Another Book Review Blog?
The name of this blog should give some indication of the purpose I intend to use this space for. It’s not necessarily a place to promote books, just to share some insights and – hopefully – encourage you to read something outside of your comfort zone. The content was originally intended to be over in my main blog, but I couldn’t reconcile the nature of my ramblings with a more pointed and thoughtful exploration of ignored books.
You may never get around to reading all of the titles which will be reviewed here, and I fully expect that the undeserved obscurity of some books will continue. It matters not a jot, because as long as someone is reading the authors I have chosen, the labour of writing them will not have been in vain.
Somewhere between thinking about doing the odd review and actually writing the reviews, I found that I am – no kidding – completely out of my normal writing experience. There’s a certain uneasy tension in picking up the work of another writer and consciously making the decision to explain what they did and didn’t get right. It has to be pointed out, right here, before you go any further, that I don’t view myself as an authority on good books.
Most of my collection is pointedly bad books as far as your average lit-crit would consider. The hokey, sack of fun that keeps on wriggling. The pulpy, hack-work that journals and broadsheets look down on from their not-so-vaulted halls. I don’t care about labels. I care about writing…
-Gary James
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