The blogosphere is still a fascinating place. Today I ended up on this post about contentious book reviewer/ author relations on the web, and it was a welcome distraction from my current flu-ish feelings. There is a mild gossipy thrill in reading about conflicts I am not personally involved in. This may be a character flaw. So may be my blogger's narcissistic impulse to let you know what I think about it.
But you are here reading, so you know that already.
First, part of the trouble is the blurring of genre that has occurred through the populism of blogging. Maggie Stiefvater separates book posts from book "reviews," but there isn't really a mechanism to distinguish the two on a grand scale for the online reader. People who write about books will be classed with other people who write about books, and it will be up to the individual reader to decide if a post is a "review" by her definition. Personally, I don't want to read mean-spirited posts attacking authors, though I may make an exception if the book mentioned is itself a mean-spirited attack on a person or group (*cough* Leslie Bennetts *cough*).
Second, this problem is actually an old one. I think of Dorothy Parker's "Constant Reader" column in the New Yorker of the twenties and thirties. Her column might have reviewed books, but readers came to it for her caustic attacks and bitterly funny personality. The result was sometimes a disservice to the book. Parker's condemnation of A.A. Milne's Pooh books served only to highlight that Milne was capable of more subtlety than Parker; so much so that Parker missed the subtlety entirely. But her "reviews" are still funny today, and appealing in their own biting way.
Readers come to book posts for different reasons, and many of them may read to know the reviewer better, rather than the book. That is not a less legitimate reason to read a book post than reading one for a fair-minded review. I may be more interested, for example, in how Miroslav Volf's books have shaped the mind of Recovering Sociopath than I am in actually reading Miroslav Volf's books. This does not mean that RS should not write about him.
Lastly, I think mean-spirited reviewers forget that turn-about is fair play. If they believe an author is fair game for personal attack because he or she has published a book, then the reviewer is also fair game for publishing the review. And there is no end to that particular cycle of spite.
(And now I am trying to remember how long it has been since I wrote a book post, and hoping it was a fair-minded one.)
1 comments:
I read Anthony Lane's movie reviews in The New Yorker not because I care about the movies -- I rarely go to movies; and anyway my town is too small to ofter many of the movies he reviews -- but because I find his reviews so clever. I love the way he uses language.
Once I wrote about a book on my blog and the author found it, which was crazy to me because I suppress my blog from search engines. We had a very nice chat, actually. (I loved the book. It was a children's book.)
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