideal. What it means is that most of my reading these last eight months has been devoted purely to review material, with me perhaps reading only twenty or so books that did not get reviewed for whatever reason. This has changed my reading habits significantly.

One thing it has done is lowered the amount of non-fiction I’ve been able to read, which is the change I am least comfortable with. While I sneak some books in here and there, the review schedule means that I cannot do focused reading on a topic of interest — such as reading five or so books all related to the same historical era. There are times when this lack has made me as mean as a coffeeless morning after three hours’ sleep — and it’s the one thing that illustrates very clearly to me that the review-a-week schedule is an impermanent and temporary phase for me.

Old Favorites

But, the end isn’t in sight yet, and there are a whole crop of good things reviews have done for me. Firstly, they’ve got me rereading some old favorites that I may not have revisited for years to come. Neuromancer, Dying Inside, A Clockwork Orange, The High Crusade, The Gunslinger, and On Writing are a few of the books that I’ve read and reread in the past that I may not have gotten around to rereading any time soon. I’m glad I did.

And, whether reading a new book for the first time or rereading an old favorite, the act of reviewing a book changes the reader’s relationship to the material in subtle and interesting ways. It is more critical, to be certain, but perhaps also somewhat more intimate. When you know that your own name will be attached to the work you are reviewing, in however tenuous a way, it forms a different sort of bond. And setting your thoughts down on a book forces you to not only think about what you are reading, but to have an opinion that goes beyond the merely superficial. Overall, I’d say the act of reviewing is good for readers, and that the books I’ve reviewed feel a bit more ‘mine’ afterward.

And New Stuff

One of the big changes to my reading habits since I’ve started reviewing has been the inclusion of more new fiction in my diet. It was generally pretty rare for me to read much in the way of ‘new stuff,’ and practically inconceivable that I’d read something from an author I had never heard of the year it came out. Both of the reviews on this site of books published in 2008 were exactly that, new books from authors I had never heard of. One of them, The Martian General’s Daughter, turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Though I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to review the absolute cutting edge of fiction, I have tried to read more of the new books that I’ve accumulated in an effort to at least remain partially up-to-date. When I look at all the books I’ve reviewed that were published in the last five years, or since the year 2000, the percentage of new to old starts to look more like the fifty-fifty split I was originally aiming for. 20th Century Ghosts, Old Man’s War, The Etched City, Pirate Freedom, The First Law Trilogy, The Annals of the Western Shore, Whitechapel Gods, The Empire of Ice Cream, Dusk, Pirate Freedom, and Altered Carbon were all books that, typically, would have stood a fairly good chance of sitting on my shelves for a few more years until I got around to them.

While my goal has never been to grab the newest fiction and evaluate it as ‘news,’ the choice I’ve made to focus on some of these newer books and get more in touch with contemporary genre publishing has been well worth it.

Singles vs Series

And what I might have been reading rather than those books is one or more big series, which brings up another change in a reviewer’s reading habits. Overwhelmingly, it seems to me, it is the stand alone novel that makes the most sense for review. There is a law of diminishing returns at work in the series — not only from a sales perspective in which each subsequent volume sells less than the previous one, but also, I think, in the ability of the reviewers to truly say anything new.  Much of what can be said about the first book in a series can be said for all of them and, while many people may be interested in a review of the first book, it is mostly only readers of the series that will care to read reviews of subsequent volumes, and then primarily as a curiosity, as most serious readers who get ‘locked in’ to a series aren’t going to pass up subsequent volumes based on an online review.

I decided early on after my review of On Basilisk Station that I wasn’t going to cover series at the expense of presenting a variety of authors and books on this site — so, while I’ve read five more Honor Harrington books since then and grown even more impressed with David Weber’s saga, I don’t think it makes sense for me to review every one — though a review essay or the like might be a fun project. Newer series are something of an exception, such as Abercrombie’s First Law and Robert Low’s Oathsworn, as they have topicality on their side, but should I turn to some of the bigger, open-ended series such as The Malazan Book of the Fallen and A Song of Ice and Fire in future, I suspect I’ll approach them the same way as I did the Honor Harrington books and review the first book only. Still, my approach here will have more to do with mood than any overarching plan, so don’t hold me to it.

The Best of 2008

There are several ‘bests’ in my reviewing experiences of 2008. There are the books I like the best, but also the one’s that surprised me the most. There are also some reviews that stand above the others in terms of style, perspicacity, and insight.

Best Reviews

I think some of my reviews really kick ass. Not all of them mind you, but some of them stand out for me as the sorts of reviews I wish I wrote every time I tried. Whether it’s due to the book itself or some other external factor I can’t say, and I’m really never sure why some reviews turn out to be a cut above the rest. It does seem, however, that more than a few of these reviews share a kind of looseness and  willingness to play around with language that might indicate I was feeling utterly comfortable with the material. Here then are the five reviews of mine that I think represent my best reviewing in 2008:

• A Clockwork Orange
• Dying Inside
• Imaro & Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush
• On Writing
• We

Best Moment

When I picked up Charles Saunders’s Imaro back in April I did so because I thought I could get a short, undemanding read that would let me knock out my second review quickly and painlessly. I never suspected I was about to encounter one of the finest sword & sorcery tales since the days of Fritz Leiber. Saunders work is everything heroic fantasy should aspire to be, combining pulp sensibilities and pacing with beautiful prose and real human insight. Add the original premise of an African-inspired fantasy world executed with confident authenticity, and you’ve got an absolute must-read series for fans of adventure fantasy.

