“Eyes down for the cliches: it's time to play Book ... - The Guardian” plus 1 more

Eyes down for the cliches: it's time to play Book ... - The Guardian

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 07:20 AM PDT

Review bingo: could you manage a full house? Photograph: Graeme Robertson

How embarrassing but how brilliant. The Examiner has come up with a new game to play while reading the weekend papers: Book Review Bingo, intended to "get the book review cliché tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, and burnt at the stake. And driven out of the book review world completely."

Book Examiner Michelle Kerns has, she says, "embarked on a freakish One Woman Crusade against the book review cliché", and will be awarding monthly Reviewerspeak Awards to humiliate the worst offenders.

She's even created bingo cards for us to play along, featuring the most irritating words used in book reviews – "compelling", "haunting", "riveting", "sweeping" and "x meets x" being a small selection.

Now, I rarely review books, but I'm cringing to see that in the first review I wrote, I described (the excellent) Hurry Down Sunshine as "a compelling, harrowing, lyrical memoir". That's two in one sentence, and I think "clear-sighted" also came in there somewhere ... I was a bit better here and here, but I know I'm guilty of throwing in a "pitch-perfect", a "rollicking" or an "unflinching" when I'm looking for a quick shorthand to describe a book. Incidentally, when you have to sum up 20 books in a row, as I did yesterday for the Orange longlist, it gets harder and harder to be original, and the stories start to look weirder and weirder ("after cider-maker Jonathan Dymond's uncle dies, he is led to family secrets which have lain hidden since the war", for example).

Here's Kerns's list in full:

compelling
beautifully written
lyrical
in the tradition of
rollicking
tour de force
thought-provoking
at once
haunting
riveting
nuanced
x meets x
cliché-free
stunning
epic
pitch-perfect
readable
timely
unputdownable
that said
gritty
powerful
sweeping
unflinching
fully-realised

I'd add controversial, and dark, and darkly comic – I know I've
resorted to them on occasion. But what else drives you wild? I promise, here and now, to do my best to avoid them in the future ...

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Brooklyn and Half Seven on a Thursday: Book reviews by ... - Scoop

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 01:55 PM PDT

Wednesday, 17 March 2010, 10:00am
Source: TV3

In celebration of St Patricks' Day this weeks reading review is looking at books by Irish authors.

Link: Brooklyn and Half Seven on a Thursday: Book reviews by Gail Woodward

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.