Monday, July 11, 2011

Book Reviews

Reading has been one of my favorite passtimes since I was given a little book called Redwall by Brian Jacques for my 8th birthday. I used to spend around 2 hrs a day reading before I got sucked into college, and work, and found my love for writing. These days I don't have as much time for reading and I have to pick and choose the books that I read rather than grabbing anything and everything. I've overcome some of my lack of free time to read by listening to audiobooks at work, but I still don't get as much "reading" done that way as I used to because i read in my head MUCH faster than the actors reading the books aloud.

Anyway, I've found myself relying heavily on book reviews to choose the books that I read. There are, of course, certain writers and series that I follow, but when choosing new things I don't really have the time or patience anymore to just grab things off the shelf and go with them anymore.

So I thought I'd do something new with my website and free time. As I may have mentioned before I have some kinda severe ADD. It's extremely hard for me to concentrate on one thing for more than an hour or so at a time, and i usually flip between different projects frequently during any given sitting. At the moment I have a bit of a problem. I'm only working on one project, and having nothing else to work on that I can switch to when i get frustrated or bored is actually making my progress on that one project slower, believe it or not. I figured that if i'm not working on something else, I might as well start a section on my website for book reviews.

AS i rely on book reviews so much to pick out what I read, I figured I might as well start writing some of my own to break up the monotony of working on a single project. Starting next week I hope to review one book per week, and post the reviews on my site. I realize that I'm something of a nobody and my opinion doesn't really matter much to most people in the world, but it's more something for me to do when I can't focus on what I'm doing. It's just something fun for me to do, giving praise or critisism of other writers who have made it in the profession i hope to someday make my way into. Who knows, maybe someone, somewhere, googling, will think that my opinion actually matters.

So, i've been working on a format for how my reviews will go, and I've come up with something like this:

1.) Introduce the book and the author, and give any interesting details on the history of either if any.
2.) Give a spoiler free synopsis.
3.) Point out the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
4.) give any closing comments/thoughts and whether I would recomend it to read or not.

These will all be written reviews rather than video reviews as seems pretty popular on the internet these days because of one simple thing. I am not an actor, and I am not exactly the most articulate person on earth either. I will be working on making the new addition to my site as well as my first review and hope to have them up sometime next week. I'll post here when I do get them up and running.

What book will I review first? Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. Why? Because I think reviewing it will be a lot of fun, because it is both a very good, and a very bad book in the same package.

2 comments:

  1. Are you on www.goodreads.com? I find that a great place to share reviews.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm not on goodreads, in fact i've never heard of them. I'm just posting things on my own website.

    ReplyDelete