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September 2, 2010
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Where have all the reviews gone?
Published May 6, 2007
As a reader of actual, honest-to-God books in America, I am, of course, an endangered breed. With movies and television and the Internet dominating the attention of the average citizen, the reading of a book, which actually takes a little concentration and effort, has fallen by the wayside.
So it comes as little surprise when I read in The New York Times that the book review is dying.
It seems that many small to mid-size papers are eliminating book sections in favor of running canned reviews from wire services or syndicated work from larger papers. While The New York Times Book Review is unlikely to disappear any time soon, other papers seemingly are unwilling to justify the cost any longer.
Close to home, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently fired its book editor, and this is just part of a larger trend. With book discussions becoming common on Internet blogs and online columnists writing reviews faster than they probably read the books, many papers feel it’s a good time to get out of the book reviewing business.
This may not mean a lot to most Americans, many of who get their book recommendations from Oprah, but it leaves me a little sad. As a person who actually reads book reviews looking for titles that may interest me, a shrinking market leaves me with fewer places to turn to for that new sleeper hit. I mean, I’ve got more than a few books, many excellent reads, from The New York Times, but their tendency to lean towards a certain style of book leaves me with only a certain window on book releases.
I understand why some papers might leave the book review behind. They’re not exactly big draws for readers and with so many opinions on books elsewhere, it most likely seems simpler — and cheaper — to run reviews from the Associate Press or a big paper.
The problem with that reasoning is it assumes that the discussion of literature should be left to the bean counters. By eliminating book reviews in many papers, the number of opinions is being limited on discussing particular works of literature. While book reviews are becoming prevalent on the Internet, quality control is hard to come by, as is assurance that any particular reviewer has any qualifications to discuss literature, including literacy.
The newspaper book review guaranteed us a writer who would give us a thoughtful assessment of a particular book. With almost every major newspaper including original reviews at one point, there were hundreds of books being discussed regularly for devoted readers to consider.
Yet while the number of books published each year has not decreased, less professional opinions are available to comment on those books. Despite the claims of Internet equality, if you’ve ever read the average online review of anything, you know that issues like intelligence or writing ability rarely come into play on the web.
For The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the major papers of the region, to drop book reviews, is simply inexcusable. No matter how many books I try to plug in this column, making all of you sick of me, I can’t fill that gap alone.
Bring back the book review, America. Reading is in bad enough shape already.
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