Head Down for the book review Part One

This week is Determined Effort to make significant headway in reading a professional monograph for which I have promised someone a Book Review for their professional journal. I’m late, so as part of the January 2012 Determined Attempt on the 2011 Miscellaneous Still Outstanding pile this is designated in my mind Book Review week!

So, before this blog looks like a western with tumbleweed under the usual cudgel of the diary and schedule (too busy doing to talk about), a few musings on volunteering to do book reviews for somewhere and the process.

Hopefully next week will be the incredibly exciting (or not!!) Part Two of this post when I’ll talk about the rest of the process in the past tense being finished or substantially so!

THE BENEFITS

Generally speaking these are:

For you -

• Source of lots of new professional reading on the latest developments in a subject.

• Usually you get the book free to keep in return for doing book review.

• The fact you’re Review’ing it nudges you to actually read it.

• You have to really consider what you think of the text and arguments made in it.

• There is at least one new concrete result of your reading (the Review itself).

Wider –

• It hopefully helps promote awareness of good new texts to audiences.

• It helps folk decide on what they want to purchase.

THE DRAWBACKS

For you –

• You still have to invest in the process – the time involved.

• There’s probably a timescale you’ve been given for delivery to bear in mind.

Overall  

Doing something for someone else eventually tends to  force self-discipline and prioritisation to get it done. Which makes it a great incentive.

Just buy it for yourself and perhaps many months later it’s still not made it up the priority pile because it’s there after all, so obviously you’ll get to it sometime, but not a ‘sometime’ with a date attached! Of course in reality busy lives ‘sometime’ often never comes…!

APPROACHES

Some things to bear in mind

Before you volunteer

• Is the work of enough relevance and / or interest to you that you really want to do this?

• Would you have automatically purchased a copy anyway (without conditions attached)?

• Can you do a couple of minutes first before volunteering just checking a few websites to inform yourself of key factors? For example -  pagination. Is it akin to a novella or an epic? What does that mean in terms of likely time required? Cost - could you actually afford it yourself?. Can you pull up a table of contents?  Does it still look as inviting? Does the level look right for you? Is it an author/s you know already? If so what does that tell you about how easy to read it might be?

• Is there any indication of what the timescale is for delivery and how does that fit in with everything else you know you have to do / want to do in the same period? This book review does not exist in it’s own separate vacuum. It needs to integrate with the rest of life.

• Is there a specific format / arrangement the Review is required in?  Do you have a copy?

• Is there a defined word count for it?

HEAD DOWN READING PHASE

Eventually it is likely if you do not plan how you’re going to fit this in you will look at when you’re supposed to submit and wince a bit. Possibly because it’s suddenly close, possibly because it’s already somehow passed!  If you haven’t been coughed at by the person you agreed to give it to in the first place it’s more likely it’s passed but it wasn’t urgent and can go in the next one.

So, bear in mind…

• To keep this under control (i.e. that it’ll happen in a decent timeframe) you have to schedule it.

• Look at your diary and figure out where a good week is to get the reading done and how (or a substantive part thereof if it’s an opus). So, for example, this week I’m on long trains an awful lot, a couple of Manchester trips, a couple of Edinburgh ones. That helps for me. Defined periods of time known in advance when I can concentrate on it away from many distractions.

• Know that for a certain period e.g. a week It Is Priority over all the other things you’ve been meaning to do that are unscheduled but swimming about the back of your head. Ignore them and do this. Head down, blinkers on, get on with it in the gaps between what you already have scheduled that you know you have to get done that is more important.

• The important thing is a start date and then reading a bit every day till you’re done. Do not make advance decisions about precisely how much you’ll have read by when because that’s a lot more likely to fail.   What you utterly need to avoid is an irregular start / stop rhythm, that just gobbles up energy, find the energy to start Once Only and then continuing takes much less. Don’t have to re-start it every four days. Pretty soon that won’t happen.  Again, if you decide it’s ‘x chapters a day’ or ‘x amount of pages a day’ that’s really blunt, your day is not the same, some days you will have more on than others, more claims on your time, you will feel more or less tired which will affect how well you can concentrate. Don’t treat yourself like a machine because you’re not and it won’t work. Be flexible and realistic but keep it going.

• Finish each day at the end of a defined segment of text and have a marker in so you know precisely where you’ve got to.

• Have a notebook of some kind beside you and just jot down interesting sections and thoughts they trigger and what you feel about, and in a way that you can easily find the precise section again. Do this regularly. It’ll make writing up at the end a whole lot simpler. I tend to use chapter headings and wait a bit afterwards and then jot a few notes on each chapter. For some folk scribbling as they read works well, for others that might take them out of the text too much or perhaps style-wise they like to let information settle and percolate a bit in their minds and think it through a bit first.

• Keep a note of how well you’ve done overall since the overall start date each day and concentrate on that, not how far you’ve still to go or if you got less done today than yesterday. So in two days this week I’ve read six chapters, I have eleven chapters to go, however last Sunday I hadn’t even read page one and it’d been sitting here for – coughs – almost five months precisely because I hadn’t scheduled it till then and had far too much on. If I compare Sunday to today then I’m seeing mass progress. Progress is always motivating for benefits of  continuing.