Looks like Infoquake is going thru a nice resurgence for you. I too picked it up and plan to read it on on my vacation next week with a review to follow. Hopefully my review will meet your definitions.

Have a good one!

Nate

(Morrow goes on to take this 4-part taxonomy and apply it to the kinds of trouble a writer can get into while trying to write a book. I won’t get into that here, but it’s brilliant. )

Your 10 points are like a recipe for making a good good review or a good bad review.

–d

I’m having a bit of a debate about myself at the moment. The way I read reviews is skip the boring analyse and get to the end to find out if they liked it or not. And they I might go back and find out a bit more but not too much more as I want reviews to be teasers, tasters, to entice me to read them but not actually tell me too much.

But then a review has to be more than a promo and dip into the strengths and weaknesses of the book but then how far to you take praise and criticism. Will it actually help someone pick up the book if they don’t really know what you are talking about? Then again do you loose credibility as a reviewer if you don’t try and get fast the surface and show off the blood and guts in the middle?

Then there is the whole scoring thing that goes back to making it easy for someone to judge if you liked it and by how much. It’s all relative though as I tend to always try and judge a book against itself rather than compare it to any others unless it’s a pale imitation of something and doesn’t stand on it’s own.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Infoquake and I’m glad to see Solaris pick it up in the UK. I’m going to see if I get a copy

Thanks for the food for thought.

Gav.

Having skimmed through the review and the controversy, I was all set to think Paul Kearney a thin-skinned twit for his remark… and then I read his follow-up comment saying “I regret my earlier comment, and please don’t think I’m a thin-skinned twit.” He makes some good points. If you’re just some guy writing off-the-cuff opinions, you can read and review any portion of the book you want. But if you bill yourself as a “book review site” or a “book review blog,” well, there is some obligation there to follow through. Except, of course, when you make a rare exception.

Honestly, I thought you were more than fair to the book, and had plenty of blurbworthy things to say about it. Your negative review actually made the book sound quite interesting to me, and I’m now inclined to go track down a copy.

And finally, like one of your commenters, I couldn’t finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell either. I put it down somewhere around page 32,523, when I realized that the author had yet to include a single description of spellcasting, despite the fact that her characters were doing it on almost every page.

I’m going to start up Infoquake next, and I’ll certainly keep a lot of these thoughts in mind when it comes time to review it, whether I enjoy the novel or not.

One thing I’m curious about is your opinion on a reviewer writing a review of a novel they couldn’t finish. I caused a bit of a stir with my review of Paul Kearney’s The Ten Thousand and then wrote about my experience HERE and would be curious to hear your thoughts.

~Aidan
A Dribble of Ink