I am a book addict and the genre matters not as long as the prose sings to me. Vocationally I am also a Systems Engineer and avocationally a Book Reviewer. In the early days I felt like I had been skimming too much and not really getting much out of my reading. Then came Close Reading and Book Reviewing. And nothing was ever the same.
What it means to me to be a critic/reviewer? For a lot of readers, a “reviewer” or “critic” is an embittered failed novelist or worse, a barely restrained serial rapist. Book critics may take the form of a dilettante, theorist, essayist, or even historian, but almost never reviewers, who sometimes lack the distancing from the text required by the demands of academia synthesis.
One of the reasons I love writing book critique is because it allows me the pleasure of close reading. Invariably this leads to question: “Why do you think the writer did that?” The ‘that’ could be a technique, a literary device, a plot point or some clever thing (like the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare or the visual cues R.J. Ellory uses so masterfully).
Close reading is a wonderful technique to tell us how the writers use language for effect. It’s all about grabbing our attention. They just wrap it up in a nice little phrase that make us think before they answer the questions they always answer. What you’ll read in this volume are my several in-stantiations of this Close Reading applied to the books I read during 2014. What differentiates this volume from its prede-cessor “Strokes: Book Reviews 2013”), apart from Ulrike Böhm’s wonderful foreword, is the fact that most of the in-stantiations here assume a more review-like-form instead of a more vignette-like-form.
eBooks
Print Editions
Book Reviewing
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Sed non risus.
Suspendisse lectus tortor, dignissim sit amet, adipiscing nec, ultricies sed, dolor. Cras elementum ultrices diam. Maecenas ligula massa, varius a, semper congue, euismod non, mi.
Proin porttitor, orci nec nonummy molestie, enim est eleifend mi, non fermentum diam nisl sit amet erat.
Search :
AOR - Westcoast Music WEBSITE
Manuel Augusto Antão - Copyright 2013