These are fantastic tips. Those books that I can find meaning in tend to be the ones that are favored, though I love a book for pure entertainment. But naturally, I love to look into books more. Looking into an author's history has always been a layer deeper to me that I love to explore and use as a way to interpret a text. Much in the same way that I enjoy reading trivia about the making of movies, it just adds more context & fun!
I love all five of these tips. Thank you. Here's another one that works for me. If I already know (or strongly suspect) that a work is great literature, I take note of things that strike me as obvious mistakes or failures by the author. Great works don't often have really obvious mistakes, so, if I think I've found one, I'm probably misunderstanding what the book is trying to do. By looking at it in a different way, how might I turn that apparent failure into a brilliant success? Sometimes the author really did screw up, but usually not. And novels that I thought I hated sometimes turn out to be new favorites. Right now I'm struggling with The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Wish me luck.
Thank you for this. I need to read this every time I’m unsure about making a big statement about a book. I just did a Instagram review of Julia Alvarez’s new book and had to convince myself it was ok to say it had borderline satire elements, and elements of metafiction and autofiction. (I don’t know if I’m right in the public eye, but my personal eye gleaned this from my reading experience!)
This is such a perfect flowchart-of-sorts for a thought process I really need when a books starts to get either confusing or boring. Maybe the book really isn’t great but this will help me figure it out more!! Love this
I love this newsletter. Thank you! In general, I tend to write books very high if I can get emotionally involved with the characters in the book. If the book has flat characters, they get lower ratings from me. I also can tell from the annotation of a book whether or not it is going to try to Force a social issue on me that I’m not interested in reading about. It is not that I’m not open minded, rather I do not want to be preached to in a book and I will steer away from Books that I think are going to do that.
These are fantastic tips. Those books that I can find meaning in tend to be the ones that are favored, though I love a book for pure entertainment. But naturally, I love to look into books more. Looking into an author's history has always been a layer deeper to me that I love to explore and use as a way to interpret a text. Much in the same way that I enjoy reading trivia about the making of movies, it just adds more context & fun!
Thank you for trying to get folks to a deeper reading level that could enhance their reading experiences. Keep it up!
I love all five of these tips. Thank you. Here's another one that works for me. If I already know (or strongly suspect) that a work is great literature, I take note of things that strike me as obvious mistakes or failures by the author. Great works don't often have really obvious mistakes, so, if I think I've found one, I'm probably misunderstanding what the book is trying to do. By looking at it in a different way, how might I turn that apparent failure into a brilliant success? Sometimes the author really did screw up, but usually not. And novels that I thought I hated sometimes turn out to be new favorites. Right now I'm struggling with The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Wish me luck.
Thank you for this. I need to read this every time I’m unsure about making a big statement about a book. I just did a Instagram review of Julia Alvarez’s new book and had to convince myself it was ok to say it had borderline satire elements, and elements of metafiction and autofiction. (I don’t know if I’m right in the public eye, but my personal eye gleaned this from my reading experience!)
This is such a perfect flowchart-of-sorts for a thought process I really need when a books starts to get either confusing or boring. Maybe the book really isn’t great but this will help me figure it out more!! Love this
I love this newsletter. Thank you! In general, I tend to write books very high if I can get emotionally involved with the characters in the book. If the book has flat characters, they get lower ratings from me. I also can tell from the annotation of a book whether or not it is going to try to Force a social issue on me that I’m not interested in reading about. It is not that I’m not open minded, rather I do not want to be preached to in a book and I will steer away from Books that I think are going to do that.