I think perhaps the reason my Imaro review turned out to be one of my best was that I was so passionate about this material. Not only was it not getting the recognition it deserved but, at the time of my writing, the series had been twice dropped by a publisher. So my joy at discovering this fantastic work was alloyed with my despair and anger at its cancellation.

But within a week Charles Saunders stopped by this site and made the announcement that Imaro wasn’t dead, that it would continue through a new publisher called Sword and Soul Media. Pretty soon thereafter Sword and Soul released Saunder’s excellent Dossouye, which I was lucky enough to review for the Black Gate website. Other authors have dropped me a line or linked to one of my reviews and it’s always a nice feeling, but Charles Saunders’s note of hope has to be the best moment for me as a reviewer this year.

Best New Books

There are a lot of excellent books that I can’t in good conscience call the best I’ve read in 2008. A Clockwork Orange is one of the best books I’ve read, ever, but it isn’t new to me — it isn’t ‘new’ period — so singling it or any other classic book out for a mention doesn’t make sense. Better to focus on new books, or ‘newish’ books, that are both less than a decade old and previously unread by me. So, my picks for the best new books I read this year are:

• 20th Century Ghosts
• The Empire of Ice Cream
• The Etched City
• The Martian General’s Daughter
• The Whale Road

The first two are fantastic collections containing some of the best examples of the modern short story I’ve read, the next two are amazing and inventive novels from authors I had never read before, and the last is the start of a viking adventure saga told with utter confidence and command of period details.

Honorable Mentions: Two fantasy series that I highly recommend are Joe Abercromie’s cynical, brutal, and unexpected First Law Trilogy, and Ursula Le Guin’s richly human meditations on maturation and society The Annals of the Western Shore. Gene Wolfe’s accessible Pirate Freedom is a page-turning adventure from the master of unreliable narration. And Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk reboot Altered Carbon is a noir mystery that treats its new technologies as integral components of a roller coaster plot, rather than mere window dressing.

A Look Ahead

This year I will have more reviews at other venues, mostly concentrated at Black Gate. Whether that will force a slow down of reviews on this site I cannot say, but I would like to stick to the book-a-week schedule for at least a year. Maybe I’ll even shoot for one hundred on-site reviews — but I make no promises.

Forthcoming reviews include the third volumes in both of those honorable mention series above, The First Law and The Annals of the Western Shore — and I’m happy to report both series finished on a strong note (assuming the Le Guin is finished?). I’ll also have a classic from Richard Matheson, more short fiction from Jeffrey Ford, a writing book or two, a weird western from Joe R. Lansdale, some classic science fiction, a hot new fantasy, an expanded interest in film and television reviews — in other words, plenty to keep us all interested.

With the holidays bearing down upon us like a suped-up Epcot monorail piloted by a goose-hungry Tiny Tim, as well as my ever-increasing array of other commitments (including other reviews!), I’ve decided to take a break from regular reviews until next year. That’s only three weeks away, so don’t despair, and don’t feel as if you have to start an online petition or a grassroots Save Bill Ward’s Reviews campaign — although if you’d like to do those things let me know and I’ll send you a press kit and we’ll see if we can’t milk it for all its worth.

Anyway, I will be posting a Best of the Year retrospective in a week or so on the books I have reviewed this year, so now seems like a good time to stop and  go back over what I’ve read and take stock. Plus, I think my reviewer batteries need a recharge anyway.

So, regular weekend reviews will resume in January — until then I’m going to go read something I don’t have to take notes on!

Oh no, here it comes, the inevitable urge to clack away at one’s website, adding incrementally to its once lean frame until it’s bloated text-carcass grows to resemble something the size and shape of a Tatooine crime lord. I’m feeling an undeniable need to add ‘content,’ no matter how vacuous or self-serving. To — dare I say it — blog. I thought I was stronger than that, or could at least pretend to be, but the supposed benefits of blogging are just too much to overlook. Think of the attention you’ll get, the little e-devil on my shoulder says, think of the legions of readers who will flock to your quirky, yet nicely-rendered little opinion pieces, he lies in my ear. You gotta have content, he says, this is web 2.0 man, quit playing with your transistor radio and betamax and get with the program.

So starting next week, and roughly every week thereafter, I’ll be putting a book review up on this very site. Not a critique, nothing learned or profound, but an hors d’oeuvre, something designed to whet your appetite and get you interested in a book I like. That means no bad reviews, no scathing torrents of excoriating prose with the purpose of feathering this young turk’s hat. Oh no, I don’t finish reading bad books, and I can’t imagine wasting time writing about them. So it’ll be a big love fest around here every week, something like a virtual Woodstock with the smell of patchouli and unwashed twenty-somethings replaced by the musk and moulder of second-hand books, or the sweet inky rush of a brand new printing.

Plus, my little e-devil tells me, this will be the perfect excuse to procrastinate instead of doing real writing.