How to Read and Review a Book like a Qualitative Researcher

There are many ways to read a book, but when the reading is intended to lead to a book review, the process can become a bit more challenging for the reader-reviewer. In the case of reading for pleasure, the reader can access the book in a wonderfully appreciative manner, consuming the plot, connecting with the characters, and escaping into the setting. When reading for scholarly purposes, the reader can extrude useful information, identify new sources of information, critically examine the author's words, and document the location of each and every notable moment in the text. For the book reviewer, the aspects of reading for pleasure and scholarship can be combined to help the reader not only focus on the aesthetics of the work, but also reflect on the author's execution and product. Yet, different from both the reading for pleasure and reading for scholarship modes, the reading reviewer must not only consume the book, but also compose an essay that captures a particular sense of the book that would be valuable for the book's author and would-be readers to contemplate. Merely retelling the contents of each chapter or summarizing a general affection for the text on the part of the reviewer does not seem to contribute much new or of value to the reader or to the book's author, so what are other ways a reviewer can create a book review that brings new insights to the understanding of the original work? As a book reader and reviewer I seem to have adopted many perspectives and techniques from my training and experience as a qualitative researcher to systematically scrutinize a text, develop a focused perspective on the work, and present my reviews in a creative form that hopefully presents an account that is informative to the author and reader alike. Besides being a way of seeing the world that I like, reading and reviewing a book from the perspective of a qualitative researcher makes sense given the strengths of the family of methods. Qualitative research is a way for investigators to open themselves up to discover the perspective of an "other" in a manner similar to how a reader would open the pages of a book to discover what the author is conveying in the text. Textual materials are a common data source for qualitative researchers to examine in their inquiries so the gathering and analyzing procedures we use to manage data in a study can be quite amenable to the reviewing of a book. Qualitative research encourages us as investigators to be mindful of who we are and how our perspectives can influence how we interact with others and make sense of the world around us. In a similar fashion when we read books we bring our experiences to bear on how we come to understand the words offered by the authors and how we re-present the meaning the text had to us. In this vein, qualitative research offers reviewers useful self-reflection tools such as audit trails and journaling that can help us track how we bring ourselves into the reading and reviewing processes. As Editor-in-Chief of The Qualitative Report and The Weekly Qualitative Report, I may read and review up to a dozen books a year. It can be quite a challenge to work my way through these tomes especially if I am overly familiar with the author or the general subject matter being addressed. For other works, I can find myself approaching an area of qualitative research that is quite new to me presenting novel ways of conducting research and producing reports. In both of these cases, I ask myself how can I honor each work with my commitment to reading the book and constructing a review that emerges from my close encounter with the text? As I have evolved and developed as a book reviewer I find that I call upon basic qualitative research transformational approaches to describe, analyze, and interpret (Wolcott, 1994) the tomes I read and review. In this essay, I want to present some of the qualitative research procedures and perspectives I use in this endeavor to help readers approach their reviews in a way that I think can make the process more enjoyable and the end-product more pleasurable. …