Essay rec: the components of reader response to a book

Janet at the romance blog Dear Author has posted an excellent essay discussing the three main strands that go into a reader’s reactions to a book (correctness, style and taste), noting that only one of these is objective, and considering how that can lead to misunderstandings in online discussions.

The subject is something I’ve often seen discussed in fanfic circles, which has a whole critical vocabulary to indicate stories/books which have a high score on one aspect but a low score on another. But this is one of the best single-post discussions of the subject that I can remember seeing, and while it’s written from a romance reader’s perspective, it does not rely on prior knowledge of any particular fiction genre or fandom in-group knowledge. The comment thread has some good discussion as well. If you’re interested in meta, you may well find this an interesting read regardless of your preferred genre.

Meta: on writing reviews

This rant has been brewing for over a month, but was finally triggered when I went over to Amazon earlier this week to look at reviews for an html reference book. So when I went back to writing prose rather than html yesterday, the word count was 1700 words of rant instead of shapeshifter smut.

On writing reviews…

We’ve all seen them on Amazon. The one line reviews that say “This book sucked!” or “This book is great!”. They’re not very helpful, and one of the reasons they’re not very helpful is that they don’t tell you _why_ the book sucked or was great. You have no way of knowing whether that person’s tastes match yours, and hence whether you can trust their opinion to reflect what you’d think of the book.