Posts Tagged ‘Salon’
Book review cliches
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
We love to hate them but can we do without them? I’m talking about the book review cliché – all those sprawling, epic, haunting yet unflinching and powerful expressions book reviewers employ to portray the core meanings of an author’s tome…
On The Book Show we speak to Michelle Kerns from the Book Examiner about her campaign to rid the world of bookreviewspeak. She’s created a book review cliché bingo game which is fun to play, especially with the weekend papers and any other literary mags in hand. Michelle is also hunting through prominent sites and publications for the best of the worst offenders. You can see her results for April here.
She began this quest because she suddenly realised her own work sounded very like the book jacket blurb. Michelle has also created a book review template, based on champion reviewer and author John Updike’s 6 Rules of Book Reviews in his Picked-Up Pieces (1975), but she admits it’s difficult. ‘I ended up unable to write anything because I felt suffocated under the burden of my own high-minded expectations.’ (more…)
