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...