Friday, January 15, 2010

me on book reviews

With the whole book fuzz that I’ve been in since last year, I started experimenting different ways to improve my reading skill and experience. One of the things that helped me was taking books to the office and give it quick lookups between a reboot and a rebuild. Other was setting time aside from my common schedule just to focus on the book. After some try and error I got a few techniques in place that make me feel more productive on the matter. One of them is book review.

I have done very little publicly on it though. A quick look on my goodreads.com account will show a few short reviews that are much more general comments than anything close to a review of the book, the writing and the content. But I definitely want to do more, and that’s the point where I’ll get to soon.

It’s not entirely new for me. I’ve done formal book reviews once for Paula Mastroberti, a Brazilian author that wrote and illustrated fantastic books that were a re-read of great classics of literature like Goethe’s Fausto, Homero’s Odissey and Cervante’s Quixote. In her version of the stories, the plot would roll in our modern times and all the different characters would be adapted to meet all their madness and tragedy within our day-to-day lives. Fausto became a sold-soul rockstar, while Quixote was turned into a suburb hero – succumbed by his madness wearing brighty and shiny 80’s disco clothes. Fun indeed.

It was a long time ago, but as you can see, I liked reading before I started working.

The exercise of writing book reviews is a good way to keep memory in shape and making sure you squeeze the most out of the book content. It’s even better for non-literature books, like the technical and conceptual books about programming and economics,  as we recap the content and reinforce the lessons and concepts learned. Also, it’s very good to develop writing skills as well, and for a non-native English speaker like me, it’s something.

My deal is the following, as I set the goal to provide whatever kind of content here for my own pleasure and fun, and as I want to make sure I enjoyed and payed attention to all my books details, I’ll start posting more about the books and giving them a post-mortem review after reading it.

At some point I’ll start using only the goodreads.com service to do so, and will pull them here through theyre fine API, which I’ve been playing a bit for a few days.

Be in peace amd correct my typos!

[Via http://rafaelbandeira3.wordpress.com]

No comments:

Post a Comment