31.8.06

Antrum

the enjoyment i gather from reading a review derives much from the insight the reviewer provides the would-be readers that comprise the reviewer's audience. yet all such reviews are written after the fact; they are retrospective, and as such, no matter how expressive the reviewer, the audience can never have a true inkling of what it would be like to read the book in question.

nothing wrong with that, really; in fact, it's the reviewer's prerogative to deny the audience such inklings, and the audience's lot to find out for themselves. only that now, with the internet and blogging and all, i thought it might be interesting to see what could be done with a closer-to-real-time review; still retrospective, of course, but supplied in fragments, as bits of the book are read.

also, because on-line journals are supposed to be commentaries on your life, and i do lead an other life in books, i thought it unfair to that life that i should blog about one and not the other.

(of course, all that's just pretentious pap. i'm only doing this because it's my idea of fun. and because, thanks to blogger, i can.)

i take my inspiration from Duncan Shriek's commentary to his sister Janice's afterword to the Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris (i.e., Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword).

and so, it is only fitting that we start there...

3 comments:

banzai cat said...

Just a deluge of comments. ;-)

Am nitpicking here but shouldn't that be "On Another Life"? However, you've got a wonderful point there about interjecting review comments while reading. It's something I've also picked up while reading a book but for the life of me, I can't remember 'em when I do the said reviews.

More fool me!

skinnyblackcladdink said...

it could be 'another' rather than 'an Other' but it shouldn't have to be...

more to the point, it depends on your subject. it's like hyphenating words. is 'interjecting-review comments' the same as 'interjecting review-comments'? does 'more-fool me' mean the same thing as 'more fool-me'?

discuss. or not.

banzai cat said...

Ooh, that would be cool. The 'Other'. This is your 'Other' blog. This is your 'Other' life. So ominous.

Are you sure you're not growing mushrooms on your head already?

:-D