It's gripping! It's luminous! It's the maiden voyage of the Reviewerspeak Awards!

 

Forget the Ides of March: it's the Clichés of March -- and of every other month -- you need to keep a riveted, irreverent eye upon.

That's the goal of the newly inaugurated Reviewerspeak Awards: to thought-provokingly observe, vividly record, and unflinchingly report every book reviewer cliché perpetrated daily on the hapless readers of a select number of online book review sites.

To leap boldly into a Brave New World where prose isn't always lively or spare or graceful or taut or accessible or lyrical;  where debut novels aren't always solid or sparkling; where characters aren't always flawed or fully realized (or, if you prefer, perfectly realized) or quirky or likable or nuanced; where authors aren't masterful or at the top of their game in every third review.

A place where "uneven" can finally be surgically removed from its siamese twin, "pacing," and similar procedures can be conducted on such freaks of nature as "deftly balances," "richly colored," "deceptive ease," "pitch-perfect," "that said," and "eminently readable." (The most harrowing of the bunch is going to be "entertaining" which has got so many hideous growths snaking off it, it'll strike you blind if you read too many of them in one sitting: "rambunctiously entertaining," "immensely entertaining," "wildly entertaining," and, that great old workhorse, "consistently entertaining.")

Why bother? Clearly, you haven't cast your eye upon the top 20 most annoying book reviewer clichés  and how to use them all in one meaningless review or tried your hand at Book Review Bingo.

Clichés are leeches. They drain the blood out of everything a reviewer is trying to say, blood that would be better off pumped straight from the writer's carotid artery onto the page (see Book reviewing as a blood sport for more bloody details). Burn those leeches off, baby, and you'll find you're left with something worth saying. Or, perhaps, you'll find you have nothing to say whatsoever. Sometimes, it's a toss-up as as to which scenario is more terrifying.

But enough of this unevenly paced patter. On with the gritty details of the Reviewerspeak Awards. Huzzah!

 

The 2010 Reviewerspeak Awards Rules and Regulations

1. The 2010 Reviewerspeak Awards window spans from April 1, 2010 to April 1, 2011. During this time, I will monitor the adult fiction and non-fiction reviews published on the following online book review sites:

2. The statistics compiled will be based on adult fiction and non-fiction online book reviews only: no book commentaries or book lists will be counted, as well as no print reviews that don't have an online manifestation. Also, no children's, poetry, or audiobook reviews will be included. Those genres have their own unique cliché lists (audiobook reviews: "gravelly," "resonant,"; children's book reviews: "bouncy," "bright") and deserve a cliché-watch all to themselves.

3. Now, this is where the fun really begins, the place where I get to breed my oddly hyper-science background with bookishness.

The first day of each month will feature a series of graphs displaying that particular month's cliché results. Even though, technically, the Reviewerspeak-Watch didn't begin until today, April 1st, 2010, I've monitored three publications -- Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and The Washington Post -- throughout March (insert evil laugh, here) so I'd have some data to demonstrate these graphs with.

The first graph will compare the total number of clichés contained in each publication for that particular month, like so:

 

"But wait!" a few of you will scream now. "You're comparing different word counts as if they were the same! It doesn't work!" Right you are, my friend. Which is why the second graph will compare the average number of clichés per 100 words for each publication for that month. Here are the results for March:

 

The next graphs -- nifty line graphs, don't you know -- will show the cliché progression of each publication throughout the year. I find this sort of thing endlessly interesting.

For instance, Publishers Weekly averaged about 1 cliché for every 100-150 words in the reviews they published from March 1st to March 15th. Then, abruptly, the number tanked. The March 22nd to March 29th reviews contained only about 1 cliché for every 300-350 words. That's one hell of a decrease in a very short span of time. I wonder, could it be that Book Review Bingo was posted on March 15th and lauded by Book Review Goddess Laura Miller on March 16th? Hurm. But what will really be worth casting an eye on will be the April and May and June numbers. Will they stay low? Or spike back up?

Next will be a graph demonstrating which clichés are hogging up the most time in the reviewers' collective cerebral cortexes. Here's what the March results look like based on the numbers from Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and the Washington Post:

 

Clichés, like music or clothes or weird celebrity diets, go through trends over time. I'll be tracking those hip clichés and reporting the month's up-and-comers. In March, it was definitely the tendency for reviewers to refer to the pages of books turning, as it were, all by themselves. Like in this review:

The prose style is spare and powerful and the pages turn effortlessly.

