November 20, 2010

I Reviewer I Am… Not.

Lately, I’ve been reading this book of poetry theory, and taking pictures of some pictures of bits I like for twitter, since that’s totally faster than transcribing them and much less hassle. I got through it, and then it was time to write a review. I did that today, and it went well! I was pretty pleased with it. Which just reminded me how much I hate most of the reviews I write for the press. I’m not a good reviewer.

Granted, I “review” shit on here all the time, and I’m never unhappy with those. (Well, okay, when I find a typo awhile later, when I’m trying to refer to the review, then I’m kind of unhappy. Heh.) There’s something inherently different about that, though. These reviews are inherently biased. They’re completely from my personal point of view. Sometimes I might point out this or that about a game which I think appeals to people who are not me, but that’s about the extent of it. If you’re reading my personal blog, for some silly reason, you inherently want to know what I, personally, think. If you want a pure review of quality, you can get that elsewhere. Here, you get the me perspective. That I can do, no problem.

However, the readers of Big Muddy don’t give a shit who I am. If they’re reading the reviews in the back, they ARE wanting that objective evaluation of quality, or at least something to give them a good idea of the content of the book. I am so terrible at this. I do have some reasons for it, though.
Part of the problem is that I am horribly under-read. I don’t read as much of these sorts of books as part of me feels I should, since I have so many important vidjeogamez to get to. As such, I can easily tell if, say, a book of poetry adheres to my personal standards of what a good book of poetry should be, but I honestly don’t have a totally great idea what the, you know, standard, middle of the road poetry manuscript looks like to be able to objectively rate something like that.
The other part is that I just can’t seem to figure out what to talk about. I want to give enough information to, you know, inform, but I also don’t want to tell the entire plot summary of the book, except for when that’s appropriate because it’s non-fiction. I also don’t have the crutch of mechanics to lean on, like I do when talking about a game. I mean, if it’s a book of poetry, I can talk about the poet’s style a bit, I suppose, but if it’s not very experimental, there’s not a lot to say there.

I get my assignments in the press done, and I write the reviews. I just always feel like there’s something wrong with them. I don’t have the non-subjective reviewer gene. I guess it comes from all my whatever about believing in a subjective sort of reality, etc. Maybe. Or maybe I just suck at it. That’s fine. I can write many other things. Like silly blog posts about how I can’t write certain things. Yeah.

Why don’t you process a whole blog post dedicated to redacting mistakes made? Like NPR does sometimes.

Comment by Kale — November 21, 2010 @ 12:01 am

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