Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I never metadiscourse I didn't like

4/29/08 10:32 am - reviewing books by teenagers

Sometimes I really hate reviewing books by teenagers, and it seems to be happening more and more often these days. ( Not because they're bad, but because it's hard, and I am crazy. )

Tags: children's literature, reviewing

3/5/08 06:40 pm - different markets, different audiences, and recreational reading

After having been fairly publicly snippy in Roger Sutton's blog, I feel a need to explain myself. For one thing, Roger Sutton is a big macha in children's literature and I... well, I'm not. To a certain extent, you could even call him my boss; at least, the book I just put down to write this post was sent to me courtesy of Horn Book Guide, who will pay me to read and review it. Moreover, Roger is a very intelligent man for whom I have a lot of respect, and it feels weird to have people sending me e-mail saying "thank you for what you said to Roger!" And finally, I don't want to come off, as Elissa said, as a Trekkie angry at SNL Shatner's "get a life". I think Roger raised a lot of points, some good and some less so, and I do want to address them.

( Audiences for reviews )

( Remembering the implied audience )

( Because children's books are better: sentimental blathering or trufax? )

( Am I missing something in the world? )

Tags: children's literature, personal, reviewing

11/2/05 09:31 am - book review musings

If I always had this many books on my plate to review, I could support myself doing this. Not very well, I admit.

I've been thinking about what I've liked reviewing for different journals (and disliked). I think in many ways it reflects what I like and dislike about the reviews themselves, and their purposes.

( I ramble on about reviewing )

I have more thoughts, but I'll come to them later. I think I'd like to ramble at some point about terrible nonfiction design. Here's the entire rant in two bullet points: 1. Designing your book to be laid out like an (ugly) web page will not make your book more hip, it will make it unreadable; readability on a 6 x 8 piece of paper is an entirely different beast that on a computer screen with working hyperlinks. 2. Providing web sites in your "further resources" section is a great idea, but you also need to provide references to other materials, and if your footnotes primarily reference non authoritative web sites, then you've identified yourself as a lazy hack.

Tags: children's literature, reviewing