Self-promotion or self-demotion? An emotional observation.

I read quite a lot. I also try to review each book I read. Sometimes it’s a cursory mention of themes, settings and plot, just enough just to keep the memory alive. I find it helps, because with the help of these little clues I often find that some time after finishing a book I suddenly understand it better after re-reading the review and thereby appreciate more completely what it was trying to say. If, of course, the book had anything to say! 

Usually, my reviews of 500 to 1000 words, sometimes longer if I decide to include grab-quotes. I keep the reviews in a commonplace book that I started in August 1973, immediately after some of the most interesting years of my life when I was an undergraduate in London. These years are condemned to remain no more than memories, it seems, but the memories remain strong.

My reviews are rarely judgmental. I am not keen on star ratings, though some places where I share my reviews demand them. It seems to me the height of self-delusion to use a single, five-value scale to quantify eternal opinion on work that might be as diverse as a haiku or Ulysses. Equally facetious is the banal “I liked it” which, like all clichés, should be avoided like the plague.

What I try to do, sometimes, is to mimic the style of the book. This means that reviews of nineteenth century fiction are longer than those for books from the 20th century. The draft of a recent review of Middlemarch had so many subordinate clauses, asides and God‘s-eye-view observations that the first sentence reached 200 words. I remember it made the point I intended, but I ditched it.

So, with the decades of summary reviewing behind me, one would have thought that completing an author interview would be a trivial exercise. But no. I was just ten questions into the process when I realized I had spent over an hour at the task, and I had written very little indeed. The process suddenly took on an importance I had not envisaged developing when I started.

In the final analysis, the book that formed the basis of the interview, Eileen McHugh, a life remade, must speak for itself. The review is merely an aide memoire. The book must speak for itself. It will have to, because trying to express where it came from was a disturbingly cathartic experience which probably only skirted clarity. The interview is online at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/philipspires.