Reviews FAQ

1998-2004, Christian Sauvé

1. Look, I only have the time to read one answer: What do you want me to know about your reviews?

This site contains over five megabytes of reviews dating back to 1996. Some of them are raves and some are not. Some of them are well-written and most are not. Nearly all were written for pure personal enjoyment. I buy nearly all of the books I review and I don't accept review copies from authors or publishers. I occasionally slip and spoil stuff, especially when I don't like something. I don't claim to be an authority in any domain, so take all comments with a grain of salt. Enjoy.

2. Why write those reviews?

A few reasons, in no particular order:

Practice, because churning out a steady stream of reviews every single month forces me to sit down and write, which is pretty much Obligation Number One for any wannabe writer. Even when other writings projects get shuffled to the wayside when I have other things to do, the reviews keep coming in. Eventually.
Personal Enjoyment: What can I say? I like being an obnoxious know-it-all. I like to take a few minutes to reflect on a book and tell it like I think it is. I like to provide material for hundreds of high-school plagiarists around the world. This is something I still enjoy, so why not?
While you may think that these reviews are written for you, the truth is that they're mostly written for me. Over the years, I have found that an on-line archive of past reviews is very handy: I can make references to it, refresh my memory, download them to my PDA, check out when I read a specific work, etc.

3. How many books do you read per month?

I read a lot, and I can back up this affirmation with some cold numbers. Consider:

I read around 200-250 books a year. (It comes up at one book every 39 hours or so.)
I read at a rate of over 100 pages an hour. Do the math.
As of this writing (December 2005), my personal library hold in excess of 3,000 books. More than 300 books currently sit in my "to be read" bookcase. My "extra copies to give away" stack alone contains over twenty books.

4. How did it all begin?

It all began in January 1996, by way of an e-mail. I had posted a few short informal reviews of French-language Science Fiction books on a mailing list I belonged to. These reviews were read by Joël Champetier, the then-editor of Solaris, the leading French-Canadian SF&F genre periodical.

Would I be willing, Champetier asked in the said e-mail, to review a book for Solaris?

Would I? Gee: At the time, I had been a Solaris subscriber for a few years and held it in exceedingly high esteem. Think of an American SF fan being asked to review something in Asimov's or Locus.

I said "Yes!" immediately, then began to panic: Other than those short informal reviews, I had no experience whatsoever in the fine art of criticism.

Instead of curling up in a ball, I did the next best thing and embarked in a crash program of book reviews apprenticeship. By the end of 1996, dozens of "practice" reviews later, I was hooked. When you're having this much fun, it's hard to stop... and so I didn't.

(Oh; my review was eventually published in Solaris, though my apprenticeship didn't pay off in time for this particular review: It's so ineptly written than I can scarcely even glance at it today. Blame it on beginner's jitters. Fortunately, further reviews for Solaris came to be much better.)

[Ironic side-note: I am, since December 1999, Solaris's webmaster. Among other things, this allows me to pick books for reviewing. Life's funny that way.]

5. Have you changed the format of the reviews since 1996?

There have been two significant changes since 1996.

In April 1997, I started jotting down capsule reviews about every movie I saw. I'm still more of a reader than a viewer, but movies have a bigger audience than books and end up being easier to write about. I don't consider myself a serious or in-depth film reviewer, but if those can profide a barometer of my preferences to put the book reviews in context, hurrah!

Less significantly, I switched from a "post whenever I've got ten reviews" to a "post monthly reviews" format in 1998, more recently (2003) settling on a quota of eight book reviews per month.

I briefly flirted with the idea of additional capsule book reviews in 1998 for those "less interesting" books, but ultimately didn't carry the experiment beyond late 1998. More recently, I have also tried to avoid comparative book reviews, focusing on a one-book-per-review format instead.

6. Do you review everything you read?

No! Are you kidding? I review, on average, one out of every two or three books I read, depending on my interest in the book. It's easy to praise or condemn, but it's much harder to find something significant to say about an average book. If a book is not interesting to read, chances are that it's not interesting enough to write about. "Bonus points" toward consideration for reviews are given to authors I have already written about, very recent books or books that illustrate any particular theory of mine.

7. Do you get your books from publishers? Can I send you something for review?

No. The vast majority of the books I read are bought with my own money, usually at used book sales. (Which may serve to explain the ecclectic nature of my reading.)

I have accepted a number of review copies in the past and found out that even if I enjoyed the books, I did not enjoy the experience of reviewing it "on demand". Since then, I have refused all review copies. Harsh, but fair to everyone.

In short; no, I will not review your book. Sorry, and it's nothing personal. My stack of books to read already fills an entire extra-large bookcase.

The same also goes for movie screeners and free tickets. I've done my time hunting for free movies, but these days I'd pather pay and complain at my leisure than dance on demand to someone else's tune.

