HEY YOU! WRITERS! READERS! REVIEWERS! SUBMIT A REVIEW!!!!!!!
(Reviewers are writers after all) 2/9 UPDATE!!!! 1,000 word limit. And though this part may be obvious, I'll write it anyway: you can't submit based on the fact that the reviewer liked your book or a book you loved. The review itself has to have moved you -- not the book it's about. And the potential categories:
ALL GENRES WELCOME
Funniest Snark
Most Moving
Worst (as in writing? or giving away plot? most pointless? most wandering from the subject? Heck maybe the whole contest could be based around this particular area. . .but NO.)
Most Convincing (either to read or not read a book)
Most Kowtowing/Gushing
Most Thought-Provoking
Most Unusual Format (for example: a Q and A between the reviewer and her conscience)
Please submit -- and use your own reviews and categories. I like the way AAR does contests. Organic is good. It has to be a review but it can come from a blog or formal review site.
Shortest has already been taken by Dorothy Parker, Although this site's movie reviews are great -- Scroll down a bit and they're on the right.
Prize to be determined: But not a book. God knows the reviewer probably doesn't need a book. Although a nice volume of reviews from The New Yorker would be good. . maybe we need a good pretentious name too.
Update: The single GRAND prize will be a beautiful blank journal and pen.
Flora Poste is the recently orphaned waif who finds it necessary to impose herself on some body of relatives. Her meager inheritance of 100 pounds a year is not enough "keep you in stockings and fans," as her good friend Mrs. Smiling remarks. She writes to several distant family members and receives three replies. Most of them are appaling, except for the one from her cousin Judith Starkadder, which is, at least, interesting and appaling. She writes back and accepts the offer of boarding from Cold Comfort Farm, to find out what "rights" she has that cousin Judith mysteriously refers to. Her arrival at Cold Comfort begins a warming trend that ends up firing up every Starkadder in sight, including: Amos, the hellfire-and-brimstone owner of the farm and preacher to the Quivering Brethern; Reuben, his son and would-be caretaker of Cold Comfort; Seth, the hunk-a-hunk-a burning love that has terrorized the female countriside, to his mother's extreme shame; the flighty Elfine, who whisks around in ethereal garments quoting her own poetry; and the matriarch who rules Cold Comfort Farm with a iron fist, Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something "nasty in the woodshed" when she was a little girl, and who hasn't left Cold Comfort Farm since.
Gibbons is artfully playing on the conventions of the melodrama, and it helps the reader to be familiar with the work of Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen to fully appreciate some of the playful work here. Without this meta-nature, Cold Comfort Farm would be amusing, but not nearly as effective. For modern readers, this is one novel that has weathered the intervening sixty years well, due in some part to Gibbons deft touch with her satire, but also her clear, readable style when not trying to out-purple the purple prose-wizards of the melodramas.
This is the perfect novel for those book-weary high-school students still suffering under the weighty tomes of "literature" that is force-fed to them by our assembly-factory education system. A good dose of parody, a kind of 1930s National Lampoon, should help them feel better about books, and literature in general.
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