August 30, 2010

Negative reviews

I was prompted to write about negative reviews by this post on Publishers Weekly on The Value of Negative Reviews. The PW post was in turn inspired by a blog post by Sarah Rees Brennan and comments on that blog post about the value of positive vs negative reviews.

Someone said that they didn’t read all positive review sites which is interesting to me because I have done my most reviwing for Armadillo which had a policy of not publishing reviews that panned a book. By and large that rule has held true for me in reviewing. On my blog and in trade magazines you won’t find me reviewing a book negatively. I have in the past reviewed books negatively: in my brief stint as a Guardian teenage reviewer and in online reviews for a BBS I ran for recommended reading. Nowadays I feel uncomfortable about putting bad reviews in the public eye.

I may privately wax lyrical with my friends about hated books. Sometimes I need to vent about a book and my friends get the outpouring of bile about a title I haven’t enjoyed. Like Sarah “I can act out, scene by hateful scene, some of these books.” Our book group has a good balance of liked to hated books and we’ve had several books which we’ve spent a pleasant evening tearing apart. When I review publically, I review books I like.

Even when I complain about an element of a book this is within the context of me contining to read the books. Sometimes I forget to take this into account when criticising long standing series writers. As a collector of writers I can get disappointed with someone’s current strand of writing, like their work generally but not specifically. It can be hard in the fervour of hate for a book to remember that you were gripped while reading it and enjoyed a great deal of it.

I’m suddenly inspired to give negative reviews and to explain the ‘why’ of the negative for books I own and intend to keep. For example:

  • I buy all Steven Brust’s Dragaera books but not in hardback anymore. I love the world and the character and I want Brust to finish the 23? book sequence but I feel they’ve bogged down now and lack the playful stylish inventiveness of the earlier books in the series
  • Did Lois McMaster Bujold hit the ultimate Vorkosigan novel in Memory? Can any book in that series top that masterful work? I end up being disappointed in the novels since that one just because I enjoy them so much and I want so much of them. Is this fair criticism? (The fear of every artist has got to be that you have already completed your best work eg Michael Jackson and Thriller)
  • Diana Wynne Jones will always be on my top ten, Margaret Mahy likewise. But it’s been a while since either of them wrote fiction that influenced me as much as their earlier work. Is that because I’m no longer a teenager?
  • Spider Robinson seems to have turned into Robert Heinlein. The evolution of Callaghans Bar has moved the conceit so far away from the things I liked about it – and yet I continue to buy the series. I like the character development but I hate who the characters have developed into.
  • John Scalzi is experimenting with different POVs in pre-existing story/universe, I want him to get on and write new work. Tie-in novels are not as good as original ones they’re merchandising, not fiction. Yes, I know this is harsh.
  • I adore Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutian series and Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish series. I resent it when they write other books. Yes, I know this isn’t fair.
  • David Weber, Peter F Hamilton and George R R Martin and other authors create these huge worlds and universes with so many interlinked plotlines and character proliferation and I wonder if those series will ever be completed, like Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time. I wish they’d write shorter 3, 5 or even 10 book series which stand a chance of being completed. Oh, and PS: if you’re going to have over-titles and individual titles please keep them consistent: Book 1, Book 2 and Book3a and Book3b is aan unhelpful way to title books of the same length.

Yes, I feel negatively about books. These are my kinder criticisms. But we criticise because we care – I think that’s something to remember.

June 2, 2010

My favourite authors: Diana Wynne Jones

Filed under: bloggery,growing up,my favourite authors,recommended reading — Tags: , — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 4:08 pm

Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. – Diana Wynne Jones

I’ve been reading about Diana Wynne Jones on her official website, prompted by the sad news in Ansible that her oncologist fears she “has ‘months rather than years’”. I have loved Diana’s work for years. I still vividly remember reading Howl’s Moving Castle at age ten and laughing myself silly but even that wasn’t the first DWJ book I’d read. I’d found Witch Week a couple of years earlier but hadn’t made the connection. From age eleven I was following her work compulsively. My mother and I both loved Fire and Hemlock but I was particular found of her more sf titles: A Tale of Time City and The Homeward Bounders. I’ve recently been re-reading my collection of her books for the umpteenth time and noticed that the more I read it the better I like The Time of the Ghost and how clear it is to me as an adult and a writer myself how much of her own childhood experience she puts into her work.

There are so many of her books I love. For sheer hilarity and imagination I don’t think books come much better than Archer’s Goon. I think overall I prefer the novels where she uses her own vast store of creativity to imagine beings who are mysteriously magical to the ones in which she draws on mythic themes and resonances. (Eight Days of Luke employed the norse gods, Hexwood an assortment of mythic figures and Fire and Hemlock and  Enchanted Glass the seelie court.) I do appreciate a good mythic reimagining but Diana can create powerful characters and strong ideas of her own without relying on borrowed power.  In her Chrestomanci series she created a central character, a surrounding world and an expansive multiverse which is iconic in the fantasy genre and has doubtless influenced a number of other YA writers.

My own writing has definitely been influenced by Diana’s work. The relationships and dysfunctions of families is a strong theme in her work and has become so in mine. I’ve also endeavoured to emulate her smooth transitions between the magical and the mundane: in settings, plotting and the way my characters think.

Having read Diana’s words quoted above about her attempts to write the ideal book – the one she wanted as a child – I feel a strong empathy with that impulse. I also have not yet written my ideal book although I feel that I am getting closer to it. But my conception of what the ideal book is comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s work. She and Margaret Mahy have set the standard I aspire to and drawn the map of of the fictional landscape I inhabit.

I have never met Diana but I feel as though I know her through how much of herself she has given to her readers. My thoughts are with her and her family in this difficult time and I hope very much that she will surprise the medical profession. With all that she has given us, she still has more to give. Meanwhile I’m returning to reread the rest of my collection and to fill in the astounding gap. I think there are two whole novels of hers I inaccountably don’t possess.

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