Dave Higgins writes speculative fiction, often with a dark edge. Despite forays into the mundane worlds of law and IT, he was unable to completely escape the liminal zone between mystery and horror. A creature of contradictions, he also co-writes comic sci-fi with Simon Cantan.
Born in the least mystically significant part of Wiltshire, England, and raised by a librarian, he started reading shortly after birth and has not stopped since. He currently lives in Bristol with his wife, Nicola, his cats, Jasper and Una, a plush altar to the Dark Lord Cthulhu, and many shelves of books.
It’s rumoured he writes out of fear he will otherwise run out of books to read.
To me, a book report is the kind of thing one was required to write in school after reading an assigned book. It summed up the intention behind the book and put it into a historical or social context — as perceived by the student, of course. Whether one enjoyed the book or not was considered irrelevant or incidental. (Things are probably different now, of course). Reviews, on the other hand, are all about judgments of quality, either simplistic (“Terrific read!” or “Terrible! Threw it at the wall!”) or sophisticated, depending on the writer of the review. The increasingly rare critical review published in magazines and newspapers has some qualities in common with the book report (context, for one), but its purpose is to render judgment on whether the book is worth reading.
I suspect our views on this are similar — but different. 🙂
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Might be a cultural thing: putting a book in context and explaining how/why the author did things was called literary criticism when I met it rather than book reporting.
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I associate “book report” with school days. In university and after, definitely literary criticism. There probably is a cultural element, though.
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