Being a part of Indonesian book blogger (BBI) seems couldn’t cure my moody habit of writing a book review. Thanks to a dozen reading challenges that I joined; I can make it a reason to force myself writing more reviews, even my mood is still up and down.
The idea began from Aul, my BBI fellow, that posted about how she writes her reviews. Although, still, I’m a moody blogger, I notice that I have some good readers/visitors. So, why not share about that too?
I try to write review for every book I read; can’t deny that some books are neglected unreviewed, or maybe a little bit late written. The factors are varied, but mostly those books aren’t included in any reading challenge.
While reading, I make a note of book pages that contain quotable sentences. Lately, if the books are my own collections, I use sticky markers to mark my favourite scenes or quotes. When it is time to write the review, I type all the quotes first. In case I read ebooks, this phase is easier, for I just need to copy them. That method helps my understanding of the whole book, gives me a path of how I’d make the review and makes sure that I could involve every detail I want.
After that, I just write what’s on my head. I don’t have a strict formula or rule how my review should be. Although I always try to educate myself through my own reviews. I try to peel those books, layer by layer, what could I find, what morals I should know, etc., again, depends on my mood (oh, no).
For the language, I made this blog for Indonesian book blog, so it is in Bahasa Indonesia. Since I joined many reading challenges from international bloggers, and I get some international readers from them, I started to write in English. Anyhow, I still will write in Bahasa Indonesia, for three reasons: (1) it’s easier for me to express everything in my mother’s language since my English is so-so (or bad enough?), (2) I want to attract Indonesian readers to read many kinds of books, whether it is translated or not, published in my country or not. Not because I think my readings are the best, just to give another view that may be different from others, and (3) I believe if some international readers really need to read certain book’s review, mine isn’t the only one. They can go to other blogs that are much much better than mine, or if they’re kind enough to read my review, there’s Google Translate good enough doing this thing. Although, I try, always, to make it bilingual–English and Bahasa Indonesia–if it’s for international reading challenge.
For the whole process, I usually type in Notepad or Ms.Word before copy it to my blog post. It’s due to bitter experience with my old laptop and bad internet connection (what a combination); I lost my whole written review. I believe, today that problems have been solved (I have the new one), but my recovery from that trauma isn’t good, beside, I think it’s good to have offline backups.
I’m still learning, glad to have you, my visitors, for the part of my learning process.
Bacaan B.Zee 