What is a reader response?
A book review is traditionally a form of literary criticism, an evaluation of the content and merit of a work, written by a critic deemed capable of such an evaluation, and published in a magazine or newspaper. A book review is a worthy literary contribution, and while I can write them, I often prefer to write in a more yielding manner, describing my personal response to a work. Librarians use the term, “book talk”, a non-critical approach used to promote reading. A better term for what I do is “reader response”. The term comes from literary theory; it focuses on the reader’s experience as the event that completes a book. The reader response style fits better with blogging. With print media, reviews were written by authoritative literary figures; they were also relatively scarce. On the web, reviews are written by anyone; they are in abundance. More often than not, the most valuable thing I can add to the conversation about a book is my personal response, a fragment others can collect in forming their overall perception of a work.
My reviews have other patterns.
- I only review books I finished and liked. The absence of a review for a book I started is a silent critical judgement (and perhaps a kindness to the author). Some books I just read for pleasure and do not review.
- I summarize the book. Anything written in the first quarter of the book is fair game, no spoiler alerts required.
- I experiment with echoing the author’s writing style as a method of informing my reader without adding sentences to the review. It also teaches me a bit about writing.
- I include a quote or two to let the writer’s words speak for themselves.
- I pride myself on précis and pith, limiting the length of a review to about four paragraphs.
Does a shift from the traditional review represent another step on the road to hell for critical thinking? Is there any intellectual merit in a reader response? Each review I write requires an act of slow reading and contemplation about a writer’s ideas, a seed that later emerges into original, more complex thought. Intellectual merit? Yes, I say.
