Frogs for Snakes

I don’t have a Facebook account — maybe. I did once and deleted it but I’ve been told that I’ve shown up since and I’m too lazy to check. And besides, Facebook scares me — but read this:

” … 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.”

This is from MSNBC Market Day, reporting on an AP-CNBC poll. The authors claim the poll reveals that users distrust Facebook but I think that gives too much leverage to the vehicle.  Most people like their friends and enjoy the opportunity to keep in touch with them provided by social networking, and other people like stalking and enjoy the opportunity provided by social networking. Others enjoy expressing their bitterness and hatred and social networking provides for that as well, but almost nobody enjoys advertising and few of us are in love with our tools. Facebook is popular mainly because it’s popular — that’s where our friends (or our targets) are, but I can’t imagine that many people like the application. It’s like Windows — it’s there and it works and I use it, but if something better comes along I’d drop it in a heartbeat, and I think most people feel the same way about Facebook.

I try to write a review of every book I read.  Some show up here, more at LibraryThing, and I’ve been concerned with the quality of my reviews but hadn’t found any credible instruction or guidance on writing them.

Today, though, I stumbled on John Updike’s ‘six rules’ on a 2011 post from Justin Taylor’s blog and it was just what I had been looking for. The six rules are:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.

Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like.

Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind.

Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers.

Review the book, not the reputation.

Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast.

Better to praise and share than blame and ban.

The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.