October 8th, 2012 / 1:09 pm
 Behind the Scenes

Reviews Section Update: 25 Points

HTMLGiant is now accepting submissions for a new category of book review. “25 Points” will feature reviews consisting of numbered series: 25 facts and/or opinions about a single work. Tangential list items, variations of length, and other deviations are encouraged. Reviews and queries can be sent to brooks [at] htmlgiant [dot] com.

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7 Comments

  1. October 8th, 2012 / 4:36 pm Alexander J. Allison—

      Seems like a really excellent format.

  2. October 9th, 2012 / 12:25 am alan—

      I don’t know, seems really lazy. You don’t have to write a coherent piece or even connect up your various points, and you can be funny in a formulaic way by simply juxtaposing serious and less-serious items.

  3. October 9th, 2012 / 2:00 am Scott Riley Irvine—

      Yeah, this could get old fast.

  4. October 9th, 2012 / 2:41 am Brooks Sterritt—

      You’re talking about Twitter here, right?

  5. October 9th, 2012 / 11:35 am Kyle B. Bjorem—

      You could get pretty complex with it… in the style of something like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Spinoza’s Ethics, etc. If it is a simple list, yeah after a few of them it would be stale.

  6. October 9th, 2012 / 2:09 pm reynard—

      this is just to say those books are sitting on top of each other on the electric piano in my living room

  7. October 9th, 2012 / 8:45 pm deadgod—

      –or about lazily driven-by non-sequiturs: a conventional review, a long novel, or a haiku each could be an incoherent or formulaic piece. No form intrinsically lends itself to disorganization.

      I’m interested in reading what people come up with, along the lines of coherent (or pregnantly fragmentary) ‘bullet point’ reviews.

      The difficulty for me would be: 25 seems like a lot of points. Think of some classic book–one you love but have chewed over somehow, one you know well. –say, Hamlet, or Gatsby. Can you think of 25 separate “points” in interaction even with such rich material? You could write a fine essay on an angle–secrecy in Hamlet, why does Nick call Gatsby “great”?, that kind of thing. But 25 discrete particles of refraction… that’d take some discipline.

      (Of course, one solution is to quote the source–beautiful, powerful passages that – extracted into this context – each makes a kind of “point”.)

      It’s an interesting constraint.