About
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I was a publisher. Today, I still work as an editor and writer. Never shy, I have always believed that you should write honestly about yourself, what you read and, occasionally, what you see.
I am now joining the team of reviewers at the San Francisco and Sacramento Book Reviews
sanfranciscobookreview.com
sacramentobookreview.com
and have started what is intended to become a semi-regular column on trends in publishing and the book trade. Here is the first column:
I have also accepted other books for review purposes — as and when those reviews appear, they will be clearly marked.
As a quick word of explanation, the reviews written for more formal publication are limited in word count and cannot discuss any of the themes or ideas in any detail. I shall continue my more general and idiosyncratic reviews at length on this site. As always, I refuse to pull punches. If I was in a restaurant and was served a bad meal, I would swiftly make everyone aware of my unhappiness. Similarly, I will discuss anything I consider bad in the subject matter for review. But I refuse absolutely to award scores. This is too complicated a calculation for me. Although I could devise a marking scheme whereby I allocate so many marks for the prose or script, construction of the plot, the characterisation and its credibility, and so on, this is all highly subjective and potentially arbitrary. Hence, I will simply explain why I like or dislike any feature of the books, films, television or anime I review. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
If you want to talk about any aspect of this site, my e-mail address is dmar9114@yahoo.com.
When I wrote the crime fiction column for the Detroit Free Press, I had to give stars. I hated that, but they insisted, so I understand and agree with your complaint about scores.
If “scores” of any sort are to be given, I find myself in sympathy with the Metacritic approach of broader traffic light categories. Even more appropriate is their acceptance of the principle it’s possible to use the whole percentage range from 0 to 100. The idea that any grading system should start at, say, 50% skews the valuation system. At least the San Francisco/Sacramento star system goes from 0.5 to 5.