Splitting out literary criticism and book reviews

As I reflect upon what it is I do here at With Both Hands, I’ve decided to make a stronger distinction between criticism and reviews. Writing book criticism is something I love to do, and intend to continue doing, but it can also take a while to find the right information and then craft an argument for how a particular work contributes to the Great Conversation.

As you might have noticed, time has been in short supply for me recently, so the pace at which this can be done has fallen off. It has also been the case that I haven’t had time for many new books and authors. However, it is much easier and quicker to provide a review than criticism per se, and so by differentiating the two I plan to offer a greater variety of book reviews, and a lesser amount of literary criticism when I think it is warranted, or I just feel like it.

This allows me to address a wider variety of works here, which seems to be needed right now. It is also convenient in that I can separate out what gets put in a merchant website’s review section from what I want to keep here on my own website.

This experiment starts today! Let’s see how it goes.