8. What is your process for writing and publishing these reviews?

Generally, it goes like this:

Read the book. I seldom take notes (which explains the lack of specific quotations) and try to rely on the general impressions I get by the end of the book.
Write the first draft of the review. This step usually takes about thirty minutes. The length of the reviews (roughly 700 words) is dictated by the available space on a single sheet of "paper" set in Arial 11pts. Hey, it works for me.
Let the review sit for a few days. I'm a notoriously baaad self-editor. Forgetting about the exact words usually helps in debugging. In most cases, reviews (regardless of when they were originally written) are left to sit until the end of the month, when I can afford the luxury of revising the monthly batch of reviews at once.
Read about the book and/or the author. Thanks to Amazon, Google and the reast of the web, it's easy to get a "reality check" about any book. While these extra opinions seldom affect the main thrust of a review, they can occasionally suggest elements I have forgotten to write about ("Oh, yeah, the beginning was a little slow") or offer reasonable counterpoints to some of my objections. I have found that reading on the authors can also help contextualize some of the reviews, and often inject further interest in the review. (Usually, alas, when the author died since then)
Do my best to edit and correct the reviews. As stated previously, I'm really, honestly quite bad at self-editing, which serves to explain the tons of typos on this web site. I often re-read my stuff months or years later and still catch embarassing errors. Oh, the humiliation.
Convert the reviews to HTML. Working from OpenOffice/DreamWeaver, this is actually a pleasant step.
Post on the web. Self explanatory...

9. Your reviews don't spend enough time telling us what the book/movie is about! Why don't you spend more time telling us about the plot?

I will not endlessly summarize the plot. There are several reasons for this:

Reviewers who spend most (or even half) of their verbiage explaining what happens in a story are not reviewing and certainly not criticizing . This isn't high-school book reporting any more. We're all equally capable of reading cover blurbs.
Amazon.com, among many other fine outlets, is there to provide on-line cover blurbs. In this information age, it's not exactly difficult to find out those things.
I hate it when a story is spoiled for me: I'll usually say as few things as possible unless I really hated it. (More about this in a moment)
The heart of a review is opinion, and it's almost a mission for the reviewer pass judgement (and subsequent explanation) as soon as possible. The result might be a collection of opinions without any clear description of what the book is about; I'm willing to risk it.
Finally, I'm not naïve enough to believe that my reviews are the only commentary ever written on the subject, nor even the first thing that visitors here will read about a particular book/movie.

10. Eek! You spoiled [book or movie X]! Why?

I tend to be very coy about a story's conclusion except in the following situations:

If it's a bad conclusion and it causes me to think less of a book/movie, I have to explain why. If something concludes badly, wouldn't you like to know before investing time in it?
If I really, really, really hate something, all good intentions are off: If you see me sharpening critical knives and you fear a spoiler, stop reading. I'm liable to spoil the damn thing just to prevent you from reading it.
If the book is part of a series, I will assume that you've read the previous volumes and that they're fair game for spoilers. Sorry.

11. Are you a reviewer or a critic?

(Implicit in this question is the sub-question "what's the difference between a reviewer and a critic", which I hold to be this: A reviewer is primarily a consumer's advocate: Is this worth reading/watching or not? Why so? Who's the best audience for the work?

Whereas a critic goes deeper and thinks harder: What is the significance of the work in contemporary/today's society? What place does the book occupy in the creator's work?

A reviewer may say "Good, 8/10" while a critic would write "Interesting, relevant and a welcome change of pace from this author".

There is also a third, fuzzier category, that of essayist, which tends to focus on the work vis-à-vis the reader... but let's not go there.)

A little bit of both, but I usually reject the label of "critic". Despite using the word here and there in this essay as synonym for "reviewer", I think of myself as an opinionated reader first and foremost. I love to discuss books, but do so from the perspective of someone for whom reading is fun and fun is reading. I seek excitement over enlightenment. "Fine literature" usually bores me. I will read Clancy well before Dostoevsky. I make not attempt at academic relevance or even fine prose. I believe that authorial psychosexual profiles are best handled by trained psychiatrists. Call me a critic and you will have a duel on your hands; armed keyboards at five keystrokes a second.

12. What, as a reader, annoys you the most?

To bore is a sin. I pay my money, I invest my time; I'd better be entertained. A bad book can be entertaining, and most great books are entertaining. But to be boring, to fail to arouse interest, is the worst sin an author can perpetrate.

My personal mission is to expose all those faux-auteurs, those pseudo-entertainers, those money-grubbing morons who produce pages of lifeless prose, dead characters, tired ideas and obvious plotting. I vow to wage war on the authors of unworthy books. Do not be surprised if I end up being partial to bad stories on account of inventive concepts or simple fun. Be even less surprised if I end up trashing acclaimed works of fine prose whose enjoyment value is perilously close to zero.

13. Where do you come from, ideologically speaking? What are your biaises?

In a nutshell, I'm a rational French-Canadian techno-nerd with a scientific education.

Every reviewers have biases. Here are some of mine: I come from a staunchly francophone family that's been on North-American soil since the 17^th century, and in Canada from the beginning. I have a Computer Sciences B.Sc. One of my favorite magazines is the "Skeptical Enquirer". I'm still young and still optimistic and still believe that humans are basically decent. Conservatives would call me a liberal. Let the flames begin.

14. What's next for these reviews?

From time to time, I get annoyed at the fact that all reviews are in a flat-file format, that they're not hyperlinked together, that you can't search them very well and that I don't have a bunch of links to author's sites and such.

Converting the whole thing to a database-driven format may not be very difficult to do from a technical standpoint, but maintaining the whole thing afterward is likely to be more time-consuming than what I'm willing to spend at the moment.

Still, you never know. Maybe, some day, you'll see files with .php extensions.

In the meantime, you can rely on a monthly batch of reviews. Hey, that's what you're looking for anyway, right?