So the oddest thing has happened concerning an entry I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It got picked up by Kelly and mentioned in the latest issue of Edge of the Forest. (And I do appreciate the link there Kelly!) Then Wendy picked it up from there and wrote an entry based on it that took just a little bit of an exchange in my comments out of context. From there it seems to have spawned a larger discussion in the kid lit blogosphere about the merits of negative vs positive reviewing (See Jen, Fuse 8, CF&T and just follow the links and comments from there.)

What the hell.

I have said before that I am pretty much exclusively a positive book reviewer. A suggestion seems to exist out there though that positive can sometimes equal dishonesty (at least to some degree). So let me explain how this is not true about the way in which I review.

First, with the exception of Booklist, pretty much every book I review for Bookslut, (where I am the YA columnist and also review adult books and write features), Eclectica Magazine (where I am Reviews Editor and review YA, picture books and adult titles) and Voices of NOLA (where it's all about New Orleans) I request myself directly from the publishers. I have gotten very good at knowing what I like and read on a variety of subjects so it is not hard for me to choose books I will like. So far this year I'm pretty sure there have been only 5 books that I have requested that I did not enjoy. They were: Tallulah Falls, Bass Ackwards and Belly Up, The Black Tattoo, A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life and Manstealing for Fat Girls (which actually the publisher asked me to take a look at so technically not a request). In one place or another I have seen these books written up by people who did read them to the end and liked them, so it was clearly just an opinon that made me not enjoy them (it's not as if they were badly written in other words.) I could have taken up some of my valuable and finite reviewing space to write about how I didn't like these books but I chose not to - I would rather use that space to write about books I like. So I just said nothing about them, until now. This is apparently what makes me a positive reviewer.

Several bloggers have brought up the issue of ARCs arriving unrequested from publishers and whether or not you should feel beholden to giving those books positive reviews. I get a lot of books from publishers - over the course of this year, between books I requested and those that just showed up, I am already past the 450 book mark. It would be impossible for me to read all of those books and some of them I never even crack open (again, if they were unrequested). But I do try to give every book at least a look and some of these unrequested titles do end up gettting read and reviewed by me. Case in point: Glass Houses, a teen vampire novel that fit perfectly in my creepy October theme and arrived right in the middle of September when I was thinking I needed one more book for the column. I enjoyed it from the first page and was happy to recommend it as the fun kind of title it is. It got a positive review because I read it and liked it. There are probably 200 books I have gotten this year that I could have struggled through (if I chose to) and would have then had to write negative reviews for because I didn't like the subject or the style or the plot was thin or the characters silly or whatever. But I didn't read them so I don't know. That's the key: I pretty much do not read what I do not like. That's why I'm not a negative reviewer.

The exception to all of this is Booklist. Let me say first that I was honored and flattered beyond reason to be asked to review for Booklist. When I was young we did not have much money and the public library was the primary source of books for my family. After my father died one of things I made sure to keep close to me (and I still do) was his (still active) library card. The library holds a lot of important and significant fond memories to me and I can not overstate how highly I regard the responsibility of reviewing for the ALA.

The way it works with Booklist is that my editor chooses books she thinks are appropriate for me to review and sends them my way. Booklist is mostly a recommends only magazine - and that makes sense if you think about it. There is no room for every review imagineable (we only get 175-195 for a review) and it comes out 22 times a year. Librarians don't have the time to read negative reviews about books from authors they have probably never heard of and their patrons won't even ask for (we're talking poorly written books here). If we do receive a poorly written book by a well known writer - say Stephen King - where we know patrons will be asking librarians about it then we write an honest review and it could be negative. But mostly the magazine is about recommending, especially books that might be overlooked otherwise. We want to let librarians know about books that their patrons might be looking for, even if they don't realize the book is even written yet. ("Do you have any books on......") To accomplish this, the editors need to make sure that books get to the right reviewer - I don't review cookbooks or gardening for example because how would I tell a good one from a bad one? I did okay reviewing literature and short stories in the beginning but things have really started to click lately as my editor and I have weeded out what I'm best at. With degrees in aviation, history and northern studies I am perfect for titles on the north, flying or Alaska. (There are quite a few of those believe it or not.) I also have a keen interest in nature books and am reasonably well read in that area so I review those as well. But I do also read fiction still and whatever my editor might need. The result is that I have appropriately reviewed quite a few books for Booklist but I have also refused to review a few as well. These were books I thought were poorly written - not because I didn't like the subject but because they were impossible to follow or claimed to be nonfiction memoirs and then included information (like lots and lots and lots of verbatim conversation from before the author was even born) that could not be true, etc. In these cases I send a detailed and very specific email explaining why I do not want to review the book. My editor does a bit of research to make sure my reasons are valid and we move on.

So no - I do not review bad books for the ALA in a positive light. Booklist is separate from everything else I do and has it's own set of rules and I follow them, to the letter.

Finally, I do not solicit books to be reviewed for Chasing Ray. The books I mention here are almost always reviewed in Bookslut, Eclectica or Voices as well and I just use this site to talk about them more informally. A lot of the books I discuss here are never reviewed by me at all - they are books I bought myself or were given to me as gifts; they were never intended to be reviewed. Sometimes I write about books I have received from publishers out of the blue, just because I love them and want to let folks know. But I never intended for this site to be a place to read exclusive reviews - this site is about the reviews I run elsewhere, literary news, reviews I read elsewhere, my own writing, and sometimes even politics. It never occurred to me to write about why I didn't like a certain title here, there are too many other things I'd rather write about than that. And maybe that's the biggest thing about all of this for me - I just don't want to spend my time writing about books I don't like. I'd rather write about a thousand other things than that; I 'd rather spend my time doing other things.

I just don't want to read books I don't like and then write about them.

How that decision reduces the value of my reviewing somehow - well, I don't get it and I never will. How that makes me a less honest reviewer somehow - no way, not for a minute. I'd like to think that after reviewing books for almost three years at Bookslut and Eclectica, readers have learned to have a bit of faith in my respect for them and the job I do. If you read my stuff then you know I don't lie; I just find good books and then I spend a lot of time writing about them.

I am lucky in that I mostly get to choose the books I review and then I work very hard at choosing books I will enjoy reading. Perhaps another way of looking at this positive vs negative reviewing thing is to look at reviewers themselves. If you are choosing the books you read (not having them assigned) then why choose books you will not like? Why read in a genre or subject that you don't enjoy? I wouldn't want to spend my days doing that, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why anyone else would either.

Tomorrow it's back to books I've read lately - big surprise, I liked them all!