Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: As you are reading a book, do you take notes for your reviews, write your reviews as you read, or something totally different?
It depends on the book. For novels, I read the whole book straight through and then sit down to write the review. Sometimes I'll make a list of points that I want to get to in the review, but these are really too sketchy to even be considered notes and are more like bullet point reminders. I have tried taking notes as I read, but I have found that they just aren't that worthwhile as I haven't had time to digest the entire novel, so I would often end up with notes that raised questions or commented on aspects of the story that were resolved later, or simply didn't matter much to the overall novel. A novel needs to be digested and reviewed as a whole.
On the other hand, when I read a collection of short fiction, I will stop and review each individual work as I finish reading them. I have found that reviewing collections and anthologies this way is much easier than reading all of the short works in the volume and then going back and trying to remember which title is matched to which story when I am writing up a review. This method also seems to give my reviews an immediacy that would otherwise be missing, and I think that improves them by a fair amount.
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Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Greek Philosopher Carneades Died in 129 B.C.
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Very nice answer.
ReplyDeleteI read and write so I don't forget what I want to say. :)
Happy Hopping!!
Elizabeth
Silver's Reviews
My Blog Hop Answer
@Elizabeth: Sometimes forgetting a point I wanted to make actually works to my benefit, because if I said absolutely everything I wanted to about some books, my review would end up being ten thousand words long.
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