Or this one:

Vivid local color and sharply drawn characters...help make the pages fly.

Where can I get one of these self-page-turning books?

"Ambitious" also got alot of play this month. I received an email from a Mr. Stuart Baimel that claimed there wasn't a review of Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered that did not contain this word. I took him up on the challenge and, do you know? He was right. Well done, Mr. Baimel. You are, truly, a Reviewerspeak champion.

But don't think that the Reviewerspeak Awards solely recognize publication achievement at the expense of individual reviewer acheivement. Goodness, no.

The next several monthly awards laud outstanding cliché achievement in individual reviews.

For March, the winner of the Most Clichéd Review Award goes to the Publishers Weekly review of Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector. In a mere 218 words, this rugged reviewer managed to pack in 10 clichés: subtle, astute, dazzling, brilliant, enjoyable, satisfying, robust, fully realized, trenchantly, and meaningful. Well DONE, Publishers Weekly!

Second place went to Leah Hager Cohen's review of Lionel Shriver's So Much for That, which not only featured this sentence -- "Can it be entertaining, rousing, illuminating?" -- but also worked in the word "brio," which, I am convinced, like "uputdownable," exists nowhere on the face of the earth other than in book reviews.

Alexander McCall Smith's New York Times review of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand takes the prize for Repeated Clichés in a Single Review with his use of "sensitively" and "sensitivity" in back-to-back paragraphs. Though, to be fair, Ron Charles in the Washington Post used the word "sensibility" when describing the same book so perhaps it's just a book that cries out for a descriptor beginning with an s-e-n-s-i, etc.

Ken Kalfus gets the award for Most Annoying Cliché of the Month with his description of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight as "luminous." (I'll give him this, he did throw it in right at the end as kind of an afterthought. Maybe he was getting a little weary of the whole piece and just stopped caring.)

The crowning glory of all, the Reviewerspeak Award for the Most Clichéd Reviewer of the Month goes, predictably, to the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani who used practically every cliché known to God and man in 6,495 words worth of March reviews, most notably "nimble," "palpable," and, "fiercely imagined."  Additionally, Ms. Kakutani, like her fellow New York Times reviewers, has a fatal weakness for two clichés, namely "ferocious" and "deeply," as in "deeply affecting" or "deeply felt."

And, because I have received so many emails screeching about the word "limn," I will specifically follow and graph Ms.Kakutani's use of the hated word across the year, an act which should completely assure that this (scroll down; it's under the More Recommended Reading section) will be the only time my name ever manages to appear on the New York Times site. (For those who are wondering, she used it once in March: in her March 17th review of Jules Feiffer's Backing Into Forward.)

But, please, don't think I read all of these reviews just in order to nitpick clichés out of them. There are so many that remind me how wonderful the art of book reviewing can be. Like this bit of Janet Maslin's review of Danielle Trussoni's Angelology: "She [the character, Evangeline] will find that certain human-looking Manhattanites have evil schemes, occult powers, and feathery wings." And to think, I was under the impression that all Manhattanites had these things. What a naive creature I am.

Or Ron Charles' review of Lionel Shriver's So Much For That: "Glynis's treatment produces a double helix of hospital bills." That kind of witty sentence fills me with enbo (see Michael Dirda's review of Kenzabur Oe's The Changeling for the definition: "bitter envious resentment.")

Out of all the reviews I read in March, Janet Maslin's and Dwight Garner's of the New York Times impressed me the most. I adore how they refer to authors as "Mr." or "Ms." (Of course, I do that, but no one ever gives a damn about that except me.) If I were forced to choose between the two, I'd have to give it to Mr. Garner. His reviews are so good -- and so cliché-free -- I'm not entirely certain that he is mortal.

Hey, Mr. Zeus, come on down and give me a visit.

These March results don't count in the tallies I'll be using to calculate the annual 2010 Reviewerspeak Awards. But next month's will. Care for a glance? Take a look at them, here -- Engrossing, vivid, unstoppable: The Reviewerspeak Award results for April 2010

Rants? Raves? A publication you think I should target? A cliché you think I've overlooked? Direct your thoughts here.