(Or How I Do This)
I’m not one to boil down my entertainment to a single scalar value — it may work for some, but not for me. I have an education in mathematics, specializing in statistics. A simple digit cannot convey any real nuance of what I experience when reading. With that in mind, I thought I’d spell out a little of my thought process here.
Fair warning: if you think my reviews are going to be summed up with a TL;DR, this isn’t the place for you. I’m going to elaborate.
Can’t read a book if I don’t buy it first, so what drives that dragon to gather for the hoard?
The cover: Even a simple cover can catch my eye, but anything on the back or inside cover needs to lend support. Who wrote the blurbs? Is there a synposis? Of those two, the latter is more important. Is there enough there to draw my attention? Does this book entice, or does it drift into the land of cliches?
If I’m interested but not convinced, I’ll open the cover and check the first page. When I say first page, I don’t mean the prologue — I mean the first page of prose. Part of my education in the writing craft (which I might talk about later) included The Hook, and it’s importance in modern fiction — especially when it came to catching a publisher’s eye. I take what I learned into account as well.
At that point it goes home with me or back on the shelf. Of course, there’s always recommendations by firends and colleauges. I’m not going to lie and say that doesn’t factor into it.
Once the book is mine — and keeps my attention and interest for the first fifty pages — I take two primary considerations into a book: How well is it written, and did I connect with/enjoy it?
While the whole of a critique can encompass a spectrum, one can chart out the basics on a simple, four quadrant graph — now quite Cartesian, but we make do.
Well Written/Enjoyed It: This is what I look for in my fiction. This is a book where I can just focus on the page, play out the scenes in my mind’s eye, and savor until the very end. Examples include Adam Oyebanji’s “Breaking Day”, Tamsyn Muir’s “Gideon the Ninth”, and Linden A. Lewis’s “The First Sister.”
Poorly Written/Enjoyed It: The Guilty Pleasure. Yes, it may be garbage, but it’s fun garbage. It could also be meaningful garbage, but Shakespeare it ain’t. A lot of pulp fiction, golden age SF and the like fall into this category. Examples include: many of HP Lovecraft’s stories (long dry prose, poor descriptions, but he could sell cosmic horror), “Trail of Cthulhu” (August Dereleth), and at least one of the first five novels in Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” books.
Well Written/Couldn’t connect: Just because I didn’t like a book doesn’t mean it sucked. Some books don’t connect with certain readers, and that’s the honest truth. My go to example of such a novel is Wrath James White’s “Succulent Prey.” A very disturbing novel, and one not to my tastes. However, White’s an excellent writer and he made a budding sado-masochistic cannibalistic serial killer a sympathetic main character. I have no idea how he did it.
Poorly Written/Couldn’t connect: Usually these books reveal themselves in the first fifty pages. Life is too short to suck it up and force myself to read a terrible book to the bitter end. I made that mistake with Mike Flynn’s “The Wreck of the River of Stars.” Never will I make that mistake again. Another example: “The DaVinci Code.”
Every novel can have their quibbles and their gems, and I’ll be sure to try and point them out in due course of the review. Because tastes can be different amongst people, I’m not going offer any recommendations, just opinions. So as I said in my intro, grab yourself a beverage when you read a review, and take some time to relax.
16 August 2026
Mike Brendan 