Thanks for the link and the kind words! You raise some good points about reviewing books as a fan. Your "best of" columns are a terrific strategy for spreading the word about series you love in an irrational, bad-dialogue-be-damned sort of way. I've enjoyed your Boys Over Flower column immensely, and hope you continue to post many, many more.

@Greg Hatcher:

As I learned when I taught, grading is an incredibly difficult, fraught process--you can't be objective, so the best you can hope for is consistency, fairness, and rationality. There's nothing lazy about a carefully considered grade, especially if it's accompanied by a thoughtful review that spells out the critic's reasons for awarding a book an A- or three out of five stars.

What do you like to see in reviews and do you want graded reviews?

At the risk of giving away my own bag of tricks...

My feeling about reviews is that you should know what you're talking about. (I rarely talk about manga because I'm an ignoramus in that area, despite playing catch-up in school for the last decade or so.) If you know your stuff, then it just becomes a question of...

1. Explaining what you think the creators were trying to do.
2. Deciding if they did it.
3. Opining on whether or not that was worth doing.

It's a very old-school and Aristotelean review model, but then Aristotle knew what he was doing. If you can be amusing while you hit those three points, so much the better. But as long as you hit them the odds are good that your reviews will be useful even if the reader is an ignoramus like me about the field in general.

I'm ambivalent about grades. Some people like them but I think they're a bit lazy. However, I tend to look at them from the perspective of someone who is a reviewer, as opposed to someone just reading a review, so I am not sure if my opinion's worth much there. But my tastes in this area were formed by the old Comics Journal, which once upon a time in the 80's fielded a review squad so awesome that the magazine was always a terrific read even when I was hardly buying comics. We should shoot for that: be a good read whether our readers here on the blog buy the book in question or not.

My two cents.